This marks a significant step in the bank’s digital transformation as Latin America seeks to capitalise on a potential $90 billion trade finance opportunity, shifting from legacy back-office systems to cloud-native infrastructure.

Mexico has been strengthening its position as a manufacturing hub in recent years, characterised by robust export growth (5% annually) and deeper integration into high-value sectors like automotives, electronics, and machinery in global value chains, making clear the value which trade finance could provide there.

However, as the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and World Trade Organization (WTO) found in a recent report, large multinational firms often use own-financing arrangements, meaning local bank-intermediated instruments in Mexico have not yet gained a foothold. This makes the MONEX-Surecomp® collaboration all the more significant.

“Partnering with Surecomp has not only fuelled growth in traditional trade finance over the past year, but has provided a solid foundation for us to enter into new market segments,” said Karla Hernandez, vice president of trade finance at MONEX and chair of the Mexican FCI factoring association.

The digitisation effort reflects broader industry trends across Latin America, where bank-intermediated trade and supply chain finance remain underutilised despite robust trade growth. Mexico covers just 8% of its merchandise trade through trade and supply chain finance, a far smaller proportion than developing counterparts (for instance, 21% in Vietnam and 25% in West Africa).

The IFC-WTO analysis suggests that doubling trade finance coverage and reducing financing costs to match more advanced economies’ benchmarks could raise Mexico’s imports by 6.7% and exports by 7.4%. This would correspond to an annual increase in merchandise trade volume of $85.1 billion for Mexico alone.

Supply chain finance accounts for just 17% of banks’ total trade finance assets in Mexico, despite regulatory and digital innovations that have benefited the market, and the technology supports only about 1% of Mexico’s international trade, pointing.

Market concentration challenges

The trade finance market remains highly concentrated across the region. Three-quarters of trade and supply chain finance in each country is supplied by the respective nation’s top three banks, with foreign bank subsidiaries tending to dominate.

In Mexico, the high share of related-party trade with the US—around 56% of total trade and 65% of exports to America in 2023—helps explain the limited use of bank-intermediated services.

Mexican banks cite limited institutional readiness as their top concern, followed by correspondent bank processing delays. Smaller banks struggle with correspondent banking relationships, where high financing costs and compliance requirements limit their ability to provide trade finance.

As such, MONEX’s deployment of Surecomp®’s DOKA-NG platform for internal trade finance processing (integrated with the allNET customer portal) uses technology to address these challenges, and is promised to accelerate transaction processing, reduce manual intervention, improve customer experience, and ensure regulatory compliance.

“We are delighted to support MONEX in its continued growth and innovation,” said Matias Hutín, Surecomp®’s commercial head for Latin and North America. “Its commitment to delivering customer value through technology reflects the broader industry shift towards digital transformation.”