Mexico's Digital Economy Law and the move away from cash: the IT your Mexico operation needs to take digital payments without breaking

On September 18, 2026, President Sheinbaum’s Digital Economy Law initiative went public. DPL News reported that the goal is to cut cash usage and revive CoDi and DiMo, the two phone-based payment systems from Mexico’s central bank that never really caught on.

Here is the part that matters for planning: according to Grupo Animal, the finance ministry would decide which sectors stop accepting cash. That is a date on a calendar, not a choice your Mexico team gets to make.

What changes when every sale is digital

Cash has one quality nobody brags about: it works with no power and no internet. Once every payment runs through a card terminal, CoDi or DiMo, your register depends on a chain: power, modem, internal network, terminal, point-of-sale system.

Break one link and the line at the counter grows until people walk out. In our experience, most Mexican stores and clinics we visit run one modem on a cheap power strip, with the same wifi shared by the terminal, the register PC and the warehouse guy watching videos.

A primary link and a real backup link

Two paths to the internet, from two different providers. Fiber as primary, something structurally different as backup: a second fiber, fixed wireless, or Starlink. The point is not owning a backup, it is failover that happens automatically.

Scenario	What happens today	What should happen
Fiber goes down	Nobody can charge	The router fails over in seconds
Power cut	Everything off	A UPS holds register and modem for 20 minutes
Terminal fails	Take cash instead	Charge via CoDi or DiMo from a phone

For plants, warehouses or stores outside the main cities, see when Starlink works as a primary or backup link.

Power, the part everyone forgets

A UPS is a battery that keeps equipment alive for a few minutes during an outage. It is not a luxury. It is what lets your staff finish the sale in progress without corrupting the point-of-sale database.

Keep payments off the shared wifi

Segmentation sounds technical and is simple: one network for payments, one for operations, one for guests. If a laptop gets infected, it cannot walk toward the money.

Backups, invoicing and fraud on the phone

When every payment is digital, your accounting lives in files. Backups run automatically, one copy lives off site, and somebody tests a restore every quarter. More on that in backups that actually restore.

One thing foreign-owned operations underestimate: Mexican electronic invoicing (CFDI) has to reconcile against those digital payments. If the local POS and your global ERP do not talk, someone in Mexico is retyping numbers every month, and that is where errors live.

Fraud moves too. Expect fake payment confirmations over WhatsApp, edited transfer screenshots and “activate your CoDi” links. The counter rule: release the sale when the money shows up in the account, never when the customer shows a screenshot.

Meanwhile, Xataka México noted on September 14 that selling online has stopped being optional for Mexican SMBs, with Mercado Libre leading. Same problem, different door: if your online store and your inventory do not sync, you will sell what you no longer have.

Let's talk

What about your operation in Mexico?

Run the thought experiment: if your Mexican sites could not take a single peso in cash tomorrow, how many hours a month would they be unable to charge at all?

At ProcessBi we review that whole chain on the ground: primary and backup links, UPS and electrical protection, segmentation with firewall, backups that actually restore, and integration between the local POS and accounting when they do not talk. Written SLA, invoicing in MXN or USD.

Book your free assessment — we reply the same business day.