Mexico Fintech Market Shifts Into Maturity, Consolidation: tapi

Mexico’s fintech industry is moving beyond its early phase of experimentation and disruption. According to Kevin Litvin, Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer,  tapi, and Claudia Núñez Sañudo, Managing Director, Fintech México, the sector has entered a new stage defined by institutional maturity, market consolidation, and a growing responsibility to transform how money circulates within the economy. 

“What we are beginning to see very clearly is that the industry has reached a stage of maturity,” Núñez Sañudo said. “Fintechs are no longer merely complementary to traditional financial services. Through new regulatory frameworks and operating models, they have become actors that are actively reshaping the system from within.”

After more than a decade of expansion, Mexico now hosts over 1,100 fintech companies, most of them founded locally. However, Núñez Sañudo noted that the character of growth has shifted. Investment capital is becoming more selective, favoring scalable and sustainable business models over experimental initiatives. In parallel, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity and closer regulatory interaction are redefining competitive dynamics across the sector.

This transition is unfolding amid widespread user adoption. By year-end, fintech platforms are projected to reach up to 86 million users nationwide. “The discussion is changing,” Núñez Sañudo said. “It is no longer simply about expanding access; it is about ensuring that financial products genuinely improve people’s lives.”

This shift—from financial inclusion to financial well-being—signals a critical evolution in industry priorities. The objective is no longer limited to providing access to financial services, but rather to empowering users with tools that enable clarity, predictability, and control over their finances.

Despite this progress, longstanding structural barriers persist. Cash remains the dominant means of payment, particularly for low-value transactions. “Eighty-five percent of payments under MX$500 (US$30) are still made in cash,” Núñez Sañudo observed. “That illustrates the scale of the challenge ahead.”

She argued that reliance on cash is rooted not only in habit, but in trust gaps and system design. In the absence of frictionless digital alternatives, consumers continue to rely on physical channels. Moreover, without digital transaction histories, large segments of the population remain excluded from formal financial profiling. “Seventy-five percent of first-time credit applicants are rejected,” she said. “Often, this is not due to risk, but to a lack of data.”

For Litvin, these limitations highlight the importance of infrastructure. The development of fintech in Mexico, he said, is inseparable from the modernization of payment and collection rails—the underlying systems that enable digital finance to operate at scale. “Tapi did not begin as an infrastructure company,” he explained. “We started as a consumer wallet. But we soon realized that the greatest inefficiencies, and therefore the greatest opportunities, existed at the infrastructure level.”

These inefficiencies are particularly evident in collections. While users can access multiple payment applications, the number of billers available digitally remains narrow. “In a country of more than 130 million people, most applications allow payments to only 80 to 110 companies,” Litvin said. “By contrast, Colombia, with roughly one-third of the population, offers digital access to more than 17,000 billers.”

According to Litvin, this disparity stems from historical market structures. Other Latin American countries developed open aggregation networks decades ago, enabling diverse organizations—from utilities and schools to insurers—to collect payments through shared platforms. In Mexico, payment collection became concentrated around a single retail network, resulting in fragmentation and limited interoperability.

“Our objective is to open that system,” Litvin said. “To allow any company, through a single integration, to be payable everywhere—across banks, fintech platforms, digital wallets, and physical locations.”

Today, tapi operates this connective layer, facilitating service payments and airtime top-ups across leading banks and fintech firms, while linking more than 70,000 physical payment points, including convenience stores and supermarkets. Increasingly, the company defines its role not as a payments provider, but as a network coordinator.

This network-based approach is expanding into automated collections and account-to-account transfers. Litvin cited Brazil’s Pix and Argentina’s recurring debit schemes as examples of a future less dependent on cards. “We need to advance toward autopay and domiciliation models that give users genuine control over what they pay, how much they pay, and when they pay it,” he said.

User control emerged as a central theme throughout the discussion. Consumers are increasingly unwilling to encounter unexpected charges or navigate complex dispute processes. Instead, they demand transparency and autonomy. “Users want to know what they owe, when it will be charged, and to have the ability to modify or cancel payments easily,” Litvin said.

Meeting those expectations requires more sophisticated technological integration and broader data exchange. Tapi’s application programming interfaces (APIs) were designed to be modular and forward-compatible, enabling the company to evolve without imposing disruptive changes on its clients. “From the outset, we had a clear view of where the system needed to go,” Litvin said. “That direction is essential when developing core infrastructure.”

Artificial intelligence is accelerating this evolution. Although both speakers emphasized that AI is a tool rather than an objective in itself, its influence on payments, collections, and customer interaction is already evident. Intelligent agents, predictive notifications, customized payment journeys, and real-time reconciliation are rapidly becoming standard features rather than experimental concepts.

“Technology is not the end goal,” Núñez Sañudo said. “The priority is to understand users’ needs and challenges, and then apply technology to address them effectively.”

That approach will face a significant test in the coming year, particularly as regulatory changes reshape the operating environment ahead of the FIFA World Cup. Núñez Sañudo characterized 2025 as a pivotal year for institutional coordination, one that will require companies to adopt a broader ecosystem perspective rather than focusing solely on individual strategies.

“The challenge is to move beyond the viewpoint of a single company or subsector,” she said. “What is needed now is collective construction.”