CoDi and DiMo: Why Digital Collections Haven't Taken Off in Mexico

WAU Marketing
a few seconds ago
5 min read

The problem with CoDi and DiMo isn't that Mexico lacks payment technology. The infrastructure exists, it runs 24/7, and it's among the best in the region. What fails is deeper: it's in the banks' core, and in who has the incentive for digital collection to actually happen.

Banxico did its part. It created CoDi in 2019 to collect by QR code with no terminal and no fees, and in 2023 it launched DiMo to transfer using just a phone number. Both run on SPEI, one of the most solid payment infrastructures in Latin America. On paper, Mexico had everything it needed to repeat Brazil's PIX phenomenon. On the ground, it didn't happen. And it's worth understanding why, because the answer says a lot about the real state of Mexican banking.

The uncomfortable numbers

Let's start with the figures, because they're brutal. Throughout 2024, CoDi posted an 18% drop in the number of transactions; it closed December with barely about 307,000 operations, according to the CNBV's 2025 Annual Financial Inclusion report as covered by Milenio. There was growth in accounts using the service—2.2 million made at least one payment, up from 1.6 million in 2023—but per-person usage is collapsing: more registered users, fewer real transactions.

DiMo tells a similar story. It has between 11 and 12 million linked accounts, yet from its launch in February 2023 through the end of 2024 it had processed only about 250,000 transactions in total. BBVA México's own finance director—at the bank that holds 5.7 million of those users, more than half—put it bluntly: "practically nothing," according to Yahoo Finanzas. Millions of accounts ready, almost zero usage.

The contrast with Brazil stings

To size up the failure, look at PIX. In 2024, the Central Bank of Brazil's instant system processed 68.7 billion transactions, up 52% year over year, peaking at 252.1 million operations in a single day, per Brazilian Banking Federation figures reported by Global Finance. Some 76.4% of Brazilians use PIX, which already accounts for nearly half of all electronic payments in the country, ahead of cash and cards.

The comparison is merciless: Brazil does in a single day nearly a thousand times what CoDi did in all of 2024. And it's not for lack of Mexican infrastructure. SPEI moved more than 5.4 billion transfers in 2024, for an amount several times Mexico's GDP, according to Banxico reports. Mexicans do transfer digitally. What they don't do is collect with CoDi or transfer with DiMo.

Why it won't take off: three real brakes

There's no single explanation, and almost none of it is the regulator's fault.

There's no incentive for the bank. CoDi removes point-of-sale terminal fees. That's great for the merchant and terrible for the bank's business model, which lives on those fees. The result: banks don't actively push a product that cannibalizes their own revenue.
SPEI already solved the problem "well enough." Mexicans are used to SPEI and have never been told why CoDi or DiMo would be better. Analysts cited by El Financiero note the lack of a clear value proposition versus what people already use, according to El Financiero.
The experience is fragmented and fragile. Each bank implemented CoDi and DiMo its own way, inside its own app, on its own core. The technical flow works, but the end-user experience isn't homogeneous: different interfaces, different onboarding, different acceptance points. And where onboarding demands good connectivity and a modern phone, half the population is left out. As one analyst summed it up at that same forum: "if you need 5G just to register, imagine the towns where people barely have 3G."

What Brazil did differently (and Mexico didn't)

PIX didn't win by having a better QR code. It won through three decisions Mexico didn't make: the Central Bank of Brazil made integration mandatory for any institution with more than 500,000 accounts, standardized the experience with interoperable aliases (email, phone, random key), and built an open model where banks and fintechs compete on the same shared infrastructure, as El Financiero analyzes. Mexico has the infrastructure; what was missing is orchestration and a single experience.

Banxico seems to have grasped this: it's already working to integrate CoDi and DiMo into a unified "super-channel" to reduce confusion and accelerate the move away from cash, according to AméricaRetail. But unifying the brand isn't enough if digital collection still depends on how each bank wired it into its core.

This is where the banking core comes in

This is the point the public debate omits. Whether a digital collection is instant, reliable, and well-experienced depends on how the bank exposes CoDi and DiMo from its core. If the core only talks in batches, if it has no real-time APIs, if reconciling a QR collection is a nightly process rather than an instant event, the experience feels slow or untrustworthy—and the user goes back to cash or the same old SPEI. The interoperability PIX took for granted—24/7 availability, instant confirmation, unified aliases—is only possible on a core designed to respond in real time, not patched to do so.

Put another way: the battle for digital collections in Mexico won't be won with another Banxico campaign. It will be won when banks' cores can deliver the experience PIX made the standard.

How we see it at WAU

At WAU we build banking cores designed for exactly this: payments and collections exposed via API, in real time, with instant reconciliation and continuous availability. When an institution runs on a core like that, integrating CoDi, DiMo, or whatever comes next stops being a patch and becomes a native capability: collection confirms instantly, the experience is the same across every channel, and the user has no reason to go back to cash.

Cash in Mexico isn't holding on for lack of payment technology. It's holding on because the digital experience still isn't good enough—and that's decided in the core. If you want your institution to be among those that actually capture digital collection when it takes off, let's talk. 👉 Book a conversation with our team.