“If we manage to extend these digital and secure payment means, I believe we will create a better, more protected society”

In 2022, Mexico’s National Commission for the Protection and Defense of Users of Financial Services (CONDUSEF) incorporated the UN Principles for Responsible Digital Payments in its Financial Education Diploma. Over one hundred thousand people have registered - the majority women. It is a unique offering; online, comprehensive, and free of charge. Even non-Mexicans have signed up.

We spoke with Wilfrido Perea Curiel, General Director of Financial Education at CONDUSEF, to understand the course’s success.

How did the idea of connecting this Diploma with the Better Than Cash Alliance come about?

I arrived here in December 2018, and the Diploma was already an accredited course. It was getting a little long in the tooth. We did a survey to get feedback, and I realized that substantial changes had to be made. In 2019, the Diploma was profoundly overhauled. We built content that was previously never considered: the social economy, the issue of cyber fraud, and we recruited partners to assist with the modifications.

Wilfrido Perea, Financial Education Director at CONDUSEF, Mexico.

Given the success, we decided that by 2022 we had to make further improvements, which is where the Better Than Cash Alliance comes in. We asked them to help develop content related to safe and responsible digital payments. And so we invited many other institutions to the Institutional Stock Market (BIVA), which helped us address Stock Market issues, to the Federal Cyber Police, which helped us strengthen the cyber fraud module, and to the national bank, Banco de México. In 2019 and early 2020, we had reached 40,000 subscribers. Suddenly, atypical registrants began to appear during the pandemic, with 76,000 people. The inaugural generation of the new era was the first generation of 2021, which surprised us all: 106,000 registered.

Which ingredients ensured success?

On the one hand, the pandemic worked in our favor due to the prevalence of remote working. On the other, the modifications we made to the content and the partnerships we forged with other institutions, such as the Better Than Cash Alliance, helped us improve the product. I feared that when we returned to normality in 2022, the enrollment would drop dramatically because we had returned to office. It was gratifying for me that in the last few weeks, at the close of the first enrollment of 2023, we reached almost 97,000 subscribers. It means engagement is sustained in a highly-valued, robust, 150-hour diploma. Our links with autonomous state universities, private universities, unions, and civil society organizations have also been very successful.

Who is the course’s target audience?

The statistics we do at the end of each intake tell us that the vast majority are young. I’m talking about a number close to 70%. Almost half of these are under 25 years of age, and it increases to almost two-thirds under 35 years of age. The rest are forty or fifty-year-olds. For those of us who design public policy on financial education, what we have to do is very clear - focus on young university students. Here is a piece of information that encourages: 54% of the registrants are women.

What is the value of integrating the UN Principles for Responsible Digital Payments?

Regarding public policy, our mission is to reduce the use of cash, but we cannot achieve it without providing a genuine alternative. Here comes the issue of security. It is a matter of trust. We Mexicans like our bills, and we like to count them in our wallets. Disassociating yourself from that link is not easy. You have to offer something powerful as an alternative, and it must be secure, functional, and easy to use. This is important because it affects financial inclusion, which results in social inclusion. For me, a triumph would not only be that a middle-class young man in Mexico City pays for his sandwich at Starbucks with his cell phone but that a 50-year-old person in a rural community pays for their milk digitally. I’m talking about a social angle; greater inclusion and democratization. If we manage to extend, these digital and secure payment means, I believe we will create a better, more protected society. This will be very favorable for us because it means that people’s habits and customs are improved.

What impact will the Diploma have in the future?

Some fellow research sociologists share the notion that we are about to witness the first generation of young Mexicans who will fare worse than their parents. This is a powerful statement. Everything my father did for me to have an education, he did thinking that I could do better than him. That’s how the expectation of social mobility works. Everything gets complicated when this ladder is broken. And when young people live through a threshold of such uncertainty, they must consider how to manage their portfolio and keep in mind the retirement savings challenges they are going to have. They must foster a greater inclination towards self-employment and entrepreneurship. Twenty years from now, I hope it will be perceived that we were aware of these issues and that our product can help in some way to improve people’s quality of life.

Which of the nine UN Principles for Responsible Digital Payments are the most relevant in the Mexican context?

Principle 3, prioritizing women in financial inclusion, is an issue to which we are committed. Last year, a total enrollment of 143,000 was achieved, where the participation of women predominates. It will be hard to get fewer than 50 thousand persons enrolled. I tell you this with great satisfaction because we know we will not go wrong because the product is liked. We had 60% and 54% of women in the last courses. I think these are the numbers that are addressing the issue of gender equity.

What does the future hold for the Diploma?

It is an open product undergoing constant transformation. It is a diploma sensitive to the emerging issues of financial education. It should be modified every two or three years in reaction to emergent issues of financial education. The great challenge is building it on a more robust, versatile, and stable technological platform. And we must strengthen this link with universities or unions to stabilize the participation figures. A final challenge is to raise the retention level and reduce churn.