Aplazo × SoFi Tech Solutions: Democratizing Credit in Mexico

The Challenge: A Credit Market Locked Behind Closed Doors

For decades, installment credit in Mexico was concentrated in the hands of a couple of large retailers-turned-banks operating closed-loop systems. Alex Wieland described the moment his co-founder surfaced the data that sparked Aplazo: roughly 11% of adult Mexicans had a credit card, meaning the rest either used those two retailers' installment products or had no structured path to credit at all.

"The question was, why has nobody done this  -  open loop, somewhere else? We started digging in, trying to understand it, and we didn't find reasonable answers. So we decided it was a good business and a good place to fill the gap." 

Nearly half of Mexico's adult population still relies on non-traditional credit today, filling the gap through community-based mechanisms like tandas  -  informal rotating savings groups  -  rather than formal credit products. Founded in 2020 and headquartered in Mexico City, Aplazo set out to take installment credit out of that closed loop entirely  -  building an open, transparent, easy-to-understand product that any consumer, at any participating merchant, could access.

The Product Evolution: From Checkout BNPL to a Ubiquitous Card

Aplazo began as a checkout-embedded Buy Now, Pay Later product, integrated directly into merchant checkouts both online and, notably, offline  -  the majority of Aplazo's BNPL volume still runs through in-store, offline integrations, a key difference from more developed BNPL markets.

But checkout-only BNPL had a ceiling: growth was gated by the pace of one-by-one retailer integrations. To remove that ceiling, Aplazo pursued its own Mastercard Principal License and partnered with Galileo  -  now SoFi Tech Solutions  -  for the processing infrastructure needed to issue a physical and digital installment card. The result: a non-revolving, fixed-installment card (5 to 12 equal payments, no fine print, no late fees, auto-debited from the customer's linked bank account) that works anywhere Mastercard is accepted in Mexico, not just at integrated checkouts. The card became the "graduating product" for consumers who had already built trust and payment history through Aplazo's core BNPL offering.

Why Aplazo Chose Galileo (SoFi Tech Solutions)

With the SoFi brand largely unrecognized in Mexico outside of SoFi Stadium associations, the partnership wasn't built on brand recognition  -  it was built on three things:

"It was a mix of trusting what you guys had done before, the reliability... and the local team that transmitted a lot of trust and helped us even design the solution."

Reference calls with Galileo's existing clients gave Aplazo confidence to build a product that didn't exist yet in Mexico  -  a non-revolving installment card charged automatically to a debit account, at a time when most competitors were building revolving credit instead. Strong documentation and infrastructure reliability meant Aplazo's team, which allocated only about 5% of its product and tech resources to this bet in 2021, could rely on the partner to carry the heavy technical lifting. And a Mexico-based local team helped Aplazo design and localize a card structure that hadn't been built in-market before.

The partnership has run 4 to 5 years  -  spanning nearly the entirety of Aplazo's six-year history  -  and has evolved from an early-stage bet into a core, revenue-generating cross-sell product, with Alex noting customer lifetime value increases measurably once a consumer adopts the card.

Scale: A Two-Sided Network Built on Trust

Aplazo's growth model depends on reinforcing two sides of a marketplace simultaneously  -  merchants and consumers. Alex was candid that this started as a "fake it till you make it" dynamic in the early days, with a handful of merchants and a couple hundred consumers. Today, that network includes:

• 15,000+ fully integrated merchants, with a presence across all 32 states of Mexico

• Major retail and brand partners including Walmart, Sam's Club, Nike, Sephora, New Balance, and Reebok

• Expansion into entertainment and ticketing through Superboletos

• New use cases like everyday bill payments (electricity and other utilities), payable in full or split into installments

• A 70% credit approval rate  -  notably higher than traditional bank approval rates in Mexico

• 300,000+ monthly app downloads

• A physical card currently in pilot phase, rolling out gradually alongside the established virtual card

The Human Impact

Asked for his most rewarding moment, Alex didn't point to a metric  -  he told the story of a mother shopping during Mexico's back-to-school season who could only afford one pair of shoes for her oldest child, with plans to hand the old pair down to her younger kids. When Aplazo's credit made her available funds stretch far enough to buy three pairs of shoes instead of one:

"She looked me in the eye and asked, 'This is all I'm going to pay? Are you sure? This is everything?' ... Yeah, this is all you need to pay, there's nothing else, no hidden fees. Even if you're a few days late, there's no late fees."

That moment, multiplied across millions of transactions, is how Alex measures Aplazo's mission.

What's Next

Aplazo remains intentionally focused on deepening its footprint in Mexico through this year and the first half of next year  -  adding merchant categories, higher-ticket use cases (Alex cited airline purchases in the $600–$1,000 range), and deeper product usage among existing users  -  before considering geographic expansion elsewhere in Latin America.

"I would be ashamed if, in the next five years, a consumer has to wait more than five minutes to get a credit, and we don't offer something that is much better than any incumbent can offer."

That's Alex's five-to-ten-year vision for the category: transparent, fee-free installment credit that's fast, understandable, and available everywhere  -  not the exception, but the norm.