Plan México Wants 30% of Businesses on Bank Credit by 2030. Here's What Has to Change for That to Happen.

Plan México is President Sheinbaum's flagship economic development policy: 13 goals aimed at boosting national development and reducing poverty and inequality by the end of the decade. It covers everything from energy and infrastructure to nearshoring and financial inclusion, and it has become the organizing framework for how the government is engaging with the private sector on growth.

Last month, at the 89th Convención Bancaria in Cancún, the President announced a major update. The government is now targeting two specific, measurable outcomes: increase credit access from 20% to 30% of businesses by 2030, with a focus on the MiPyMEs that remain chronically underserved, and grow the volume of credit from 38% to 45% of GDP in the same period.

ABM President Emilio Romano committed the banking sector to 4.5 trillion pesos in new lending through 2030, with 1.4 trillion earmarked for this year. Santander announced plans to deploy 36 billion pesos in new PyME credit in 2026. BBVA called PyMEs its primary strategic bet through 2029. The political will is there. The capital is there.

The question is whether the infrastructure is.

What this means for banks, lenders, and fintechs in Mexico

To hit these targets, financial institutions will need to meaningfully increase the number of businesses they lend to. And that means increasing the number of businesses flowing through every stage of the funnel: sales, onboarding, compliance, and underwriting.

We believe that infrastructure improvements are a key and necessary part of the puzzle to achieve those credit access and volume goals. Without them, the targets are aspirational. With them, they become executable.

The top of the funnel is moving 

The credit need already exists. Millions of MiPyMEs are operating without access to formal financing, and they want it. There are also a number of initiatives underway to improve digitalization and access to the digital economy. The Visa-MIPYME initiative to increase card acceptance. The push for digital business incorporations. New and innovative lower-friction digital onboarding channels, including mobile-first and messaging-based approaches. These will help bring more businesses into contact with the financial system for the first time.

Getting millions of informal businesses to walk through the door of a bank is an enormous challenge in its own right, one that involves trust, education, product design, and distribution. None of those challenges are small. But here is the thing: even if every one of them succeeds, banks still need the infrastructure to process what comes through the door.

Without infrastructure, the funnel breaks

Consider what the process looks like today. More than half of business applications do not arrive with valid documents on the first pass. What follows is weeks of back and forth: compliance teams chasing down missing filings, requesting corrected documents, waiting on responses, restarting reviews. For a bank processing a manageable number of applications per quarter, this is painful but survivable. Now imagine that volume scaling 10x.

Top-of-funnel initiatives will drive exactly that kind of volume increase. And that volume will collide with the manual operations, onboarding, and compliance processes that we tend to see across the industry today. These processes were designed for a world where a bank might onboard a few hundred new business clients per month. They were not designed for what Plan México is asking: millions of new businesses entering the financial system within four years.

Manual review does not scale linearly. It breaks. Backlogs grow. Turnaround times stretch. Quality drops. And when quality drops in compliance, the consequences are not operational inconveniences. They are regulatory, reputational, and financial.

Fraud risk scales with access

We are also concerned that some of these newer digital-first channels will see higher fraud rates. Lower-friction onboarding and fewer upfront document requirements are good for conversion. They are also good for bad actors.

Shell companies. Synthetic business identities. Fraudulent documents. AI-generated deepfakes of corporate filings and identity documents, often invisible to the naked eye. These threats are becoming more sophisticated and more pervasive as digital tools become more accessible. The same technology that makes it easier for a legitimate MiPyME to open an account also makes it easier for a fraudster to create one that looks identical.

We are already seeing early signs of this across the market, and we expect it to accelerate as digital onboarding volume grows.

The paradox: depth vs. speed

The increased customer volume and the rising potential for fraud and regulatory risks create a difficult paradox. Depth and speed are in direct conflict when you are working manually and have a high volume of applications to review.

A compliance analyst can be thorough, or they can be fast. They cannot be both at the same time, not when they are manually cross-referencing documents against government registries, checking beneficial ownership chains, and evaluating filings for tampering. And when the pressure is on to move faster, it is depth that gets sacrificed first. That is exactly the wrong tradeoff in a market where fraud risk is increasing and regulatory enforcement is tightening.

The co-pilot approach: technology that superpowers analysts

We recommend banks and lenders start with a co-pilot approach: using technology to give analysts leverage rather than replacing them.

At Niva, we are seeing what that looks like in practice. Onboarding times dropping by close to 98%. AML checks that go 4x deeper than what was previously possible in the same timeframe. Double digit percent reductions in fraud. All without removing human oversight from the process.

The goal is not to eliminate the analyst. It is to give them the tools to handle ten times the volume at ten times the depth. That means automating the mechanical work: cross-referencing data across documents and government registries, pulling from third-party data sources, evaluating every document for signs of tampering or forgery that are often undetectable to the human eye.

When an analyst sits down to review a business application, they should already have a complete, verified picture in front of them. The entity confirmed. The ownership structure mapped. The documents authenticated. The risk signals flagged. Their job becomes judgment, not data entry.

What comes next

Plan México will create more businesses, more financing demand, more digital transactions, and more regulatory and fraud risk, all at the same time. That is the nature of rapid financial inclusion: the opportunity and the risk scale together.

The financial services players who are best positioned to capture this opportunity will be the ones who can move fast, verify accurately, and protect themselves from increasingly sophisticated threats. In our view, the ones who invest in infrastructure now will be the ones who are ready when the volume arrives.

Niva is the infrastructure that makes all three possible.

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