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Financial Inclusion in LATAM: The Core as Engine, Not Brake
- WAU Marketing
- Mar 12
- 3 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
Financial inclusion in LATAM isn't held back by a lack of demand. Often it's held back by something more boring and more expensive to admit: the cost of serving those who have little becomes unviable on a core designed for another era.
It's an uncomfortable truth for the sector. We've spent years talking about banking the region as a social imperative—and it is—but the technical bottleneck rarely gets named. Serving a person who opens a basic account, makes microtransactions, and maybe takes a small loan has to cost very little for the business to work. And a legacy core, with its fixed maintenance cost and processing built for large tickets, makes every low-balance account a loss. It's not that the bank doesn't want to include; it's that its architecture turns inclusion into a bad business.
Where the region stands today
It's worth looking at the real numbers, because the picture is one of genuine progress. According to the World Bank's Global Findex database, published in 2025, 70% of adults in Latin America and the Caribbean had a financial account in 2024—up from 67% in 2021 and just 39% in 2011, according to the World Bank. Over the last decade, the region added tens of millions of people to the financial system. Mobile money went from reaching 22% of adults in 2021 to 37% in 2024.
Mexico follows the same direction, with nuances. The 2024 National Financial Inclusion Survey, run by INEGI and the CNBV, found that 76.5% of people aged 18 to 70 had at least one financial product—account, credit, insurance, or retirement fund—eight points more than in 2015, per the joint CNBV and INEGI release. But the figure hides gaps that matter: 72.8% of women versus 80.9% of men, and a strong regional distance—the country's southern region, at 67.7%, well below the northeast, at 84.9%. The indigenous and rural population remains the most excluded.
Those gaps are, almost exactly, the map of the customers a legacy core can't serve profitably.
The case that proves it: PIX
If anyone doubts that infrastructure defines the outcome, just look at Brazil. PIX, the instant payment system operated by the Central Bank of Brazil, closed 2024 with 63.8 billion transactions, 52% more than the prior year, as Diário do Comércio reported with Febraban data, and passed 160 million registered users. 63% of Brazilians used PIX at least once a month, according to Agência Brasil. It wasn't a financial-education campaign that banked at that scale: it was a modern infrastructure, instant and at nearly zero cost per transaction. The right technology made including millions who were previously left out both profitable and trivial.
Why a modern core changes the equation
The point isn't ideological, it's about cost structure. A modern, cloud-native, multi-tenant core operates under a pay-per-use model: the marginal cost of each account and each transaction drops, and capacity scales elastically with demand. That makes it viable to design products that would be suicidal on a legacy core: basic accounts with no minimum balance, small-amount microloans, wallets for those who receive small, frequent payments.
A legacy core does the opposite. Its operating cost doesn't drop even if the accounts are small; per-transaction processing is expensive; scaling means buying more hardware. Under that structure, serving the base of the pyramid is giving money away, and so it isn't done. The brake isn't the bank's mission: it's its technology.
And the opportunity is enormous. The study by the Inter-American Development Bank and Finnovista counted more than 3,000 fintechs in the region in 2023, and more than half of them—57%—target precisely the underbanked or unbanked population, according to the Inter-American Development Bank. Those fintechs understood something ahead of many banks: that the excluded segment is a market, not charity, if you have the architecture to serve it cheaply. The question for a traditional institution is whether it will compete for that market or hand it over.
How we see it at WAU
At WAU we design cores where serving the base of the pyramid stops being a loss and becomes a business: low marginal cost per account, low-cost per-transaction processing, and elastic scalability that makes small-ticket products profitable. Financial inclusion shouldn't depend on goodwill; it should simply be a business line that works.
If you want to serve segments your core makes unviable today—and put numbers on that opportunity—let's talk. We'll help you see which products open up when cost per account stops being the brake. 👉 Book a conversation with our team.
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