Winning the ‘home game’: 4 things global merchants get wrong about Mexico

I should admit something up front: I was never much of a football fan. It was my kids who changed that.  

They love the game, and this June I am taking the two of them and my wife to the opening match in Mexico City, to join more than eighty thousand people watching Mexico play South Africa.  

That is the beauty of a home game: the crowd belongs to the home side, the pitch is one its players have trained on, they know the altitude, the heat, the way the ball moves in the thin air of Mexico City. None of it guarantees a win, of course, but all of it shortens the odds. Move the same match abroad, into a stadium the team has never set foot in, and everything that was working for it may start working against it.

I have spent years watching global merchants expand into Mexico, and most arrive as the ‘away team’ without realizing it. Merchants rarely make any one large mistake. Instead, they typically make four smaller ones, each costing them revenue growth.

Here they are, in order they tend to surface.

1. Running Mexico from abroad

The first mistake hides inside a single number: card approval rates.

When a global merchant processes a Mexican shopper’s card through an acquirer based outside the country, or without a direct acquiring license, that shopper’s bank sees a foreign payment coming in from abroad. Foreign payments are treated with suspicion by Mexican banks because they are harder to verify and easier to defraud, so a larger share of them is declined. The shopper is real, the purchase is genuine, yet still the money does not move.

Process that same payment as a domestic transaction, routing through a local acquirer and the bank sees a local sale it recognizes. But all of this works only if a merchant reaches a customer at all, because in Mexico, reach heavily depends on giving customers a familiar way to pay.

Handled properly, direct acquiring connects a merchant to the domestic network and to the global card schemes at the same time, through one integration. A visitor paying with a card issued in Madrid and a local paying with a Mexican card are then processed on the same infrastructure, with a single reconciliation and a single settlement at the end of it.

At the same time, direct acquiring gives a merchant richer data on fraud. A direct participant in Mexico’s payment system sees the complete record behind each transaction, which makes it possible to catch fraud before the payment goes through rather than fight chargebacks after it. When that local data is run against infrastructure that has already seen the same fraud patterns in dozens of other markets, a merchant can block attempts that a purely domestic processor would let through.

2. Assuming everyone pays with cards

In much of the world, a business can reach almost every customer by accepting cards. In Mexico, not every merchants take cards at all. Bigger purchases tend to go onto interest‑free installment plans such as meses sin intereses which spread the purchase cost over three to eighteen months; it's the alternatives that carry the market:  

• ‍SPEI, the central bank’s real‑time bank‑transfer system, cleared more than five billion transactions last year.
• ‍OXXO, the convenience‑store chain on nearly every corner, lets a shopper pay for an online order in cash at the till.

A checkout that shows only card fields turns away the millions of Mexicans who pay another way. But this is not unique to Mexico – a similar pattern emerges across other LATAM countries.

3. Treating Latin America as one market

A company that wins in one Latin American country tends to assume the same approach will work next door. But Mexico has its own currency, its own regulator, and its own mix of payment methods. In Brazil, most shoppers pay with Pix, the central bank’s instant system that moves money between banks in seconds through a scanned QR code. In Peru, the everyday method is Yape, a mobile wallet used everywhere from market stalls to online stores. In Colombia, shoppers reach for PSE, a bank transfer that hands the customer off to their own online banking to approve the payment. A win in one of these countries does not carry over into the next.

Europe is often called fragmented, yet it shares a single currency and a converging rulebook. Latin America shares neither. Merchants should treat Mexico as its own market – with its own price of admission, where most of the economy is hidden from plain sight.  

4. Ignoring the economy that doesn’t show up in forecasts

Cash runs deep in Mexico. The informal economy, made up of street vendors, cash‑only businesses, and workers outside the formal banking system, accounts for close to a quarter of the country’s GDP, and the majority of its workforce earns a living inside it. Most of the market studies enterprise brands rely on to measure a new market to expand into barely register this activity, so Mexico is frequently undercounted.

However, events like the World Cup have a tendency to pull that hidden spending into view. These coming days, Mexican fans will travel to World Cups in greater numbers, and spend more along the way, than the supporters of almost any other country. In fact, this summer they barely have to leave home: thirteen matches will be played on Mexican soil, in Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey. The family driving in from Veracruz for a game, the millions buying jerseys and booking hotel rooms – all of that spending power was already there. For one summer, the entirety of Mexican consumption becomes visible in the numbers.

The effect a World Cup has on a host economy tends to outlast the tournament itself. Brazil drew an estimated 3.7 million visitors and roughly US$3 billion in tourism‑driven economic impact in 2014. South Africa’s 2010 tournament brought just over 300,000 foreign visitors who spent about 3.64 billion rand. In each case, the World Cup created an effect on the host economy that lasted long after the final whistle.

To make that invisible economy visible, merchants should make it easier to pay with the methods people naturally use. In practice, that means: treating cash‑based and account‑to‑account flows as the default in this market - offering OXXO for cash pay‑ins, SPEI for instant bank transfers, and installment options that match how bigger purchases actually get financed in Mexico. Merchants that put this infrastructure in place before the first whistle are the ones that will continue capturing that spend once the TV cameras have gone home.

The infrastructure that wins the home game

Winning Mexico’s “home game” starts with treating it as its own market, not an extension of what has worked elsewhere. In my experience, the merchants who perform best here localize the full stack: they process payments domestically to lift approval rates, build checkout flows around how Mexicans actually pay (cards plus OXXO, SPEI and installments), and stop treating Latin America as one interchangeable region. They also plan for the economy that never shows up cleanly in forecasts by making it easy for cash‑heavy and account‑to‑account customers to pay on their own terms.  

Do that, and the World Cup becomes more than a one‑off spike.  

Still, as a payments executive getting my family ready for that opening match, I can’t help wondering: how will they sell the beer? At a normal league game in Mexico, vendors still walk the stands with fistfuls of cash, while any of Mexico City’s pink taxis have a cash fare, every time.  

But I am convinced: this World Cup will push a measurable share of those small, everyday transactions onto new methods - more mobile tap, more SPEI, more acceptance in places that were cash‑only before - and the merchants who prepare for that shift now will be the ones still winning in Mexico, long after July.