The 89th Convención Bancaria brought together banks, fintechs, regulators, and a few surprising guests under one roof in Cancún. Three days, a lot of content, and a few moments worth remembering.
Here is what stood out.
Day 1 — The number that anchors everything
The first day was mostly connections — good conversations, a padel court final, familiar faces.
But one slide stayed with me.
95.5% of businesses in Mexico are microenterprises. They employ 41.5% of the workforce and contribute 15% of GDP.
And yet financing them remains one of the hardest unsolved problems in the room.
The issue is not appetite. The issue is visibility. These businesses are operationally real — they issue invoices, pay taxes, employ people — but they are invisible to the systems that lenders use to make decisions.
What we have seen at CRiskCo is that when you use the right data, you can actually see these businesses clearly enough to act. Tax data, invoice history, real financial signals from SAT. Once you start measuring, the models improve, the process improves, and more businesses get access. It compounds.
Day 2 — Commitments, momentum, and a notable gap
Day two brought the headliners.
President Sheinbaum and the banking sector committed to raise credit penetration from 38% to 45% of GDP. That is a meaningful target. The gap between where Mexico is and where peer economies sit has been documented for years — this was a public commitment to close it.
A few concrete moves were announced alongside it:
What was almost entirely absent: open banking.
For a conference focused on the future of credit and financial inclusion, that is a notable gap. The commitments made at this convention — serving microenterprises, growing credit penetration, building a more inclusive financial system — do not happen through intent alone. They happen when lenders can actually see the businesses they want to serve.
That visibility comes from data. Tax data, transaction data, financial signals that already exist in the SAT ecosystem. The infrastructure is there. What the convention was light on was the conversation about how to use it.
Day 3 — Leadership, failure, and AI managing humans
The final day delivered some of the most memorable moments of the conference.
Ryan McInerney, CEO of Visa, made a statement that will probably define a lot of executive conversations in the next few years: "I manage 35,000 employees and tens of thousands of AI agents." The implication was direct — the job of leadership is no longer managing people alone. It is managing humans and AI simultaneously, and building organizations that can do both well.
Jorge Valdano — World Cup winner, coach, and one of football's most thoughtful voices — spoke about failure and success in a way that landed differently than the usual conference wisdom. His line: "I'm more afraid of success than failure. In failure there's an error that makes us reflect. And in that process there is learning." It was a good reminder that the organizations that improve are the ones that treat failure as information, not as something to avoid.
The conference closed with Emmanuel and Mijares on stage — a full room, a genuinely beautiful moment. Thank you to Círculo de Crédito for sponsoring and building the entire stage, and happy birthday to Juan Manuel Ruiz Palmieri.
What I'm taking away
The 89th ABM Convention made one thing clear: there is genuine political and institutional commitment to expanding credit access in Mexico. The targets are set. Capital is moving. The digital payments infrastructure is advancing.
The missing piece in the conversation is data infrastructure — specifically, the ability to use the financial signals that already exist (SAT, CFDI, tax compliance, invoice history) to make credit decisions on the 95.5% of businesses that remain invisible to traditional systems.
That is the problem CRiskCo was built to solve. And based on what we heard in Cancún, the conditions for solving it at scale are more favorable than they have been in a long time.
See you at ABM 90.
Photos: Fernando Luna · Jesús Díaz
CRiskCo provides risk and compliance intelligence for Mexico. [criskco.com](https://criskco.com)