Street businesses in Mexico, selling almost everything from juices to snacks, are currently seeing a change in their practice which just a few years ago was considered an oddity: more people are using mobile payments for their purchases.

 

Jose Antonio Figueroa, owner of the small Jugos Pepe business in a popular Mexico City neighborhood, told Xinhua that in recent weeks his profits have gone up thanks to the use of mobile payments amid decreasing COVID-19 infections.

 

"A lot of people don't bring cash, but they bring their phone, so they pay with the QR (quick response) code," said Figueroa. "My profits have gone up, both from the QR code and cash."

 

"We have seen phenomenal growth from many vendors adding the payment method because it offers more solutions to the payer and also allows for payment without contact, which with the pandemic, has become very relevant," Ramiro Hernandez, head of Mercado Pago Mexico's QR strategy, told Xinhua.

 

In the last seven months, Mercado Pago, the financial arm of e-commerce firm Mercado Libre, has seen an increase of up to 500 percent in the Mexican capital among merchants using the QR code, mainly in the popular and central neighborhoods of Roma, Condesa, Narvarte, Del Valle, Juarez and Polanco.

 

The next step is to introduce mobile payments into street businesses in other large cities across the country, such as Guadalajara, Monterrey, Puebla and Toluca, Hernandez said.

 

"We see great potential to leverage technology in the same way as China and other Asian markets provide users with new financial services and open the range of opportunities to them," he said.

 

Mercado Pago's goal is to cover more than 50,000 street businesses by 2021, up from the existing 15,000, Hernandez said.

 

Meanwhile, the central Bank of Mexico (Banxico) has been promoting the CoDi mobile payment platform since 2017, with the idea of making electronic transfers between individual deposit accounts and companies more adroit.

 

According to Banxico data, the CoDi platform had accumulated just over 9.2 million users as of June 1, 2021, with businesses located mainly in shopping malls, cafes, museums and airports, among others.

 

Mexico registered the highest growth rate in mobile finance apps in Latin America between the first quarter of 2019 and the first quarter of 2021, according to a report titled Fintech App Marketing Insights: LATAM Edition 2021 by AppsFlyer.