When the 2026 World Cup kicks off in Mexico this June, fans in Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Monterrey will find something that would have been unthinkable a decade ago: taco stands and corner stores ready to take their cards.

Back then, accepting card payments meant convincing a bank to give you a Point-of-Sale (POS) terminal. Good luck with that. Banks charged merchant fees north of 3%, required mountains of paperwork, and mostly only bothered with large retailers.

For decades, card acceptance was a premium service. Small merchants (the tiendas, taquerias, and market vendors that make up the backbone of Mexican commerce) were effectively locked out. By 2013, US citizens were already paying with cards for the majority of in-person purchases. Mexico was quickly falling behind: 9 out of 10 transactions were still in cash.

The following year, the regulatory body, CNBV, began allowing non-bank entities to process card payments without a full banking license. They were called agregadoras (aggregators) and they started showing up in CNBV's reports.

What happened next helps make the case that our region, when doors are opened, is innovative and will build.

Line graph comparing POS terminals in Mexico by banks vs. non-banks, showing non-banks dramatically outpaced banks after 2017 | Sources: CNBV, Latinometrics
Paytechs gave Mexico what the banks couldn't

Companies like Clip (which had been operating in a regulatory gray zone since 2012) finally had legal standing. By 2017, non-bank terminals had already overtaken the banks.

Mexico went from fewer than a million POS terminals in 2013 to over 6.4M today. That's a 7x increase in just over a decade, almost entirely driven by non-banks.

Beyond the convenience that soccer fans will experience this June, every POS device in a corner store doubles as a bridge from the informal economy to the formal one. Those millions of new terminals are already generating transaction histories for merchants who never had one, and where transaction histories go, credit follows. Mexico's banks had decades to wire the country for digital payments. The paytechs did it in less than one.

Behind every card payment in Latin America, there's infrastructure making it possible. Kushki helps businesses across the region accept card payments — simply, reliably, and at scale. If you're looking to process payments in LATAM, start here.

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