The world ranking that left us with the pending (and not the banking)
It seems that at the party of financial inclusion, Mexico had to be the friend who arrives late, with the wrong drink and, to make matters worse, falls asleep on the couch. The long-awaited Global Financial Inclusion Index 2025, that global evaluation that tells us who are the popular ones and who are those who are left watching from the outside, has left a conclusion as predictable as a soap opera ending: Brazil shines with its own light, while Mexico continues looking for the keys to its bank account in the wrong pocket.
Prepared by the brains at Principal Financial Group and the Centre for Economics and Business Research, the report places us comfortably among the bottom ten places in the global ranking. Yes, that select group of nations where opening a digital account can feel like the same epic bureaucracy as trying to build a sand castle one grain at a time. All this, while our Brazilian neighbor not only comes to the party, but steals the show with its Pix instant payments platform, consolidating a regional leadership that makes us wonder if we are on the same continent.
Latin American “advancement”: One step forward and a half backwards
The report, with its cautiously bureaucratic optimism, mentions that Latin America has accumulated its fourth consecutive year of improvement. Sounds good, right? Until you read the fine print and discover that the regional score stood at 44.7 points, which represents a stunning improvement of… 0.1 points from the previous year. Come on, that’s what most of us call “staying in exactly the same place,” but with a new PowerPoint. A progress so marginal that it almost requires a microscope to observe.
And to what do they attribute this thunderous snail’s progress? Well, to investments in digital financial infrastructure. Of course, because installing an ATM in the age of digital wallets is the modern equivalent of arriving at a Formula 1 race on a donkey. Meanwhile, structural gaps and limited employer participation – which seems to be the favorite euphemism for “nobody cares about making life easier for the consumer” – continue to hold back equitable access to financial services with the tenacity of a watchdog at the door of a closed bank.
Brazil: The child prodigy that makes us look bad
While we struggle to remember our online banking passwords, Brazil has been playing in another league. Since 2022, its score has increased by 19.3 points, a figure that seems taken from a sports competition where we don’t even qualify. The secret? The massive expansion of Pix, a payment system that apparently works so well that even the postman uses it to get paid. This digital ecosystem is not only functional, but has generated something that in Mexico sounds like an urban legend: trust in digital solutions.
But not everything is Brazil in this garden of financial delights. Chile and Peru also recorded modest progress, derived from consumer protection policies and reforms in their pension systems. I mean, they did their homework, they turned it in on time and they even gave it a nice cover. Meanwhile, one wonders if our homework was eaten by the dog or if we are simply writing it with a pencil in a world that already uses touch keyboards.
The document, with the delicacy of a surgeon, details that in Mexico, despite the “efforts” to promote banking digitalization and inclusion, the country fails to translate regulatory reforms into a perceptible improvement. Translation: We have all the ingredients for the cake, but the oven is still cold. The disconnection between what is legislated and what the average citizen experiences is so great that one wonders if the reforms are being sent by postal mail to the wrong address.
And what does the future hold for us? If we continue at this pace, by the time Mexico achieves mass adoption of digital payments, Brazil will be paying with implanted neural chips. The transformation exhibited by other economies in the region seems to be a train that passes at full speed while we continue discussing the price of the ticket. The Mexican pace of transformation has the urgency of a bank line on a Friday afternoon: we all know it should move faster, but in the end, resigned, we take out the phone to wait.
In this great theater of financial inclusion, each country has its role. Brazil is the protagonist who solves everything in the last act, Chile and Peru are the competent secondary characters who move forward with determination, and Mexico… well, Mexico is that endearing character who always promises that in the next chapter he will do things differently, while the audience at home screams in frustration. access and consumer trust continue to be that jackpot that everyone sees passing by but that very few manage to scratch.
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