Correspondent Banking in Mexico’s Rural Areas: Lessons from a G2P Payment Digitization and Financial Inclusion Project

This paper studies the effect of payment digitization on the government-to-person (G2P) payment platform in Mexico. The main objective of the Mexican government’s Oportunidades program (Mexico’s largest conditional cash transfer program) was to provide access to financial services to the program’s recipients and others in their communities. By this, it intends to pave the way for their inclusion into the formal financial system and also to strengthen the program’s overall development.

This study by BFA Global commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation draws from various project-related documents and interviews with over 20 key actors in the months of July and August 2013. The study finds that while payment digitization was successfully accomplished for more than 6.5 million Oportunidades’ recipients, the financial inclusion initiative did not yield the expected outcomes.