Mexico's small lenders give up on 12% of loans

It's the fifth of the month. Tuition, car insurance, a loan payment and a couple of subscriptions all hit the same account on autopay. Something came up last week, and this month the account is a little short. Nobody decided to stop paying, but the loan charge bounces anyway, and the borrower becomes a statistic: overdue. A few months later, if it's still unpaid, the lender gives up on it and the same loan becomes a second statistic: written off.

Multiply that bounced charge across Mexico's small-saver lenders and the money nobody is trying to collect anymore roughly equals $686M a year, on top of everything that's merely overdue today.

Two types of delinquents

Banks, SOFIPOs (the small-saver lenders, think Stori and Klar) and SOFOMs (the non-bank lenders, think Ford Credit and GM Financial) all split their bad loans into two piles for Mexico's banking regulator, the CNBV. The first counts the students who are failing, the loans behind on payments the lender is still chasing. The adjusted one also counts the ones who already dropped out, the loans it gave up on and erased from its books over the past twelve months.

Where lenders give up most

Banks' delinquency rose only a few tenths of a point in the first half of the year, partly because inflation and softer remittances are squeezing household income. It sounds like nothing. But the banks' loan book is so large that every tenth of a point is $495M in loans that stopped getting paid. The gap between their two lines, the part they've already given up on, is worth $11.9B a year.

Counting the dropouts, SOFIPO consumer loans jumped three points in a single year. Banks don't move like that. Their adjusted line hasn't left the same narrow band in the whole stretch the chart covers, pandemic included. Those three points are about $127M of consumer lending alone, on a book that is just 3% of the country's consumer credit.

SOFOMs sit in the middle. Most of what they lend is car finance, leasing and store cards, and a loan with a car behind it is probably easier to recover than a loan with nothing behind it. Miss enough payments and the lender takes the car back. That likely explains a good part of why SOFOMs' two lines run closer together than the SOFIPOs' do.

Beyond the very different borrower each group serves, how those loans get collected can be just as important. Take payroll loans, for example. The installment comes out of the paycheck before the money ever reaches the account, so unless the borrower loses the job, the loan gets paid on the dot. A recurring charge has no such guarantee. It only clears if the money is in the account on the day it hits. Part of what separates the three groups may be that one of them lends to people whose employers already do the collecting.

Delinquency by friction

The first time a lender chases a payment, it's usually just a reminder. Toku, which automates collections for companies in Chile, Mexico and Brazil, sees it every day: on the other end there's almost never someone who doesn't want to pay. Delinquency looks more like a card that expired and nobody updated, a charge that bounced on a Tuesday and was never retried on payday Friday, an email that landed in spam. A charge that retries on its own once there's a balance again never makes it to the uncomfortable phone call.

The question for anyone who bills on a recurring basis is how much of their own overdue portfolio is a plumbing problem before it's a risk problem.

Cartera vencida as a share of total loans (IMOR) and cartera vencida plus castigos from the last 12 months (IMORA), June 2026. The gap is a Latinometrics calculation. Source: CNBV (Portafolio de Información, Sistema Homologado).