A Session Summary from the Interledger Summit 2025
At the Interledger Summit 2025 in Mexico City, the panel “Unlocking Financial Interoperability in Latin America” tackled a deceptively simple question: Why can’t money move as easily as an email? Moderated by Beatriz Durán Serrano of Open Finance Tribe Mexico, the discussion brought together payment infrastructure innovators from across the region: Andrés Albán, founder and CEO of Colombian fintech Punto Red; Alejandra Olivares from Mexico’s National Banking and Securities Commission; Jordi Puig, Innovation and Programs Director of Finnosummit; and Íñigo Rumayor, founder of Mexican payment company Monato.
Their conversation revealed that while Latin America has all the technological pieces needed for seamless financial interoperability, the real barriers are structural: misaligned incentives, fragmented governance, and a failure to collaborate against the true competitor — cash.
The Colombian Miracle and Mexican Reality
Albán opened with Colombia’s remarkable transformation: in just eight years, the country moved from 50% to 75% financial inclusion. The catalyst was digitizing government subsidy payments to female heads of household, but success required solving three fundamental problems that still plague Mexico and other Latin American markets.
“When people were going to receive the subsidy, they had to go to a near[by] village, received $50 of subsidy and it cost them $15 to claim the subsidy on commuting costs and time wasted,” Albán explained. The solution addressed cost, trust, and usability simultaneously. Colombia created free access networks, ensuring money availability, and simplifying transactions.
Mexico faces similar challenges but with distinct complications. As Albán noted, “To deposit or pay a public service can cost $1 per transaction” in Mexico, which is a prohibitive barrier for low-income users. With only three banking agents per 10,000 adults in many areas and vast parts of the country without bank branches, the infrastructure gaps compound the cost problem.
The Hidden Costs of Fragmentation
Olivares illuminated how Mexico’s fragmented payment ecosystem creates cascading opportunity costs at every level. Different payment types like SPEI for domestic transfers, SWIFT for international transfers, and various platforms for trades each operate with “different protocols, different procedures, different regulations, different infrastructures.”
This lack of coordination imposes costs beyond simple transaction fees. For users, it means lost time, eroded trust, and missed opportunities. Financial institutions sacrifice innovation, competitiveness, and efficiency. At the national level, fragmentation constrains economic growth and development.
“We do know that in Mexico, the different actors of the financial sector — banks, regulators, fintechs — through collaboration schemes, there are shared benefits,” Olivares emphasized. Yet awareness hasn’t translated into action. While 60% of Mexican banks and fintechs claim they have the technical capability and talent for interoperability, only 44% say they’re ready to act.
Technology Isn’t the Problem
The panelists unanimously agreed that Mexico has the technological infrastructure, talent, and investment capacity needed for interoperability. “As a foreigner living in Mexico, we can say that here there’s a lot of talent and the founders and banks know what they do,” Puig, who is from Spain, observed. “They have been working in the industry for quite a long time.”
What's missing is strategic alignment. Traditional institutions entering disruptive fields need security standards and clear governance frameworks. New players need monetizable use cases. Without these elements, even the best technology remains underutilized.
Mexico’s CoDi QR payment system exemplifies this disconnect. Launched years ago with strong technical foundations, it remains underadopted because, as Rumayor noted, the ecosystem lacks coordination. “We have all the pieces, but the pieces are not joined in such a way that they need to be.”
The Real Competition: Cash
Perhaps the panel’s most crucial insight was reframing the competitive landscape. While financial institutions and fintechs often view each other as competitors, Rumayor argued that “we are fighting against cash” as the true adversary.
With more than 85% of transactions in Mexico still cash-based, the opportunity for digital payments remains enormous. Yet individual actors focus on competing for market share within the existing digital ecosystem rather than collaborating to expand it.
“To eliminate cash, it is a humongous activity,” Rumayor stressed. “You have highways or bridges of cash, usability, people that want to have accounts.” This challenge requires ecosystem-wide collaboration, with each player specializing in solving one piece of the puzzle.
Lessons from Global Success Stories
Finnosummit research into successful interoperability implementations in Brazil, India, and Colombia revealed consistent patterns. These markets succeeded by establishing clear governance structures, implementing supportive regulations, and developing compelling use cases that align stakeholder incentives.
The governance piece proves particularly critical. “When talking about standards, one great benefit is that in some way you put clear roles,” Rumayor explained. “Each player knows against who is playing against.” Without clear rules and roles, players operate with different incentives, making coordination nearly impossible.
Mexico has made progress through initiatives like regulatory sandboxes introduced in 2018, allowing controlled collaboration between startups and financial institutions. The Mexican Banking Association has created coordination mechanisms for traditional banks. Yet these efforts remain fragmented, lacking the overarching framework that enabled success elsewhere.
The Blue Ocean Strategy
Albán challenged Mexican financial services providers to shift their focus from competing over existing customers to serving the 50% of the population currently excluded from formal financial services. This “blue ocean” strategy requires a fundamental rethinking of business models.
“What would I do if I were a founder of a fintech?” Albán asked. “Think about QR code payment or less expensive payment systems”" He noted that Mexico remains overly reliant on credit cards, which make business models expensive. Colombia’s e-wallet success story shows an alternative path: wallets succeeded first, only integrating cards after achieving scale and adoption.
The panel suggested several concrete strategies for reaching underserved populations: eliminate or subsidize cash-in costs, build extensive agent networks in underserved areas, simplify user interfaces and processes, develop products that match informal economy realities, and create trust through consistent service delivery.
The Path to Interoperability
The panelists outlined a clear roadmap for achieving true financial interoperability in Latin America:
- Establish governance frameworks: Create clear roles, responsibilities, and dispute resolution mechanisms that all players accept.
- Align incentives: Develop business models where collaboration benefits all participants more than competition.
- Focus on use cases: Build from specific user needs rather than technological capabilities.
- Measure impact: Track not just adoption rates but actual improvement in users’ financial lives.
- Think ecosystem, not institution: Recognize that no single player can solve financial exclusion alone.
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