🇲🇽 Fintech 3.0: Rebuilding Finance for the Internet Age

Real problems. Real solutions. Real data. This is Frontera.

Your weekly dose of data-driven crypto insights from the edges of the world. Trusted by leaders at Bitso, Binance, the Solana Foundation, the Ethereum Foundation, and more.

This is where you start if you’re building, investing, or scaling in frontier markets.

Don't miss this week's podcast, where Ab, Cush, and Simon walk through the report together, unpacking their takes and the parts they found most compelling.

This Edition Is Brought To You By Bridge

Bridge makes it simple to receive, hold, issue, and use stablecoins. Unlock new markets, launch new products, and make money move. Discover how at bridge.xyz

📊 Our Most Complete Work to Date

We’re excited to release our latest research report: Fintech 3.0: The Great Platform Shift in Mexico.

You can download it here!

This report is the result of months of research, conversations with thousands of users, hundreds of discussions with fintech leaders across the ecosystem, and a decade building in the industry.

It reflects how we see the market evolving from the inside, in the country we know and love. It is our most complete work to date, and I couldn't be more proud about how it turned out.

The 58-page report explains what Fintech 3.0 is and why it represents a fundamental platform shift. 

It traces how fintech evolved from simply putting banks online, to building software on top of them, and now toward rebuilding finance as a whole on open, programmable rails. It shows how stablecoins, modern blockchains, and regulatory progress have reached the point where they can outperform legacy infrastructure in the real world.

We then ground this shift in Mexico. Looking into why the country is uniquely positioned for Fintech 3.0, from the scale of its fintech ecosystem and venture capital momentum to the strength of the peso, the adoption of SPEI, and the growing openness to collaborate from traditional institutions.

This report is designed for you, for our audience at Frontera, for the people shaping the next phase of financial services.

• For investors, it maps where value is likely to accrue as infrastructure changes.

• For crypto-native builders, it highlights where real distribution and leverage already exist.

• For fintech leaders, it offers a framework for upgrading existing products without starting from zero and without fading into irrelevance.

Also, the document is a visual work of art, you should check it for yourself.

Before diving deeper, I want to leave you with the key messages obtained from the report, which are then explained in detail in their corresponding sections.

If any of them resonate, we invite you to download the full report here and explore the analysis behind them.

Enjoy.

🗝️ Key Messages

The following text is an excerpt from our Fintech 3.0: The Great Platform Shift in Mexico report, download your copy now.

1. Fintech 3.0 is a historic technological platform shift.

Like electricity replacing candles or mobile replacing desktop computing, Fintech 3.0 represents an infrastructure replacement once a decisively better foundation becomes available. Programmable blockchain rails now outperforms legacy banking systems across speed, cost, and flexibility, making the transition unavoidable rather than optional.

2. Mexico is becoming Latin America’s most strategically important fintech market.

Mexico now hosts 1,104 fintech startups, up 8.3x since 2017, and in 2025 it surpassed Brazil in total VC dollars raised for the first time since 2012, with fintech absorbing the majority of that capital. This combination of ecosystem scale and capital concentration makes Mexico one of the world’s most primed markets for Fintech 3.0 adoption.

3. There is a structural funding gap driven by local risk aversion.

In the most exciting Fintech 3.0 companies, cap tables are dominated by international investors, with relatively few Mexican funds taking significant positions. Local capital’s hesitation to underwrite crypto-native infrastructure creates an opening for global investors willing to back the country’s next generation of financial winners.

4. Partnership, not vertical integration, is the winning execution model in Mexico.

Seventy-five percent of traditional finance institutions are either already collaborating with fintechs, in the process of doing so, or explicitly open to partnerships, giving Mexico the highest openness to collaboration in Latin America. This partnership-first culture makes a “build-with-partners” approach the most effective way to launch Fintech 3.0 products quickly while managing regulatory and technical risk.

5. Mexico’s strong peso and SPEI system create a uniquely favorable starting point.

Over the last decade the peso has been far more stable than other major Latin American currencies and it has appreciated about 10% against the dollar over the last five years, while SPEI has scaled to more than 4B instant, low-cost transfers per year. Instead of fleeing a collapsing unit of account or patching broken domestic rails, Mexican fintechs can focus on using Fintech 3.0 to upgrade the experience of a large, digital‑first user base and make peso payments programmable across the apps people already use every day.

6. Fintech competition has shifted from acquisition to monetization and retention.

Fintech 2.0 neobanks won users with promotional, high-yield savings accounts often capped by low limits and funded as marketing spend rather than real investment products. That strategy worked during the acquisition phase, helping fintechs onboard a massive user base. More than 70M Mexicans, roughly 54% of the country’s 130M population, were using fintech services by 2024. In Fintech 3.0, however, durable advantage will come from sustainable yield sourced from transparent onchain assets and from richer product suites that monetize and retain this already-acquired audience over time, rather than relying on short-term incentives.

7. Regional champions are betting their future on Fintech 3.0

Nubank, Revolut, and Bitso are weaving stablecoins, onchain settlement, and digital asset products into their core roadmaps, signaling that the next phase of their growth will be built on crypto‑enabled rails. This shift from side experiments to strategic pillars makes clear that for Latin America’s biggest consumer fintechs, Fintech 3.0 capabilities are now prerequisites for long‑term competitiveness.

8. Crypto and traditional finance are converging into unified, rail-agnostic experiences.


DolarApp’s and Bitso’s integration of U.S. equities, show crypto-enabled companies expanding into traditional asset classes. As traditional fintechs move in the opposite direction, integrating Fintech 3.0-enabled products, the line between “crypto” and “traditional” finance is fading, leaving only better financial experiences for users.

9. Fintech 3.0 will turn companies into full financial operating systems.

Converging into unified, rail-agnostic experiences also means that the next generation of fintech winners will offer everything in one place: high-yield savings, dollar accounts, CETES, international bonds, stocks, crypto, and emerging primitives like prediction markets. Users will grow accustomed to managing their entire financial lives inside a single app, while fragmented product offerings will increasingly feel incomplete.

10. Winners will combine Fintech 2.0 distribution and trust with Fintech 3.0 technical execution.


Mexico’s competitive field is coalescing into three groups: legacy Fintech 2.0 players, Fintech 2.0 companies upgrading their rails, and Fintech 3.0 startups. The companies most likely to win will be those that pair the brand, user base, and regulatory strength of Fintech 2.0 with the infrastructure, speed, and product intuition of Fintech 3.0, through deep collaboration between traditional and crypto-native teams.

This is just a snapshot of the ideas explored. The full report goes deeper into the data, examples, and strategic implications behind each of these points. 

Download Fintech 3.0: The Great Platform Shift in Mexico to explore the opportunity in detail here.