Automated Collections: The Growth Engine for Mexican SOFOMES

Picture a SOFOM in Monterrey. It can approve a loan in minutes: a clean digital flow, a credit decision powered by data, money in the client's account almost instantly. Then the hard part begins. Every month, someone waits for a transfer that arrives when it arrives, sends WhatsApp reminders, chases the clients who fell behind, and reconciles payments by hand in a spreadsheet. The company digitized lending. It never digitized collections.

That gap is one of the least discussed stories in Mexican finance today.

Mexico's SOFOMES, the non-bank financial companies that grant most of the country's specialized credit, are the last mile of financing: the ones that reach the small businesses and individuals traditional institutions never underwrite.  With more than 2,000 of them operating and a loan book that reached MX$1.2 trillion (US$70 billion) at the close of last year, they are now the segment with the most participants in Mexico's financial system. And yet, by the sector's own account, only about 20% are fully digital. That combination (enormous reach, uneven modernization) is exactly why the next advantage will be won by collecting better.

Not all delinquency is a credit problem. A meaningful share of what ends up booked as past-due is not a client who won't pay or can't pay. It is a client for whom the infrastructure never made it easy to pay. Payments that fail and are never retried. No automatic debit. Too few channels. Reconciliation that only registers the payment days later. That friction disguises itself as risk.

Even in the well-capitalized commercial banking system, past-due loans grew 20.6% year over year in the first quarter of 2026, roughly four times faster than lending itself. Non-bank lenders carry more of that weight: the regulated SOFOM sector was running a non-performing-loan ratio of about 2.3% in late 2025, above the roughly 2% of the commercial banks. And because these lenders serve thinner-file customers, that pressure tends to arrive earlier and bite harder. In an environment of high rates and expensive funding, every point of recovery goes straight to the margin. A lender that treats collections as an infrastructure problem, and not just a call-center problem, recovers money it currently writes off, without originating a single new loan.

So why does the gap persist? Because the rails exist and almost no one uses them. In Mexico, direct debit still accounts for just 1.2% of electronic transactions. The mechanism that makes recurring collection invisible in mature markets is treated here as a niche feature. I have written before that most late payments in this country are a follow-up problem rather than a funding one. In consumer and small-business lending that is even truer, because the client who misses a due date is rarely the client who cannot pay.

The lender that makes paying easy lends more. When a client is on automatic debit, pays through a channel they already use, and sees the payment posted instantly, three things happen at once: delinquency falls, the cost of collection drops, and renewal improves. There is a fourth benefit. Every automated, traceable payment builds the client's financial history, the very data that lets the lender extend credit again, faster and on better terms. Collections stop being a cost center and become the engine of the next loan.

Many collection projects stall because of where they live, not the strategy. If paying and reconciling happen outside the core system the lender already runs, someone has to leave their screen to make it work, and eventually no one does. Collections have to arrive through the software the team already uses every morning, not next to it.

Two more pieces get skipped. Direct debit solves the client with a bank account, and a large share of a regional portfolio still pays in cash, which means that payment has to post in seconds and be as traceable as a transfer. A charge that fails and is never attempted again becomes delinquency by default, and retrying it on the day the money is actually there recovers loans that were never at risk to begin with.

At tapi, we see this difference every day. A lender can spend its month chasing money, or it can let the money arrive on its own, from an automatic debit or from a cash payment at the store on the client's corner, reconciled and traceable, so the team can focus on growing the book instead of closing it.

Today, the infrastructure is already here. What is missing is the shift in mindset, treating collections as the place where the economics of non-bank credit are decided.

As the sector gathers for its national convention, the conversation will rightly center on funding, regulation, and growth. But the lenders that pull ahead in the next cycle will be the ones that treat collecting as seriously as lending, the ones where the money actually comes back, on time and without a fight. That is a decision every SOFOM can start making today.