Samuel Chaves on What Digital Banking Still Gets Wrong About the Mexican Market

Samuel Chaves of Bankaool says digital banking hasn’t addressed key parts of the Mexican market, especially the trust and service demands that shape how consumers actually bank.

Samuel Chaves has spent much of his career on the digital side of banking, including building and scaling neobanks and fintech products in Latin America. Currently, he’s the Executive Vice President of Bankaool, a licensed regional bank with physical branches. 

Chaves’s background in digital banking and current leadership role give him a unique POV on the rapid growth of neobanks and digital-only banking trends in Mexico. He doesn’t dispute that the growth of digital is real or that it’s brought millions of customers into the financial system. But having built such platforms himself, Chaves has also seen where the digital-only model doesn’t align with Mexican market needs. 

Ways digital-only approaches get the Mexican market wrong include:

• Treating access as the same thing as inclusion
• Underestimating consumer desire for hybrid approaches
• Making assumptions about the whole market based on specific sectors
• Ignoring risks associated with unbalanced scaling
• Undervaluing credibility
• Solving for convenience instead of financial literacy

Treating Access as the Same Thing as Inclusion

An ENIF 2024 report indicated that roughly 1 in 4 Mexicans had never had a deposit account or similar financial product at the time of the survey. The figure is often higher in more rural communities or among older populations. Given those numbers, it makes sense that digital-only banking approaches the market with strategies that increase access.

Chaves notes that the assumption behind many digital banking products is that you just need to build and provide the product; doing so crosses the bridge that keeps consumers from banking. In reality, access is a starting point. Consumers still need products designed around their actual habits and the knowledge required to navigate them well. 

Underestimating How Much Mexicans Want Digital Options Without Losing Access to Branches

The Mexican banking market consistently prioritizes in-person, branch-based banking, with digital banking as a nice-to-have, helpful add-on. According to figures published by Ventana EBC, 92% of Mexicans with financial accounts maintain their relationships with traditional banks. Around two-thirds of those who use banking products complement, rather than replace, traditional banking with digital tools. 

According to Chaves, neobanks tend to view branch banking as a legacy system to eventually phase out rather than a channel customers actively choose to keep. But the data says otherwise; consumers want a mix of banking options that serve their needs, and that’s often a hybrid approach. Banks that ignore consumer trends and demands are building for a market that doesn’t actually exist.

Making Assumptions About the Market Based on Younger Urban Users

According to Galileo Financial Technologies’ 2025 study Growth Engine of Financial Services, 90% of millennials and Gen Z in Mexico rely primarily or fully on mobile-only banking solutions. But assumptions based on younger populations don’t work across the Mexican banking public. According to INEGI’s Encuesta Nacional sobre Disponibilidad y Uso de Tecnologías de la Información en los Hogares (ENDUTIH), published in May 2025, around 17% of the population doesn’t use the internet at all.

However, those figures skew when you look at specific populations:

• Almost 90% of people in urban areas use the internet, compared with around 68% in rural areas.
• States like Sonora and Quintana Roo reported internet use rates of 90% or higher, but in Oaxaca and Chiapas, more than 20% of the total population doesn’t use the internet. 

Internet use varies by age, with figures dropping off substantially for older populations:

• People aged 15 to 44: Around 95% or higher
• People aged 45 to 54: 89%
• People aged 55 to 64: 79% 
• People aged 65 to 74: 58%
• People aged 75 and older: Around 30% 

Ignoring Risks Related to Outpacing Customer Support Infrastructures

Rapid digital growth creates a support problem that’s easy to overlook until it becomes urgent. Chaves has seen this pattern from the inside: 

• A neobank can sign up thousands of new customers in a matter of weeks.
• However, building the support infrastructure to match that growth can take longer and often costs more than the technology itself. 
• When customer acquisition outpaces support ability, the result is often a backlog of unresolved issues.

Chaves points out that’s a risk regional banks like Bankaool are positioned to avoid, because they haven’t tried to scale digital acquisition faster than their ability to offer customer support. Additionally, in-person branches offer support options unavailable to digital-only customers, thereby reducing strain on call centers and other support structures. 

Undervaluing Credibility 

Chaves says digital-only strategies may not consider the full weight of trust and credibility in consumer financial decisions. 

Colocando Ideas conducted a social listening experiment from 2024 to 2026 to analyze how people are talking about Mexican digital banking and fintech online. It ranked the mentions as positive, neutral or negative, finding that:

• Less than 10% were positive
• More than 15% were negative
• Three in four remained neutral

According to the study, the negative mentions were associated with times when individuals felt they lacked control over their own resources. 

Vulnerability around money triggered more intense emotional responses than other factors, and for good reason. According to the Comisión Nacional para la Protección y Defensa de los Usuarios de Servicios Financieros (CONDUSEF) — Mexico’s financial services consumer protection agency, more than 250,000 claims were initiated in 2024 alone, primarily related to digital operations and banking. That figure grew 23% from 2024 to 2025, mostly due to potential fraud or unrecognized transactions on accounts. 

In an environment where digital is growing faster than consumer trust, regulated regional banks often feel safer than digital-only options. Bankaool’s status as a CNBV-regulated institution with IPAB-protected deposits — the same categorical protections that anchor traditional Mexican banking — puts it in a different trust category than digital-only competitors. Chaves notes that trust isn’t measured by growth or app downloads but by how exposed customers feel.

Solving for Convenience Instead of Financial Literacy and Better Habits

An app that speeds up transactions doesn’t necessarily make a customer any better with money. Digital-only platforms tend to optimize for convenience. They may involve fewer steps, faster transfers or instant approvals but not include tools that help customers actually understand what they’re doing. 

For Samuel Chaves and other Bankaool leaders, that’s a missed opportunity. Speed solves a friction problem, not a financial literacy one. Bankaool’s approach treats those as separate goals, embedding education directly into products rather than assuming convenience will lead to better habits over time. 

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