TALKING POINT

The proposition is seductive. Make digital payments easier, connect bank accounts to systems such as SPEI and CoDi, remove commissions and let a phone replace the wallet. Transactions become faster. Businesses acquire financial histories. Consumers gain access to credit. Government becomes easier to navigate. Informal commerce moves into the measurable economy.

But digitising an economy is not the same as fixing it.

Mexico is effectively constructing a new layer of national infrastructure in which payments, identity, public services and increasingly economic participation converge. That creates efficiencies. It also creates dependencies.

The government already processes around two million digital procedures every day. Llave MX has 30 million accounts and is connected to 266 procedures and services. Nube MX hosts 450 government systems. In October, the Llave MX File was expected to allow documents to move digitally rather than forcing citizens to carry them between agencies.

Individually, these projects look sensible. Collectively, they amount to something much bigger: the operating system of the Mexican state.

That makes cybersecurity, resilience, privacy and governance fundamental economic issues. If citizens are encouraged away from cash, digital payment infrastructure cannot merely be convenient; it must be dependable during cyberattacks, outages and institutional failures.

If financial histories become gateways to credit and formalisation, citizens need clarity about who can see that data, how it is used and how errors are challenged.

The danger is that‘ financial inclusion’ becomes financial visibility without equivalent protections.

Mexico’ s ambitions extend far beyond payments. The government is building Coatlicue, a Latin American supercomputer targeted for 2028, developing a national technology repository, expanding AI-powered public services and preparing a telecommunications satellite for launch in 2030. Thousands of schools and clinics have gained connectivity. Bureaucratic requirements have been cut and processing times reduced.

This is no minor administrative upgrade. Mexico is attempting to build a digitally mediated state at national scale.

That could be transformative. But governments routinely discover that digitisation removes friction for administrators as effectively as it removes friction for citizens. Systems designed to simplify services can also make surveillance, exclusion and automated decision-making easier.

Cash is inefficient precisely because it leaves fewer digital footprints. That weakness is also one of its protections.

Mexico should pursue digital payments aggressively but not confuse adoption with progress. The test of the Digital Economy Law will not be how many people stop carrying pesos or how many transactions move through a phone. It will be whether Mexico can build digital infrastructure citizens can trust without making participation conditional on surrendering control.

The harder work begins after legislation passes: establishing safeguards and alternatives for people who cannot, or do not want to, live inside digital systems. Modernisation without meaningful choice is not inclusion. It is compulsion dressed as convenience.

A cashless future may be faster. Mexico must prove it can also be freer. •

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