Most accounts of Latin America's real-time payment story lead with the flagship success of Pix in Brazil. Or they interpret the continent's growth through regional statistics alone, as if every country sits on the same maturity curve.
SoFi Tech Solutions' Adaptive Banking Report tells a more complex story in Mexico and Colombia – one that offers useful clues about where the market is headed next.
Mexico's SPEI is one of the continent's most established real-time payment rails, nearly two decades old. Layered with CoDi and DiMo, it still hasn't fully displaced cash. Colombia's Bre-B, by contrast, launched in 2025 and has already onboarded tens of millions of users. One market is fighting a trust problem. The other is fighting an onboarding-volume problem.
In fact, these two economies show two different routes to the same conundrum: once payment speed becomes a given, friction and bottlenecks move behind the interface – into fraud systems, onboarding pipelines, legacy ledgers, and release cycles most customers never see.
Key takeaways
Constraints show up differently depending on market maturity: Colombia is struggling with onboarding and backend capacity under new-rail adoption, while Mexico still faces unresolved fraud confidence and slow release cycles after two decades of infrastructure investment.
Colombia demonstrates that frictionless adoption can outpace readiness across several systems at once, not just one obvious point of failure.
Advanced infrastructure and consumer confidence are separate variables: Mexico shows that solving one doesn't automatically solve the other.
Financial institutions in both markets reserve real-time data almost entirely for fraud and compliance, leaving personalization to industries with far less regulatory weight to carry.
1. Once payment rails work, speed stops being a selling point
Mexico's SPEI ecosystem and Colombia's Bre-B network have made fast, interoperable money movement close to a given. Only about 7% of technology executives across both markets identify transaction execution speed as a regular customer complaint.
The more revealing number sits one layer down. Asked what would break first if transaction demand grew tenfold, 45.7% of financial technology leaders across both markets pointed to fraud and risk systems, not the payment rail itself. These types of second-order effects are likely to repeat as real-time payment networks mature across the region: once a market establishes the rail, the rail stops being the story. Then the real differentiator becomes how banks and fintechs treat everything that surrounds the rail.
For providers, that shifts infrastructure priorities from moving money faster to smarter monitoring: maintaining visibility across payment activity, applying risk controls as transactions occur, and reconciling accurately at volume, without causing unnecessary friction.
2. Colombia shows what happens when the back end has to catch up to the front end
Bre-B's llaves make sending and receiving money nearly frictionless for consumers. But that speed and simplicity is straining the systems behind it.
69.1% of Colombian companies say backend constraints slow their ability to innovate, compared with just 19.6% in Brazil.
What makes Colombia's version of this problem distinctive is how the pressure spreads across the stack: core ledgers (27.2%) and third-party integrations (16.0%) together carry nearly as much executive concern as fraud systems alone (38.3%).
What does this mean for markets that may face similar struggles when speed compounds transactions? There may not be a single point of failure to patch – the fragility could run through the whole back end at once. This shows up in executives' own readiness assessments too: just 6.2% of Colombian organizations believe they could scale their infrastructure tenfold within seven days, compared with 63.0% in Brazil.
A frictionless front end can outrun a legacy back end faster than most roadmaps account for. Markets still adopting real-time rails should take note: front-end simplicity and backend modernization need to move together, or what should work invisibly behind the scenes starts to fail visibly in front of the customer.
3. Fast adoption can create its own bottleneck with onboarding, not payments
Bre-B added more than 30 million users and processed 670 million transactions in its first six months. That's the adoption curve every LatAm real-time network wants. It's also why nearly 20% of Colombian financial providers now name scaling new users as their single most disruptive challenge, against a 7.7% regional average.
Consumers can link a llave in seconds. But the identity verification, account-creation, and support systems behind that moment often can't absorb the resulting surge, which produces failures at peak times and onboarding lag that can't keep pace. This is a part of the adoption story that growth headlines tend to skip. SoFi Tech's findings reveal this tension. That a payment network can succeed commercially and still expose a gap in onboarding, KYC, and case-handling capacity. For providers elsewhere in the region watching a rail take off, the practical question isn't how impressive the new-user numbers look – it's what breaks when 30 million of them arrive in six months.
4. Mexico proves advanced infrastructure doesn't automatically buy trust
Mexico has arguably the most layered real-time payment stack in the region. SPEI, CoDi, and DiMo have built deep foundations over nearly two decades. Yet 50.9% of Mexican financial providers say fraud and security concerns are the biggest issue users report – roughly 11 percentage points above the regional average – with close to half of reported fraud occurring mid-transaction.
