Mexico’s 6.3 million micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) generate nearly half of Mexico’s GDP and employ 37 percent of the workforce. Of MSMEs, 94.2 percent are microenterprises, and over half of these are women-owned or women-led. Despite this segment’s dominance in the economy, the majority of MSMEs transactions are still cash-based.
In 2019, Women’s World Banking set out on a two-year journey to understand why MSMEs have not shown widespread digital finance adoption in Mexico. We started by hypothesizing that poor supply, low demand, and an inadequate ecosystem are driving this low take-up. We began our inquiry by looking at the big picture—Mexico’s financial inclusion landscape and regulatory environment—and then moved on to deep qualitative research with Mexican women entrepreneurs to better understand their pain points and the financial ecosystem in which they operate.
