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"By visiting this Mexico City bar, I was struck by how little things have changed since I started covering the technology in 2011. Over the last eight years, the bitcoin community-and bitcoin's price-has grown by orders of magnitude. The bitcoin economy has much more sophisticated infrastructure for storing and trading bitcoins. But practical applications for bitcoin-beyond trading it, holding it, and hoping to get rich-seem almost as elusive today as they were eight years ago."

Since the partnership with MoneyGram, the XRP market in Bitso (Mexico) has been steadily growing.

Santander said the solution, One Pay FX, will be coming to Mexico "in early 2020." Initially launched in 2018, One Pay FX is a money transfer solution and leverages RippleNet (formerly xCurrent) to settle cross-border transactions. It does not use XRP.

Ripple has partnered with Intermex, which will leverage RippleNet to develop faster, transparent cross-border remittance services between the U.S. and Mexico. It will also give Intermex access to Ripple's XRP-based On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) service as a real-time bridge between sending and receiving currencies.

International Money Exchange (Intermex), one of the world's leading remittance companies, has announced that it will not be using Ripple and XRP for Mexico or its other core markets. This position comes as a surprise, as earlier this year the company embraced Ripple as a partner.

The new Governor of the Bank of Mexico, Victoria Rodríguez Ceja, confirmed plans to release a retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) during 2025. During a presentation to the Mexican Senate, the Governor said the first goal of its CBDC will be financial inclusion. It also wants to provide more fast payments options and ensure the economy is efficient and interoperable. The Governor said she's also keen to enable programmable money and promote innovation. https://www.banxico.org.mx/publications-and-press/speeches/%7BD7EB1919-DE55-95ED-B0F7-0887AE4C6843%7D.pdf

"Strike, the global money app for Bitcoin and fast, secure payments, yesterday announced the expansion of "Send Globally" to Mexico. With this expansion, it will bring its payment service to the largest remittance market in the US."

The Bank of Mexico reportedly plans to launch a two-tier ("intermediated") CBDC by 2024. As part of the roll-out, commercial banks expect interoperability capacity to increase through the Interbank Electronic Payment System (SPEI), and that a CBDC should in principle seek greater inclusion and lower transaction costs.

The Bank of Mexico (Banxico), the country's central bank, published a circular in the Official Gazette of the Federation on Friday detailing crypto-related provisions for the regulation of financial technology institutions (ITFs).

The President of Mexico tweeted that El Banco de México will issue a central bank digital currency (#CBDC) by 2024, citing financial inclusion as one of the motives. However, there is no mention of it on the central bank website, so I won't be adding it to my tabulation of retail CBDC explorers yet

"The Mexican central bank, acting under authority from a recently enacted fintech law, proposed new regulations last week that would effectively ban cryptocurrency exchanges in the country. "

WeTrust is an Ethereum-based decentralized financial services platform. WeTrust's first product is a Trusted Lending Circle (TLC) platform. A TLC a group of individuals who agree to meet for a defined period in order to save and borrow together. TLCs are commonly built along clan, geographical, social, or professional networks. These organizations have a variety of different names such as: tontine (Cambodia), susus (Ghana/ Caribbean Islands), tandas (Latin America), hui (China), chit funds (India), cundinas (Mexico), etc... https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/community-development/publications/discussion-papers/discussionpaper-ROSCAs.pdf

Libra's main stated mission is to service the world's poor and unbanked. Facebook's source for the 1.7 billion figure is the World Bank's Global Findex Database 2017. Findex also believes that 1 billion of these have mobile phones and 500 million have internet access. However, Findex also says that over half of the 1.7 billion come from just seven countries: Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria and Pakistan. More than half of these are in places where cryptos are banned, Facebook can't freely operate, the country is under heavy FATF restrictions, or it faces other limitations.

Ripple has partnered with Intermex, which will leverage RippleNet to develop faster, transparent cross-border remittance services between the U.S. and Mexico. It will also give Intermex access to Ripple's XRP-based On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) service as a real-time bridge between sending and receiving currencies.

In the wake of El Salvador's move to make Bitcoin legal tender, Tanzanian president Samia Suluhu Hassan urged the country's central bank to begin exploring crypto assets. A number of lawmakers in Latin American countries have also expressed their interest in bitcoin following El Salvador passing the law making the cryptocurrency legal tender, including Paraguay, Argentina, Panama, Brazil, and Mexico.

MoneyGram processes 10% of its transactions between the U.S. and Mexican corridor via Ripple's payments solution On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) that leverages XRP cryptocurrency.

So, what happened in open banking 2019? In Australia, open banking is finally launched; Payments NZ in New Zealand launches open banking APIs and ther NZ banks follow; Mexico continues to be the hot spot for LATAM; Brazil launches open banking model; Additional API offerings launched in Malaysia to further enrich the open banking market there; US banks begin conversations on open banking and to develop open banking 'like' APIs; the Central Bank of Nigeria places open banking on its Payments Vision Statement (PSV) 2030 to become the next EMEA country to implement open banking; and Bahrian makes claim to implementing open banking.

"El Salvador launched the Chivo wallet today, the same day that a law making bitcoin legal tender in the Central American country went into effect. Mexico-based exchange Bitso will provide the core crypto services for Chivo, which will support free transactions in bitcoin and U.S. dollars. Bitso is working with US-based Silvergate Bank to facilitate the dollar transactions. To support the launch, El Salvador's government has purchased 400 bitcoins ($20 million)."

According to this paper by Diem/Novi's Christian Catalini and Andrew Lilley there are at least three ways to remove frictions in payments and rapidly expand the number of individuals and businesses that can access the financial system and cheaply transact in real time. The first is to bring deposits on a single ledger through a central bank digital currency (CBDC), so that transfers between banks are not limited by external liquidity constraints or third-party rails. The second approach is to follow countries such as India and Mexico and increase the throughput of always-on real-time gross settlement (RTGS) systems, the model the US Federal Reserve is pursuing with the introduction of FedNow, targeted for 2023. The third approach is to facilitate the growth of interoperable, stablecoin payment rails by creating the right regulatory framework for these new types of networks to safely increase competition in payments.

Most Latin American consumers remain conspicuous cash users. Thus, CashTech could be very successful as specialists are looking for ways to bridge the gap between the digital economy and the cash economy, and many incumbents and startups have launched CashTech solutions in the region. For examples, banks have implemented cardless cash withdrawals through their apps, Amazon allows users in the region to pay for goods with cash through Amazon PayCode and Amazon Cash, and retail chain OXXO, which provides cash and correspondent banking services in its more than 19,000 stores in Mexico, has partnered with BBVA and Santander to offer cash-withdrawal services and with Ria Money Transfer to delivers cash remittances.