Every loan Meridia touches passes through a specific, narrow slice of Mexican financial regulation before the fund's own model ever sees it. This is what that slice is, how it came to exist, and where it's headed.
Before March 2018, crowdfunding and P2P lending operated in Mexico without a dedicated regulatory home — platforms structured around civil-law contracts and whatever exemptions applied, with no unified supervisor. The Ley para Regular las Instituciones de Tecnología Financiera — universally shortened to "Ley Fintech" — closed that gap. It created a new class of regulated entity, Instituciones de Tecnología Financiera (ITF), split into two license types: Instituciones de Fondos de Pago Electrónico (IFPE), for electronic-wallet and payments providers, and Instituciones de Financiamiento Colectivo (IFC), for crowdfunding. A third track, "Modelos Novedosos," exists for technology that doesn't fit either bucket.
Meridia operates entirely inside the IFC track — specifically, its debt-based subtype.
An IFC is a licensed platform that matches two counterparties the law names directly: clientes inversionistas (investors, who supply capital) and clientes solicitantes (applicants, who request it). The law recognizes three distinct flavors of collective funding under this license: deuda (debt) — investors extend loans, credits, or other instruments that create a liability for the applicant; capital (equity) — investors buy equity stakes in applicant companies; and copropiedad o regalías (co-ownership or royalties) — investors and applicants share ownership or a revenue stream.
Meridia only touches the first. That distinction carries a specific obligation: debt-based IFCs — unlike the equity or royalty variants — must periodically report their applicants' credit performance to Mexico's credit bureaus, under the Ley para Regular las Sociedades de Información Crediticia. Every loan the fund invests in is a bureau-reportable credit, not an off-books instrument.
No single agency licenses an IFC alone. Authorization runs through a comité interinstitucional — CNBV, Banxico, and the Secretaría de Hacienda (SHCP) — with CNBV as the day-to-day supervisor once a platform is live. CNBV sets the disclosure standard IFCs must meet: platforms are required to analyze and communicate applicant and project risk to investors in simple, clear terms, including general indicators of borrower behavior, and to apply their risk methodology consistently — CNBV can set the minimum content those methodologies must cover.
Banxico's role has historically concentrated on the payments and foreign-currency/virtual-asset side of ITF activity — though, as below, that's expanding.
As of the most recent Banxico count, 89 ITFs have been authorized against 198 applications filed since 2018 — 62 as IFPEs, the remaining roughly 27 as IFCs. Not every authorized platform is fully operational: among IFCs focused on real-estate crowdfunding alone, industry association AFICO counted 9 licensed platforms in mid-2025, only 7 actively originating.
Volume has been accelerating rather than flat: the sector has moved roughly MXN 16 billion cumulatively over its ~10-year history — including years before formal regulation — and close to 40% of that total was placed in 2024 alone. Scale still puts the category in "small but real" territory: Banxico's own financial-stability reporting puts fintech-sector capital at about 4.9% of multiple-banking-institution capital, which the central bank reads as no systemic threat — only investor-level risk inside individual platforms.
Two changes are in motion that reshape the perimeter Meridia operates inside. The first works in the fund's favor: Banxico proposed in November 2025 to bring debt-based IFCs under the same Costo Anual Total (CAT) disclosure standard banks and card issuers already follow — closing a transparency gap between crowdfunding and traditional credit for the first time, in the same units this site's own rate-spread chart already uses.
The second is a live headwind, not yet resolved: a proposed 20% ISR withholding on crowdfunding interest income, versus an effective rate closer to 9% under the traditional banking withholding regime — a tax gap the industry has publicly pushed back on. Neither change alters the fund's underlying strategy; both are worth tracking, because they move the relative cost of operating on regulated rails.
Every loan the fund considers has already cleared a CNBV-supervised platform's own underwriting and disclosure obligations before Meridia's model ever scores it. That's not incidental to the strategy — it's the first of two independent screens the fund relies on.
Academic work on the sector reaches a similar conclusion from a different angle: a 2025 empirical study of Mexican crowdfunding (2021–2023 data) found funding success tracks credit-risk profile the way information-asymmetry theory predicts, and that investor count matters more to funding outcomes than term or stated purpose — evidence that IFC-originated credit already behaves like a market pricing risk correctly at the margin, even before a second model. Meridia's own re-screen is designed to price it more precisely still.
Figures current as of publication date; regulatory detail (CAT methodology, ISR withholding) is under active discussion and subject to change. See Market & regulatory research for the full source list.