🇲🇽 The Fintech 3.0 Opportunity in Mexico

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🏆 The Size of the Prize

We’re days away from releasing Fintech 3.0: The Great Platform Shift in Mexico, our upcoming report into how onchain rails and new financial primitives are rewriting the foundations of the country’s financial system.

This week, we’re sharing an early section from the report that answers one of the most important questions:  How big is the opportunity?

Mexico’s fintech ecosystem has reached a scale, maturity, and growth velocity that make it a perfect candidate for a transition in underlying infrastructure. Startup formation, user adoption, revenue expansion, VC conviction, early crypto integration, and openness from traditional institutions all point in the same direction. The market is ready for the rails to evolve.

This excerpt breaks down the structural forces behind that readiness and quantifies the environment Fintech 3.0 is about to transform.

🇲🇽 Opportunity Size in Mexico

This transition becomes even clearer when we look at Mexico, a market where fintech adoption and startup growth have created the ideal conditions for the new rails to take over.

According to the latest Finnovista Fintech Radar, Mexico now hosts 1,104 fintech startups, up from just 132 in 2017, a 8.3x increase in 7 years.

It is now the second-largest fintech ecosystem in Latin America, trailing only to Brazil.

More importantly, adoption is massive. Over 70M Mexicans used fintech services in 2024, with projections pointing to 86M by 2027. That implies roughly 20% annual growth, enough to make fintech products the default interface for most of the adult population within three years.

Revenues are climbing even faster, Mexican fintechs posted 31% YoY revenue growth in 2024, with a 22% CAGR from 2021–2024, signaling an industry moving from experimentation to scale.

Together, these trends point to a market that is large, expanding, and increasingly primed for a shift in underlying infrastructure. Below, we break down the structural forces making Mexico one of the most compelling Fintech 3.0 markets in the world.

Venture Capital Momentum

Mexico’s venture landscape has entered a phase where capital concentrates around companies that demonstrate real traction and the ability to scale. Despite a slowdown in global VC activity, Mexican fintechs raised $865M across 50 deals in 2024, a volume nearly identical to 2022 and 2023, even as the number of transactions fell by 20%. Fewer checks, but larger and more deliberate ones, signal that investors are prioritizing proven operators rather than broad experimentation.

Fintech also continues to dominate Mexico’s investment profile, consistently capturing the largest share of VC dollars in the country. In 2024, 74% of all VC funding in Mexico flowed into fintech, reflecting a strong conviction among both local and international funds that financial services remain the category with the deepest market need, the clearest revenue pathways, and the highest potential for regional breakout effects.

What makes this dynamic especially important is that the next wave of fintech innovation, Fintech 3.0, directly strengthens the traits investors already prize: better margins, faster distribution, and new revenue streams layered on top of existing user bases. 

As fintechs adopt onchain rails across payments, savings, credit, and treasury flows, they unlock business models that scale more efficiently than their predecessors. This alignment between investor incentives and infrastructure evolution makes venture momentum a catalyst that will accelerate the transition into Fintech 3.0 as soon as the right breakout products emerge.

Early but Fast-Growing Crypto Activity

Crypto remains a relatively small segment of Mexico’s fintech ecosystem, but it is expected to grow faster than every other vertical.

Finnovista’s segmentation shows “Crypto” among the leaders in expected revenue growth for 2025, powered by rising transaction volumes and greater acceptance of stablecoin-based payments across platforms.

Today, Mexico counts only 29 crypto-related fintech projects, a small fraction of the total 1,104 startups, but precisely because the base is small, the upside is large. Outside of those 29, adoption inside fintech companies is rising quickly, 10% of all fintechs now use crypto technology, up from 6% in 2023. 

Most of these implementations involve stablecoins, especially for cross-border flows and remittances, where cost and time advantages are impossible to ignore, like mentioned in The Inevitable Shift.

This early momentum mirrors the beginning of every platform shift, with low numbers, but a curve that is clearly bending upward. The opportunity lies not in what crypto fintechs represent today, but in how rapidly they are outpacing their peers.

Openness From Traditional Institutions

One of Mexico’s most underrated advantages is the unusually high willingness of traditional institutions to collaborate with fintechs. Seventy-five percent of fintech companies in Mexico either already work with banks or are actively seeking to do so, making it the most open collaboration market in Latin America.

That openness extends horizontally as well, fintechs consistently partner with one another, creating a network dynamic where integration, not isolation, is the default path to scale.

This environment matters because it creates ideal conditions for new infrastructure to be adopted quickly. When incumbents are receptive and fintechs are accustomed to integrating external capabilities, crypto-native teams with deep operational expertise can plug into existing roadmaps instead of fighting institutional resistance.

The result is a mutually beneficial relationship: Bando, for example, gains a new partner to deploy Fintech 3.0 rails, while the fintech or financial institution in question gains the speed, cost efficiency, and global reach of modern infrastructure, resolving long-standing operational bottlenecks without requiring internal reinvention.

Collaboration, however, is not without friction. Two major blockers consistently emerge across the ecosystem: restrictive regulatory requirements and the slow pace of innovation inside large financial institutions. 

Yet these constraints are exactly where Fintech 3.0 creates new leverage. Bando’s regulatory-first approach helps institutions navigate compliance complexity, while the competitive pressure triggered by early adopters of stablecoin and blockchain infrastructure forces the rest of the market to accelerate innovation. As soon as one major player offers faster settlement, programmable liquidity, or interoperable cross-border flows, the rest cannot afford to stand still.

The Inflection Point

Taken together, these dynamics of deep investor conviction, accelerating crypto adoption, and an ecosystem unusually open to collaboration signal a market approaching an inflection point.

Mexico is structurally primed for a transition in its underlying financial infrastructure. The demand is clear, the capital is in place, and the institutions are ready to participate. What has been missing is the rails upgrade, and with Fintech 3.0, that upgrade has finally arrived.

📥 Get the Full Report

This is just one section of our full report, Fintech 3.0: The Great Platform Shift in Mexico.

In the full release, we go deep into the use cases being transformed, the most successful Fintech 3.0 case studies, Mexico’s Fintech 2.0 market landscape, who will win in this new era, and, most importantly, how to win.

Register here to receive the complete report the moment it’s published.