Bank'ed
Going deep into INEGI's latest financial inclusion survey.
A couple of weeks ago, INEGI and the CNBV published their latest Financial Inclusion Survey report (2024), a document spanning over 140 pages that contains extremely valuable insights on the current state of financial inclusion among the Mexican population.
While the document is quite thorough on its own, we decided to dive deeper into key topics that caught our attention.
We hope you find our analysis useful.
This post is exclusively for Margin subscribers.
If you’d like for us to create a corporate subscription for you team please contact us at miguel@tukanmx.com.
It’s a great investment to keep everyone on track of what’s happening with the Mexican economy.
Latest CNBV data shows that there are close to 138 million active funding banking accounts in the hands of the general public.1 This figure implies roughly 1.5 accounts per adult; and it doesn’t even consider the millions of contracts operated by digital wallets, SOFIPOs and SOCAPs in the country.
Generally, deposit accounts are considered the entry point into the financial sector. Once a person owns an account where they can receive funds, financial institutions then begin moving the client up the “funnel” of credit products.
INEGI’s latest financial inclusion survey estimates that 63% of the adult Mexican population currently owns a deposit (or savings) account — a rate 14 percentage points higher than in 2018.
For context, this estimates that 15 million people (when compared to 2018) opened a deposit account during the past 5 years — a figure equivalent to the combined population of states like Nuevo León and Veracruz.
This penetration rate would imply that an adult within the formal financial system would have (on average) more than 2 active deposit accounts. A figure which makes a lot of sense, at least, on paper.
This is further backed by the ENIF (Encuesta Nacional de Inclusión Financiera) which suggests that close to 30% of Mexicans with a deposit account have 2 or more different types of accounts — for example, a payroll account, and a fully-digital account (Nu, Mercado Pago, Stori, etc.).
This refers to the number of types of accounts they hold, not the total number of accounts. For example, a person could have only one type of account (i.e. payroll) but with multiple banks.
As expected, most of the population begins their relationship with the financial system through their payroll account (81%). That is, the account which is chosen by their employer when that person enters the formal job market.
This has generated a massive moat for banks that hold relationships with large corporates in the Mexican market. In fact, CNBV data shows that 88% of the country's total payroll accounts are in the hands of just 5 players.
And in turn, has translated into banks overlooking regions of the country where there are high rates of informality.
If you’re interested on this topic we did a deep dive on the relationship of informality and banking accessibility in October.
