Credit in Mexico is not scarce. It is poorly timed.

Latinometrics published a chart this week that is worth looking at twice.

Bank credit to the private sector as a percentage of GDP, World Bank data as of 2023. Mexico appears at 25%. The average for Latin America is 47%. Chile is at 80%, Brazil at 71%, and Honduras, a much smaller economy, at 74%. Below Mexico in the region, practically only Argentina remains, with 12%.

That is the figure circulating. But the one that is truly uncomfortable is the second one from the same analysis: between 2018 and 2023, the proportion of Mexican companies with access to financing declined, from around 12% to approximately one in ten.

It declined. In the same period in which the Mexican fintech ecosystem multiplied, when venture capital entered the sector like never before, and when dozens of new players appeared offering exactly that: credit to companies that banks do not serve.

If the problem were solely a lack of supply, five years of expansion would have moved the needle. They did not move it.

The question the data leaves open

The easy reading of that chart is that Mexico lacks credit. That is true, and it is insufficient.

Because there is a difference between credit not existing and the existing credit not serving those who need it. And when one sits down with exporting companies, which is what we do every day, what appears is not so much the absence of the product as the mismatch of the product.

Our thesis, and of course we put it up for discussion: the credit available in Mexico is structured for a calendar that is not that of the exporting company.

It is not a problem of amount. It is a problem of timing.

The two calendars

Look at what happened this year in the agri-food sector, which is where the gap is seen most clearly.

According to INEGI, between January and May 2026, Mexico's total exports grew by 22.6%. Agricultural exports, in the same period, fell 4.2%. It was the only category on the decline. In April, fresh strawberry exports fell 56.5% year-over-year (bulletins 300/26 and 404/26).

It is a strange contrast. The country exports more than ever and the countryside exports less. And when you ask in the sector what happened, the answer is almost never that it couldn't be produced. It is some variation of: a border closure got in the way, an inspection delay, a buyer who moved the payment, an exchange rate that ate the season's margin.

The problem is not in the plot of land.

It is that an agro-exporting company lives with two clocks that do not match:

• The operations clock: the season is planned six to nine months in advance. Inputs are bought beforehand. The field payroll is paid every Friday, without exception and in pesos.

• The money clock: the US retailer pays 45 or 60 days after receiving. They pay in dollars. And the bank converts those dollars when it is their turn, at the close of their day, not when the company needs it.

Between those two clocks there is a two-month gap that someone has to finance. Today, the company finances it with its own cash flow, every season.

That does not appear in the World Bank chart. But it is exactly the place where a perfectly healthy company, with signed contracts and investment-grade buyers, declares itself without access to financing.

What poorly timed means, in concrete terms

Three specific ways in which the financial product does not match the operation:

One: an operation that is seasonal is evaluated with annual financial statements. An agricultural export business can have six excellent months and six flat months, and the annual average describes neither of the two. The credit committee reads the average. The company lives the peaks.

Two: real estate collateral is requested from a company whose real asset is an account receivable in dollars. This is probably the most expensive mismatch. A company that sells to an investment-grade US retailer has an excellent asset: an invoice against a reliable payer, in hard currency. But the traditional model does not read it as collateral, and asks for land instead.

Three: the exchange rate is liquidated at the bank's cutoff, not at the time of payment. This seems like a technical detail, but it is not. Over a significant annual volume, the difference between converting when it suits you and converting when it's the bank's turn is a six-figure number. An industry company we spoke with recently had its own analysis: for every peso the exchange rate appreciates, they lose around 400 thousand dollars a year.

That company does not have a credit access problem. It has a timing problem.

Why this matters beyond the agro sector

The agro-export case is the most vivid because seasonality exaggerates it. But the logic is repeated in manufacturing, auto parts, processed foods, in any Mexican company whose income comes from the United States and whose cost is paid in Mexico.

And it explains, at least partially, why five years of financial innovation did not move the aggregate number: a good part of the new offer replicated the term structure of the old offer. Faster, more digital, with a better user experience, but with the same calendar.

Closing the gap between 25% and 47% does not depend solely on more money being available. It depends on the available money being timed as the company operates: lines that are drawn and paid at the pace of the season, dollar collections that do not force converting at the wrong time, and a structure that recognizes accounts receivable for what they are.

A pending conversation

We know that none of this is solved in a blog post.

On September 29, we are hosting Mesa Agro, a one-hour session with Betty Ochoa Vega from Fructus Farms, and Fernando Marrón, from Nature's Choice Produce. One tells it from operations and the other from treasury. The topic is precisely this: the gap between how a season is planned and how it is collected.

It will be a talk between two people who live the two calendars explaining how they balance them.

Register for the event here: Mesa Agro Marco September 29, 2026, 10:00 AM MX.

Credit data: World Bank, via Latinometrics . Foreign trade data: INEGI, bulletins 300/26 and 404/26.