Financial inclusion in Mexico has faced the same fundamental problem for years: not everyone plays by the same rules. While one part of the country has access to credit, savings, and planning tools, another continues to operate in cash, without a credit history and without room for growth. This gap is not new, but it is beginning to shift due to a different factor than before. And what is driving this change is connectivity.
The study “Super Apps: The New Engine of Financial Inclusion in Mexico,” by DiDi and The Competitive Intelligence Unit, reveals that financial access is no longer dependent on bank branches and has begun to be built from mobile phones.
Today, more than 19.5 million people in Mexico use digital financial services. This marks a turning point in how people access the financial system. According to the study, one in three adults is already familiar with these services, and among them, more than half actively use them, indicating that adoption has moved from being marginal to becoming an everyday practice.
This shift isn’t solely explained by technological availability, but rather by how these services are integrated into daily life. Unlike the traditional model, where interaction with the financial system was sporadic (a visit to the bank, a specific transaction), digital platforms operate with a logic of frequency.
Users don’t open an app “to manage their finances”; they open it to manage their day and, in that process, pay bills, apply for credit, or manage their money. According to the same study, this integration is what allows financial services to cease being perceived as something external and become a natural extension of everyday activities such as getting around, shopping, or paying for services.
The study indicates that platforms with high frequency in daily life manage to transfer that trust to their financial services, reducing one of the sector’s main historical barriers. In the case of DiDi, the high level of recognition among digital users and prior familiarity with the platform act as an enabler of adoption. This explains why digital credit models or integrated payments can scale faster than traditional schemes.
However, progress is not uniform, and structural gaps remain, although they are beginning to narrow. The study itself uses data from the National Survey of Financial Inclusion (ENIF) to show that significant regional differences persist (with access levels close to 84% in the north compared to around 67% in the south), as well as a gender gap of approximately eight percentage points in access to financial services.
What is changing is how these differences are being addressed, as digital models, especially those based on microloans, accessible accounts, and instant liquidity products, are reaching profiles that have historically been excluded from the formal system.
Mexico not only faces a lag in financial inclusion but has also become one of the most dynamic FinTech ecosystems in the region, with nearly a thousand active companies and sustained growth in services such as digital payments, embedded credit, and integrated platforms. The study places the country in an early acceleration phase, with enough room to double the current number of users, making financial inclusion an area where social impact and business opportunity advance simultaneously.
And for this reason, so-called “super apps” are occupying a strategic position not so much for the services they offer, but for how they integrate them. Every trip, every payment, or every purchase becomes a point of contact that reinforces habits and facilitates the adoption of new services. This changes the pace of expansion because, instead of depending on isolated decisions, financial usage is built on repetition.
The next frontier, according to the study, is financial protection. With insurance penetration barely reaching 23% in Mexico, the potential is significant, but the traditional model seems to have reached its limit. The focus now is on on-demand schemes: specific coverages, activated from a cell phone and tailored to specific events, from medical expenses to unemployment or asset protection.
This does not mean that traditional banking will disappear. In fact, the trend points to a hybrid model. The study shows that most users plan to combine traditional financial services with digital solutions, suggesting that the change is not one of replacement, but of reconfiguration.
Source: fastcompany
