Blu Financiero Launches Credit Card for Underbanked Consumers in Mexico

Blu Financiero, a FinTech company focused on the underbanked population in Mexico, has launched a “mass market” credit card that has a 99% approval rate and can be obtained without a formal credit history.

In the time leading up to the launch, the waiting list for the card grew to include more than 50,000 people, the company said in a Tuesday (July 23) press release.

The size of the waiting list shows the need for new and accessible financial products in Mexico, a country in which only 14% of the people have access to a credit card and only 30% have a formal credit history, according to the release.

“We see a classic oligopoly problem where four of the top five banks control 70% of the deposits but are all foreign owned,” Casper Yonel, CEO of Blu, said in the release. “With Mexico comprising less than 5% of their global balance sheets, these top few banks hold little incentive to develop the unique technology required to serve the growing middle class and mass market.”

Blu underwrites the country’s underbanked population by using big data and artificial intelligence (AI), per the release.

The company’s platform can process thousands of traditional and alternative data points about each customer, use machine learning (ML) models to power proprietary credit scoring technology to inform credit decisions in real-time, and perform “ongoing decisioning” that continuously evaluates, monitors and prices the credit risk of customers, according to the release.

“Our company is in the right place at the right time — with most of our customers having access to a smartphone and internet connection, we are able to extract large-scale behavioral data and build hyper-personalized models that tell a story about our customers otherwise overlooked by traditional banks,” Paul Thomas, chief technology officer at Blu, said in the release.

PYMNTS Intelligence found in 2022 that smartphones play a major role in Mexico’s online banking ecosystem and likely will continue to do so.

At the time, 94% of Mexican consumers used mobile banking apps or online banking services, even though the country has a large unbanked population, according to the “Digitizing Payments in Latin America Playbook,” a PYMNTS Intelligence and Kushki collaboration.