Banco de México issues new rules to simplify digital payments and raise deposit limits for small businesses

Mexico’s central bank just made its biggest move in over a decade to drag small business payments into the digital era. Banco de México, known as Banxico, announced new rules creating a simplified deposit account tier designed specifically for micro, small, and medium enterprises, with substantially higher deposit limits meant to make electronic payments practical for merchants who still run on cash.

The new account category, called Cuenta Nivel 3 Bis, was developed in collaboration with the Asociación de Bancos de México (ABM), the country’s banking industry group. It targets an estimated 4 million small businesses that have historically been locked out of digital payment infrastructure by bureaucratic onboarding hurdles and deposit caps too low to be useful for daily commerce.

What the new rules actually change

The new Cuenta Nivel 3 Bis tier proposes raising cash deposit limits to 3,000 UDIS. UDIS are inflation-indexed units of account used in Mexico, and 3,000 of them represents a meaningful jump for small merchants who previously hit their ceilings far too quickly.

Electronic transfer limits get an even more aggressive bump, with proposals suggesting caps of 12,000 to 15,000 UDIS. That’s the number that matters most for digital payment adoption, because it determines whether a small business can realistically process customer transactions electronically without running into artificial barriers halfway through the month.

The regulatory framework was previewed in late May 2026, and it represents the first major overhaul of electronic transfer standards since 2013.

Why cash still dominates Mexican small business

Mexico has not lacked for digital payment infrastructure. Banxico’s SPEI instant interbank transfer system has been operational since 2004-2005, making it one of the longest-running real-time payment rails in Latin America. The country subsequently launched CoDi and its successor DiMo as consumer-facing payment tools built on top of SPEI.

Yet despite having the plumbing in place, digital payment adoption among small merchants has remained stubbornly low. Small businesses, particularly the millions of informal and semi-formal enterprises that form the backbone of Mexico’s economy, faced KYC requirements and account restrictions that made digital payments more trouble than they were worth. When your monthly deposit limit is too low to handle a busy weekend’s worth of sales, accepting cash isn’t a preference. It’s a necessity.

Banxico and ABM have both publicly expressed support for the initiative, framing it as a financial inclusion measure. Moving 4 million businesses from cash to digital payments creates transaction data, reduces the shadow economy’s footprint, and generates the kind of financial histories that eventually qualify small merchants for credit products they’ve never had access to.

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