That's the clearest evidence in either market that infrastructure maturity and consumer confidence move on separate tracks. A country can solve payment plumbing and still leave millions of consumers choosing cash, not purely from habit but because digital rails haven't yet earned their confidence. For the region, that's a caution against treating rail-adoption numbers as a proxy for trust. They measure different things.
5. Mexico's banks show what happens when fraud pressure meets slow release cycles
Mexico compounds its confidence gap with a development-speed problem concentrated almost entirely inside financial institutions. 86.7% of Mexican banking and financial services companies need more than three months to deploy a simple feature update, compared with just 14.3% of Mexican IT and telecommunications companies operating in the same market, and facing the same fraud environment.
That gap matters because fraud patterns don't wait for quarterly release cycles. A provider that needs three-plus months to adjust a control is effectively fighting today's fraud with last quarter's defenses. The comparison between Mexican banks and IT/telecom firms is a useful one: it shows the delay isn't simply a market-wide limitation. It's an architectural constraint specific to how financial institutions have built, or inherited, their systems.
6. Adjacent industries show financial services what real-time personalization actually looks like
Across both markets, non-financial sectors already do with transaction data what banks and fintechs haven't gotten to yet. In Mexico, just 33.3% of banking, finance, and insurance companies use real-time data for proactive customer experiences, versus 80% of retail, hotel, and food-service companies and 72.7% of travel and hospitality firms. Colombia shows the same shape: 28.6% for financial services against 83.3% for travel and hospitality and 62.5% for retail, hotel, and food-service companies.
The infrastructure for real-time personalization – connected transaction and customer data – largely already exists inside these financial institutions. Most apply it almost entirely to fraud and compliance, not customer experience. That imbalance, more than any lack of real-time capability, leaves financial services trailing sectors carrying far less regulatory weight.
What this means for the rest of LatAm
Colombia and Mexico may be interesting outliers, but they're also two snapshots of the same transition at different speeds. A newer network (Bre-B) shows what onboarding and backend strain look like in year one. A mature network (SPEI) shows what unresolved trust and slow release cycles look like two decades in. Any market in the region adopting real-time rails sits somewhere on this same path, whether six months or twenty years into it.
The infrastructure implications that map across both:
An API-driven architecture – connecting payment rails, account services, risk controls, and customer channels through a shared layer – lets providers close these gaps without a full core replacement. SoFi Tech Solutions's Payments Hub brings ACH, Same-Day ACH, wires, and real-time rails into one integration. This means authorization, posting, and fraud decisioning are built into the transaction flow rather than bolted on after it. The Payment Risk Platform applies the same logic specifically to fraud, processing 130M+ transactions monthly with sub-90ms decisioning.
Explore how SoFi Tech Solutions' Payments Hub and Payment Risk Platform address the constraints identified in the Colombia and Mexico Adaptive Banking reports, then contact the team to map a phased modernization path for a specific market.
Frequently asked questions
The complaint data usually points the way. Customers citing onboarding friction or scaling delays signal a capacity problem – fix onboarding and identity systems first. Customers citing fraud or security concerns despite fast, working rails signal a confidence problem, which requires visible, real-time fraud response before front-end investment moves the needle.
Three signals tend to appear before the constraint becomes public: rising executive concern about fraud and risk systems specifically (rather than payment processing generally) when scaling comes up; a widening gap between real-time integration for fraud and compliance versus customer-facing functions; and product release timelines that stay flat even as transaction volume grows. Any one signal alone is normal. Two or more together tend to precede the kind of constraint Colombia and Mexico now manage.
No – speed remains the entry ticket. Networks like Bre-B and SPEI succeeded specifically because they solved speed convincingly enough that customers stopped noticing it. Speed hasn't become unimportant; it has stopped differentiating one provider from another once a market's real-time rail is established, which shifts competitive pressure onto everything built around that rail.
Not necessarily. An API-driven layer can connect existing banking, ledger, and processing systems to modern risk, onboarding, and payment capabilities, letting providers modernize in phases based on where the specific bottleneck sits.
Starting with the capability tied to a metric leadership already tracks – fraud losses, onboarding abandonment, or release cycle time – tends to earn faster internal buy-in for the next phase than starting with an infrastructure upgrade that doesn't map to a visible number yet.
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