Listening Lab Lessons | From Policy to Practice: Financial Inclusion in Mexico

A Session Summary from the Interledger Summit 2025

At the Interledger Summit 2025 in Mexico City, the panel “From Policy to Practice: Financial Inclusion in Mexico” brought together an unlikely coalition of stakeholders all working to reimagine financial infrastructure from the ground up. Moderated by Lizette Neme Bechara, the discussion featured Patricia Legarreta from Financiera del Bienestar, Mexico’s government development bank; Erick Huerta Velázquez from Telecomunicaciones Indígenas Comunitarias, an indigenous-owned telecommunications cooperative; and Natalia Cueto from Vadi, a blockchain-based community investment platform.

Their conversation revealed a fundamental shift in how Mexico approaches financial inclusion: moving beyond the traditional model of extending corporate banking services to underserved populations, and instead building entirely new infrastructures owned and operated by the communities themselves.

The Infrastructure-Trust Nexus

The panel began with a stark reality check about Mexico’s financial landscape. As Cueto illustrated from her experience living in a small town in the state of Colima, “The only bank is Bienestar. There are two ATMs and if I need to withdraw money, I have the Oxxo store. Otherwise, I have to go to Colima City.” This geographic exclusion compounds with what she calls the “complex financial lives” of rural residents, characterized by frequent, small-value transactions at multiple local vendors, a pattern that traditional banks find unprofitable to serve.

But the challenge runs deeper than physical access. Legarreta identified a critical trust deficit rooted in negative digital experiences. “For many people, especially people who are poor, the digital experience is not this vision that it facilitates and streamlines everything,” she explained. “They have a different experience. The digital experience is that the commissions are not clear, for example, or sometimes they are indebted and it's not clear for them how they are going to pay it off.”

This distrust creates a vicious cycle: people withdraw government benefits immediately as cash rather than using digital services, limiting their ability to build financial histories and access credit. The solution, the panelists argued, requires not just better technology but fundamentally different ownership models.

Community Ownership as Financial Infrastructure

Huerta Velázquez's work with Telecomunicaciones Indígenas Comunitarias demonstrates how telecommunications and financial services can be integrated through community investment structures. The organization operates as Mexico’s fourth mobile network operator, owned entirely by indigenous communities.

He shared an example from a rural indigenous university in Puebla’s northern mountains, where students formed a collective to provide their own mobile service. “Since this university gives summer courses to external students, when they find out this, they say ‘I want to switch to what you offer,’” Huerta Velázquez recounted. The collective grew to fund not just telecommunications but also device purchases for students who couldn’t afford computers, creating what he calls “an investment and credit scheme that doesn’t necessarily go through a Fintech or a bank, but through local organization with local resources.”

This approach addresses what Huerta Velázquez identifies as a fundamental extraction problem: “We break the extraction cycle. It is not that they extract the money so the service is provided to the community; the resources stay there using the money of the community itself.”

Blockchain for the Barrio

Cueto’s platform Vadi uses blockchain to enable local investment in small businesses, though she emphasizes that the technology itself isn’t the point. “We got to a point in the development of blockchain technology where it’s not important to understand if it’s nodes connecting at the same time and sharing information,” she explained. “It's like with the dawn of the Internet. I don’t know what a protocol is or whatever. I click on that and that’s it.”

The platform connects to Mexico’s tax authority through Open Finance to provide transparency for investors while helping transform complex financial data into information that “non-sophisticated investors” can understand. All projects must align with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, creating a values-based investment ecosystem.

Cueto shared an anecdote about informal community finance already at work: “Three months ago, this lady had a clothing store, she had to close it and then she met with the neighbors to reopen the store and they all collected the money to rent the place and then she reopened the store and repaid the neighbors.” Her observation was pointed: “What they did is private equity collection... When you make things easy, in how many stores can this be replicated?”

Government as Platform, Not Provider

Legarreta presented Financiera del Bienestar’s transformation from a traditional state bank into what she calls a platform for financial inclusion. The institution already operates 2,700 physical branches, however presence alone doesn’t equal inclusion.

“We want to eliminate the neoliberal model,” Legarreta stated. “This is how we call it: The state subsidized the companies and the poorest people had to pay for those services.” Instead, Bienestar is working to become infrastructure that other institutions, including cooperatives and microfinance organizations, can build upon.

This requires legislative reform, as current Mexican fintech law doesn’t contemplate public institutions providing digital financial services. But even within existing constraints, Bienestar is digitizing services and working with over 260 partners to expand reach.

The Gender Dimension

When asked about women’s financial inclusion, the panelists revealed telling patterns. Legarreta noted that in Bienestar’s credit programs, “more than 70% [of those supported] are women … but this is something that happened in the free market” because women demonstrated consistently better repayment rates.

Cueto emphasized the need to understand women’s complex daily realities: “I wake up, I take my child to school, I buy lunch, but I also do my house chores, but I was also working, but I also gave employment... Everything women do should be incorporated in the tech and digital lives.”

The discussion highlighted how existing informal finance mechanisms like tandas, which are rotating savings clubs, are predominantly managed by women, suggesting that recognizing and strengthening these existing systems might be more effective than imposing new technologies.

Beyond Regulatory Sandboxes

The panel revealed a tension between Mexico’s ambitious fintech law, that was intended to make the country a Latin American fintech hub, and the reality of grassroots innovation. As Cueto noted, despite Mexico having the second highest number of fintechs in Latin America, “we haven’t been successful being a hub.”

The panelists suggested the problem lies in treating regulation as the primary driver of innovation rather than recognizing existing community practices. Huerta Velázquez argued for expanding the definition of financial services beyond traditional banking: “We have to expand this field of financial services and financial inclusion because this can be done through local organization.”

An audience member highlighted Mexico’s underutilized success story: CoDi, the QR-code payment system launched in 2004 and recognized internationally, yet still underadopted compared to Brazil's Pix. The difference, according to the panelists? Brazil mandated adoption while Mexico left it to bank discretion, a cautionary tale about the limits of voluntary adoption.

Implications for Global Development

The Mexican experiments presented in this panel challenge several orthodoxies in financial inclusion:

• Technology isn't neutral: Every digital system embeds assumptions about users’ lives, capabilities, and resources. Systems designed for urban, educated users will inevitably exclude others.
• Ownership matters more than access: Community-controlled infrastructure creates different incentive structures than corporate-provided services, keeping value local rather than extractive.
• Trust precedes adoption: Without addressing negative past experiences with digital services, new technologies will face resistance regardless of their technical merits.
• Informal systems are sophisticated: Rather than replacing community finance mechanisms, technology should strengthen and scale existing practices.
• Government’s role is evolving: From direct service provider to platform enabler, public institutions must reimagine their function in digital ecosystems.

As Mexico continues these experiments, questions remain unanswered. Can community-owned telecommunications networks provide sustainable alternatives to corporate infrastructure? Can blockchain enable local investment without financialization? Can government banks become genuine platforms for inclusion rather than just another service provider?

The preliminary answers emerging from Mexico’s diverse innovators suggest that financial inclusion requires not just extending existing systems to new users, but fundamentally reimagining who owns, operates, and benefits from financial infrastructure. As Huerta Velázquez concluded, these models allow communities to “distribute wealth” rather than concentrate it, a proposition that may prove essential for genuine financial inclusion.