Mexico's CoDi Adoption Stalls at 0.2% Even as SPEI Transfer Volumes Surge

Despite 180 million banking accounts and growing SPEI adoption, Mexico's instant payment overlay CoDi has reached only 0.2% transaction penetration after six years. Industry panelists at Revolution Banking Mexico attribute the gap to device requirements, fiscal surveillance fears, and zero-commission economics that give banks no incentive to promote the service.

Mexico's core real-time rail, SPEI, processed 5.4 billion operations in 2024, growing 39% year-on-year. Banco de Mexico projects SPEI will overtake debit and credit cards as the country's most-used digital payment method by the end of 2026. Yet CoDi, the QR-based instant payment overlay launched in 2019, has accumulated only 17.8 million cumulative transactions across 21.8 million validated accounts as of September 2025. Only 0.2% of Mexico's 180 million banking accounts have conducted at least one CoDi operation.

Executives from HSBC, Banco Azteca, and BX+ identified three structural barriers at the Revolution Banking Mexico conference on August 10. Carlos Gonzalez Fillad, HSBC's regional payments director, noted that CoDi and DiMo applications require mid-to-high-end mobile devices because they are embedded in banks' full-featured apps. Juan Manuel Ortiz Ayala, Banco Azteca's digital payments director, argued that a persistent stigma associating digital payments with fiscal surveillance continues to deter adoption. Both executives agreed that banks lack revenue incentive to promote CoDi or DiMo because neither service generates commissions.

DiMo, Banco de Mexico's phone-number-based transfer service launched in 2023, reached 9 million registered accounts by June 2024. ACI Worldwide estimates that instant payment systems represent 8.3% of Mexican payment transactions, a share projected to reach 12.9% by 2028. The conference panelists agreed that simplifying the user experience to match the ease of card payments remains the primary challenge for driving overlay adoption at scale.