Credit in Mexico Must Be a National Cause, Not Just a Product

We’ve Tried to Fix Lending Before

Mexico has long experimented with ways to extend credit to the underserved. From early microfinance initiatives to a wave of digital lending startups, we’ve seen growth, but not transformation.

The problem isn’t that we haven’t tried. It’s what we chose to scale. What if lending wasn’t just treated as a financial product, but as national infrastructure?

Credit is more than a transaction. In economies with high informality and income volatility, it can either trap people in debt or be the bridge to mobility. And right now, we’re not building that bridge. We’re building toll roads with no map.

What We Built, and What It Became

In the 2000s, inspired by the Grameen model, a wave of microfinance-style ventures emerged in Mexico. Some had the intention of empowering underserved borrowers, particularly women and small merchants. But over time, the dominant model shifted.

Instead of scaling community-based trust systems, many lenders moved toward payroll lending, especially to public sector workers like teachers. These loans were often facilitated through agreements with unions, with repayments deducted automatically from salaries. It was a guaranteed collection model, reliable, profitable, and scalable. But something got lost.

What we built wasn’t Grameen, and it wasn’t fintech, it was monetized control.

Borrowers had little flexibility or agency, interest rates stayed high, and financial inclusion became something transactional not transformational. Meanwhile, many of the entrepreneurs behind these models became immensely wealthy. The incentives favored scaling income capture, not reducing inequality. This is important to remember: it’s possible to have financial inclusion that looks like access, but still leaves people more vulnerable than before.

What’s the purpose of lending if the people you’re lending to aren’t improving? Shouldn’t we aim for a system where borrowers can access more over time, while becoming less risky, not more?

What We Missed by Scaling the Wrong Things

As payroll-based lenders grew, innovation stalled. The focus shifted to safe bets and guaranteed repayment, not experimentation with models rooted in trust or production.

Then came the fintech wave. But instead of correcting course, many startups repeated the same logic with flashier tools: onboarding speed, sleek UX, and mass acquisition. Credit was offered for consumption, not resilience.

In some cases, credit limits were increased based on app usage or referrals, not based on improved financial behavior. Defaults rose, interest rates spiked, and the cycle repeated. We kept pushing financial tools that felt modern but were built on the same old incentives. We kept building systems that made credit easier, not smarter.

What Lending Looks Like When It Works, Even Without Strong Institutions

Other countries, facing similar institutional fragility, took a different route. In Bangladesh, Grameen Bank built group lending based on peer accountability rather than court enforcement, where borrowers repaid not out of obligation, but out of trust and shared dignity. In Kenya, M-Pesa and M-Shwari tied microloans to mobile usage behavior and repaid them through mobile wallets, with credit scored via behavior rather than credit bureaus. In India, the digital public infrastructure of Aadhaar, UPI and account aggregators enabled fintechs to lend based on real income flows, with inclusion designed into the rails. And in Indonesia, P2P lenders combined technology with local field agents to underwrite rural and MSME borrowers, with platforms like Amartha and KoinWorks proving that trust could be digitized.

These weren’t top-down subsidy schemes. They were bottom-up systems designed for the lived reality of the borrower. And they worked because they understood that scale doesn’t mean sameness, it means flexibility, context, and trust.

None of these systems are perfect. But they all show that when lending is seen as infrastructure, not just product, real innovation happens.

Where Mexico Focused Instead

Rather than build financial resilience, Mexico has leaned heavily on direct transfers. Transfers serve real needs, especially in poverty reduction, but they don’t build financial identity, productive capacity, or credit trust. There’s still no national pathway that moves a household from subsidy to agency to opportunity.

We’ve optimized for consumption and short-term support. But without building financial tools that enable long-term stability, we’ll keep falling short. That’s not an argument against transfers, it’s an argument for what should come next.

What We Need Now

We don’t need more credit products. We need a national credit vision, one that sees lending not as a private sector hustle, but as public infrastructure for upward mobility.

That means public-private partnerships that lower risk and share credit data for good, incentives for fintechs that prioritize borrower outcomes rather than just portfolio growth, credit linked to real cash flow rather than historical scores, embedded safety nets and flexibility built into the repayment experience, and a trust-first approach rather than an enforcement-first one.

It also means rethinking what success looks like. It’s the number of loans issued, but also the number of borrowers who remain solvent. It’s the speed of onboarding, but also the ability to support someone through a rough patch. It’s the volume of data collected, but also how well we use it to actually serve people.

If trust is the scarcest currency in Mexico, we must design for it.

We’ve tried, and we’ve built, but we haven’t transformed. It’s time to stop treating credit as a product, and start building it like infrastructure. Let’s build a credit system that invests in people, not just extracts from them. That means aiming our innovation in the right direction.