Mastercard and PCMI: Powering a 2030-ready economy by expanding digital acceptance

New study highlights how increasing digital payment acceptance can help unlock business growth across Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean

• Payment acceptance is rapidly evolving through cloud technology, new market players, and AI. Innovations such as Mastercard tokenization and AI-driven solutions are improving security, reducing friction, and enabling new services for businesses and consumers.
• The subregion represents a significant economic growth opportunity, particularly for small and micro merchants, with nearly 11 million businesses that could benefit from expanded digital payment acceptance. Today, about 77% still do not accept digital payments, compared to just 23% that currently accept cards.
• Cash remains dominant in everyday spending, accounting for roughly 58% of personal consumption payments across the region—highlighting a major opportunity to deliver faster, simpler, and more secure checkout experiences through expanded digital payment acceptance.
  

The full study is available here: Powering the future of commerce in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.pdf 

A new regional study by Mastercard and Payments and Commerce Market Intelligence (PCMI) highlights a strong trend of merchants and small businesses across Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean increasingly accepting digital payments. The report illustrates how this shift helps merchants reach more customers, operate more efficiently, and support stronger local economies.

As commerce becomes more digital, connected, and data-driven, the acceptance infrastructure built today will shape how fully merchants can participate in the economy of the next decade. A 2030-ready economy requires businesses to meet evolving consumer expectations, adopt secure technologies, and compete effectively in a digital marketplace. Expanding modern, scalable acceptance is essential to ensure that growing digital demand translates into higher productivity, broader inclusion, and resilient business growth.

“Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean represent one of the most significant untapped digital acceptance opportunities in the Americas. Millions of consumers are ready to pay digitally, yet too many merchants remain outside the formal payments ecosystem. If we do not act decisively to close this acceptance gap now, we risk slowing the region’s economic potential. Expanding digital acceptance is the single most powerful lever to accelerate payment growth, reduce friction and informality, and unlock shared prosperity across the ecosystem,” said Kiki Del Valle, Division President, North LAC at Mastercard.

“The region doesn’t have digital payments demand problem—it has an acceptance gap. This gap can be closed by deploying new business models, fit-for-purpose technology, innovative merchant services and ecosystem collaboration that deliver true value for both merchants, creating unprecedented industry scale and dynamism,” says Lindsay Lehr Tutson, Managing Director at PCMI.

In the report, “Powering the future of commerce in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean: Scaling digital acceptance for a 2030-ready economy”, Mastercard and PCMI estimate that digital payments revenues in Latin America could triple by 2027, driven by e-commerce growth, the digitization of services, and increased adoption of new technologies.

The study highlights a clear takeaway: as more consumers shift toward digital payments, expanding acceptance across micro and small merchants and diverse underpenetrated verticals, including transit, services and government, can help merchants capture additional sales and better serve customer preferences.

At the same time, cash remains widely used for everyday purchases, accounting for approximately 58% of personal consumption payment volume across the region.

Expanding digital acceptance can help merchants get paid faster, reduce the risks of handling cash, reach more customers—including online—and build a transaction history that can support access to services such as credit.

The report also highlights the role of contactless payments in making checkout faster and more convenient. Adoption is already strong in parts of the region—and still has room to grow. The study estimates contactless use at 83% in Central America and 73% in the Caribbean; in Mexico, it is 34%—showing the opportunity to expand tap-to-pay experiences for consumers and merchants.

In Mexico and Central America, the study finds that payment facilitators (PayFacs)—which enable small businesses to start accepting digital payments quickly—are playing a key role in expanding acceptance, accounting for close to 80% of new digital acceptance points through streamlined digital onboarding.

To help accelerate this momentum, Mastercard is working with banks, acquirers, fintechs, and PayFacs to modernize how businesses get paid across the region—making it easier for merchants to onboard digitally and accept payments securely across channels.

As the region advances toward a 2030-ready economy, Mastercard technology is supporting the scale of modern acceptance through cloud platforms, tokenization, biometrics, AI-driven services, and embedded payments—helping make payments faster, more secure, and seamless for businesses of all sizes.

With these capabilities increasingly accessible, the focus now is on scaling adoption. Across the payments ecosystem, industry leaders can accelerate the use of cloud-based and tokenized infrastructure, strengthen trust through AI and biometrics, and expand embedded payments into everyday experiences—unlocking new opportunities for small businesses and shaping the future of commerce across Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.

Methodology

To define the roadmap for payment acceptance toward 2026 and 2030, Mastercard and consulting firm PCMI analyzed the North LAC region (Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean). The methodology combined data from central banks and regulators with interviews with more than 20 executives from fintechs, processors and acquirers to capture both market performance and on-the-ground perspectives.