One of the topics that will be addressed today at the press conference of the Steering Committee of the Association of Banks of Mexico will be the new provisions on electronic payment networks that were announced yesterday by Banxico, CNBV and the Ministry of Finance and are in a public consultation process at Cofemer.
In practice, it is an official cap on the fees and commissions charged by financial intermediaries, the first in Q4, and it fell like a bucket of cold water on bankers.
Emilio Romano, president of the ABM, will have to juggle to reconcile the interests of the banks because the reduction in commissions for payment operations with debit and credit cards seeks, and the official statement clearly states, “to improve the conditions of cardholders and increase the number of businesses that accept electronic payment methods.”
The objective of the financial authorities and I support it 100% is to promote the use of electronic means of payment and reduce the use of cash in a country like Mexico in which more than 50% of the economy is informal.
The problem is the unequal impact on the banks with this cap on fees or commissions, because it depends not only on the number of cards they have on the market and here in principle the losers are the 7 large banks in the country; but also its number of point-of-sale terminals.
Winners and losers in banking
Within the G7 made up of Banorte, Banamex, Scotiabank, BBVA, Inbursa, HSBC and Santander, the losers are those with fewer point-of-sale terminals.
The winners will be the acquiring banks that act as intermediaries between the card-issuing banks and the merchants and will now pay less commission to the issuers for the use of the POS terminals. Although in the G7 all banks are issuers and acquirers, the leaders in Mexico with the largest number of terminals are BBVA and Banorte. BanBajío and Mifel also stand out, although they are medium-sized banks, they have attractive programs between SMEs and medium and small businesses to finance the installation of POS terminals.
Among the big losers is American Express, which charges the highest commission to merchants although it is also an acquirer, and Banamex because in 2015 it sold its acquiring business to Evo Payments International and is one of the largest issuers in Mexico. Banamex’s income from the use of its more than 15 million cardholders will decrease due to the lower commissions that businesses will pay.
Increase in annuity?
Businesses will have the benefit of increasing their sales and paying a lower cost for accepting card payments. But the big question is whether the use of cash will really be reduced due to the risk of greater control by the SAT and for users the fear is that the issuing banks, to compensate for their lower income, will raise their issuance and annual fees on the cards.
They will reinforce measures antilavado of money
By the way, today the ABM will also release an interesting document on the measures antilavado that are applied in banking in Mexico, without distinction of the size of the bank and its deposit and credit activities, to comply with the strictest regulations not only of FinCEN but also of the Mexican authorities.
The message that will be reiterated is that such regrettable accusations by the United States Department of the Treasury that led to the closure of operations of CIBanco, Intercam and the Vector brokerage house will not be repeated despite the fact that FinCEN did not present evidence to support the alleged irregular operations of the three accused intermediaries.
Pemex owes 517,000 million pesos to suppliers
Pemex’s results at the end of the third quarter are dismal. The most worrying thing is not its losses of 61 billion pesos, despite its exchange profit of 33 billion pesos, but the increase in debts to suppliers. The debt amounted to 517 million pesos despite the fact that on Friday before the Energy Commission of the Chamber of Deputies, Víctor Rodríguez Padilla, General Director of Pemex, assured that 300 million pesos, 50% of the debt, had already been paid to suppliers.
Another worrying fact is that Pemex’s total debt increased to 100,300 million dollars, despite the issuance of Pre-capitalized bonds issued by the SHCP for 12,000 million pesos. President Sheinbaum and Rodríguez Padilla blame “damn neoliberalism” for Pemex’s debt, but the debts to suppliers are the fault of “the blessed 4T” and the inefficiency of former director Octavio Romero, who in 1 year of government has not only not decreased but continues to increase, putting the economy of the southeastern states and thousands of jobs in check.
As if that were not enough, Pemex still does not disclose the first mixed contracts announced by the Ministry of Energy last August in the 2025-2035 Strategic Plan.
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