From Cash to Code: Modernizing Mexico’s Financial Landscape

Hey Banco is a Mexican digital bank that offers financial products and services for individuals and businesses, including accounts, cards, payments, loans and investments, with a focus on digital experience and scalable solutions for SMEs.

Q: What is Hey Banco’s position within Mexico's digital banking ecosystem and what distinguishes it from its competitors? 

A: We are the only multiproduct and multisegment digital bank in Mexico with its own license, which has allowed us to achieve the number one position in terms of clients. After seven years of maturing our service model, we have built a comprehensive and integrated offering that serves individuals and businesses with a full suite of products including deposits, credit cards, investments, and loans. This complete ecosystem is our main differentiator as it has enabled us to achieve profitability and cater to our clients' needs in a holistic manner.

Q: What role does Hey Tech play within Hey Banco's development?

A: Hey Tech is our technology arm, created to offer the solutions developed for our own operations to third-party organizations. In Mexico, our primary service line focuses on treasury automation and fund concentration services. We provide tools for payment links collections, recurring charges, and SPEI and TEF transfers, helping businesses automate and streamline their financial operations through direct integration with their own systems.

Our other two service lines are designed for both domestic and international markets. We offer our portfolio of over 40 proprietary AI models to other financial institutions — such as SOFOMES and SOCAPS — to help them solve common industry challenges like fraud prevention risk analysis and client onboarding. Internationally, we export our entire digital banking framework. We provide the complete customer-facing technology stack, enabling foreign banks to connect to their core systems and significantly accelerate their digital transformation.

Q: Hey Banco consolidated as an independent entity earlier this year. How has this transition influenced Hey Banco's operational structure and Hey Tech's autonomy? 

A: Securing our own banking license was a crucial step in fulfilling our distinct vision for a new kind of bank. This transition grants us complete autonomy in both management and financial results. It was vital for us to achieve profitability concurrently with this consolidation, ensuring a healthy and sustainable operation from the start. Hey Tech operates as the integrated technology services division within this new independent structure.

Q: What has been the market reception of Hey Tech among other financial institutions? 

A: The market reception for Hey Tech's offer has been very positive across. In Mexico, there is significant interest in our fund concentration and treasury automation services from companies that require a robust banking partner for high-volume transactions. While our AI solutions are a more recent offering, they have also generated substantial interest. Internationally, we are seeing a similarly positive response as we showcase our capabilities to banks looking to accelerate their digital transformation.

Our primary clients for Hey Tech this year have been in the fund concentration and treasury automation space. The range of acquirers is quite diverse and extends beyond the financial sector; it includes entities like card processors, educational institutions, real estate companies, and condominium associations that need to streamline their collections and payment identification. While our AI solutions are more emergent, we are already in advanced discussions with several institutions to formalize partnerships.

Q: How does Hey Tech’s innovation and transformation offering translate into tangible business results for its clients? 

A: For our clients, the tangible results are centered on efficiency and real-time data integration. Our solutions allow companies to connect their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems directly to the bank, which is fundamental for immediate access to information and faster decision making. The next evolution, driven by our AI offerings, will deliver a significant leap in performance, enabling financial institutions to solve critical issues in fraud prevention and risk analysis while automating processes like customer service. This allows them to scale their customer base without a proportional increase in operational infrastructure and personnel, shifting employees from low-value manual tasks to more strategic activities.

Q: What distinguishes Hey Negocios' accounts and collections solutions in the B2B segment in terms of interoperability integration and experience? 

A: We have learned that the business segment values a personalized relationship, especially during onboarding, which is why our approach combines technology with human support. Our key differentiator is providing a true one-stop shop experience. We offer a complete spectrum of payment solutions from simple payment links and mobile-connected terminals to intelligent terminals and back-end payment engines for large processors. This is complemented by a full suite of products including deposit accounts, investment options, and credit, creating a comprehensive and integrated ecosystem for businesses.

Q: From a design perspective how do you ensure that products like Hey Pago or the Smart Terminal respond to the changing needs of Mexican merchants and SMEs? 

A: Our product development process is fundamentally driven by a continuous feedback loop with our clients. Developing 95% of our technology in-house grants us immense flexibility to adapt solutions based on that feedback. For example, our move to intelligent terminals allows us to build specific applications that directly address merchant needs. As a digital-first bank without a branch network, we are structurally obligated to be highly sensitive to the customer experience. Without the traditional relationship manager to act as a buffer, our technology must be seamless and our response to client needs must be immediate and precise.

Q: Data-driven personalization and AI are redefining the banking experience. How does Hey Tech approach the responsible integration of these technologies into its products? 

A: One of the most significant and responsible applications of AI is the enhancement of clients' financial education. We are developing AI-powered tools designed not just to provide information, but to actively encourage healthy financial behaviors. By providing personalized stimuli, we can help customers avoid common pitfalls like over-indebtedness or excessive spending. We believe that using technology to proactively improve our clients' financial well-being will be a core differentiator for our bank.

Q: What role will agentic AI play in the next growth stage of Mexico's digital banking ecosystem? 

A: We believe the adoption of agentic AI will be revolutionary, primarily by increasing the speed and agility with which we can develop and deploy new functionalities. More broadly, it will be the key to fulfilling the core promise of financial technology: leveraging technology to deliver financial products and services to a massive audience on a personalized scale. By processing and understanding customer data more deeply, we can offer products with pricing and terms that are truly appropriate for each individual's risk and behavior profile.

Q: How will the adoption of open finance and open banking influence the design of new services within Mexico's digital banking ecosystem? 

A: It is important to distinguish between open banking, open finance, and open data. Open banking, which involves the sharing of data only between banks, will do little to advance financial inclusion in Mexico. It circulates information about people who are already part of the banking system. The challenge in Mexico is often not just inclusion but financial adoption; many individuals have an account but do not use financial services actively, thus failing to generate the data necessary for accessing higher-value products.

Open finance, which expands data sharing to include other financial institutions, is a step in the right direction. However, the truly transformative potential lies in open data. This framework would incorporate information from non-financial and government sources allowing us to better understand and verify the identities of individuals outside the traditional system. Access to this broader dataset will enable us to accurately assess risk and offer fair appropriately priced financial products to a much larger segment of the population.

Q: What are Hey Tech's main priorities for 2026 in terms of innovation and technological expansion? 

A: For 2026, our primary goal is to solidify our position as the leading digital bank in Mexico. A key part of this strategy is the expansion of Hey Tech, where we will leverage the maturity and learnings from our own platform to help other organizations automate and improve their efficiency. We will continue to be a disruptive force in the market with a differentiated offering. Our focus for Hey Tech remains on two key segments: banks outside of Mexico that are undergoing digital transformation and domestic companies seeking a technology partner to streamline their internal processes.