Mexico digital payments adoption, Digi Mart USA News: Endeavor and Mercado Pago have identified the main barriers to accelerating the adoption of digital payments in Mexico, despite a decline in cash use over the past decade.
Mexico reduced cash use in commercial transactions by more than 40% over a decade, according to the study Digital Payments: How Mexico Is Reinventing the Way It Pays, by Endeavor and Mercado Pago. Cash’s share of point-of-sale transaction value fell from 76% in 2014 to 35% in 2024.
Based on an estimated 80 digital transactions per capita for 2026, the Endeavor Data Unit projects that if the reduction continues at the same pace, cash would still account for 18% of point-of-sale transaction value. That remains far from the minimum reached in world leaders in payment digitalization, such as China.
The study also found that between 2020 and 2024, point-of-sale terminals (POS) run by fintech aggregators grew 58.6%, while those of traditional banks fell 6.8%. Of the 144 digital payment fintechs mapped in the Mexican ecosystem, three quarters (75%) operate under a commission-based model.
According to a survey by Endeavor, more than three quarters (76.4%) of digital consumers said it would be easy for them to stop using cash. However, nearly half (47%) said they use cash daily, while just over a quarter (26%) said they use their banking app with the same frequency.
“Today access exists, but it does not automatically translate into adoption. It will depend on our ability to turn access into daily use, use into trust, and trust into increasingly deep financial relationships,” said Pedro Rivas, chief executive of Mercado Pago Mexico, in the study’s foreword.
Likewise, 76.7% of the digital consumers surveyed perceive wide acceptance of digital payments, and 87.6% said they would pay more this way if that acceptance continued to grow.
The study also documents that informal commerce remains the final frontier of digital payments, representing the largest adoption gap identified in the diagnosis. Among the digital consumers surveyed, 63.4% said they use exclusively cash at informal or small businesses.
Overall, 91.4% maintain a predominant dependence on cash, while only 8.7% use exclusively digital payment methods.
The study lists four factors that explain this dependence: acceptance costs, tax concerns, misinformation about tax obligations, and the financial invisibility of small businesses.
Despite progress over the past decade, Mexico still lags behind other countries in the region, such as Chile, Brazil and Colombia. Nevertheless, the study highlights recent developments that could accelerate the adoption curve for digital payments in the country.
The Digital Economy Law for Digital and Electronic Payments, approved by both chambers of Congress (Deputies and Senators) in October 2026 and now awaiting publication in the Diario Oficial de la Federacion (DOF), for example, “expands the acceptance of digital payments, enables QR codes on terminals, and facilitates account opening: exactly the kind of regulatory change that allowed Brazil and Colombia to advance faster.”
However, the study warns that, “to approach the pace of 1.0 to 1.5 percentage points per year that those markets already achieve, the law needs to be complemented by a unified user experience, affordable costs for small merchants, and greater consumer trust.”
On the first point, the Bank of Mexico (Banxico) has already ordered measures to standardize the user experience and set December 14 as the deadline for implementation.
“The next stage of digital payments in Mexico will not be defined solely by how many people have access to financial services or how many fintechs obtain a banking license. It will be defined by the ecosystem’s ability to turn available infrastructure into everyday use, use into trust, and each transaction into a deeper financial relationship,” the study warns.
The real challenge, it adds, is to make paying digitally stop being an alternative and become a natural, frequent and sustainable choice.
