Mexico’s digital payments reforms could widen credit access while trimming bank fee income, Moody’s says

Moody’s Ratings says Mexico’s push to expand digital payments would help households and small businesses access credit, even if it modestly reduces banks’ fee income. The key point for PSPs and acquirers: the reforms are not just about payment rails; they also change merchant acceptance economics, settlement timing, and the data banks can use to underwrite borrowers.

1. The agency’s latest report on Mexico’s banking sector says wider use of digital payment methods would reduce cash handling costs, support economic formalization, and provide transaction data that banks can use to assess loan applicants more accurately.
2. Moody’s analysis covers the Digital and Electronic Payments Economy Law, approved by the Senate on October 20 and sent to the executive, plus a regulatory proposal to cut card interchange fees. Interchange is the fee paid by merchant acquirers to card-issuing banks, and it is built into the merchant discount rate merchants pay to accept cards.
3. The proposal would gradually cap average interchange at 1% for credit cards and 0.30% for debit, down from current maximums of 1.91% and 1.15%, respectively, according to Moody’s. The limits would be phased in over three years to give the market time to adjust pricing and rewards programs.
4. Moody’s says lower fees should encourage small businesses, including informal ones, to accept cards. The draft rules would also ban exclusivity agreements and tying arrangements, and require payment service providers to deliver funds to merchants on the same day.
5. The law would empower Mexico’s finance ministry to decide which sectors must accept electronic payments only, and it would require government entities to accept them as well. Moody’s notes that commercial bank lending stood at 23% of GDP in June 2026, versus around 50% in other major Latin American banking markets, while only 63% of adults had a bank account and the informal economy covered more than half of the labor force.

Moody’s does not expect an immediate drop in gross banking revenue and says higher transaction volumes should partly offset lower fees. For PSPs, that is the practical read: the margin pool on acceptance may compress, but the addressable merchant base and payment volume could expand if the reforms work as intended.