Clients paid 555 thousand million pesos with cards in January alone: ​​GBM

In the middle of the January slope, Mexicans took out their cards to pay at the supermarket, fast food, parking and plane tickets, but the pace of growth is no longer the same as last year. The value of transactions with financial plastics increased 6 percent annually and reached 555 billion pesos, GBM Research reported.

However, it was lower than the 11 percent growth observed in 2025, which confirms the slowdown in family spending.

A report recently published by BBVA Research, the bank’s economic studies division, indicated that in January 2026 private consumption fell by 0.7 percent.

Despite the data, GBM specified, the accumulated volume of card transactions in the recent 12 months amounted to 6 trillion 400 billion pesos, a figure that is equivalent to 20 percent of the nominal gross domestic product (GDP), a proportion that reflects the importance of card consumption for the economy.

In such purchases, the miscellaneous and retail categories registered increases of 24 and 16 percent annually, respectively, making retail the main driver of overall transaction growth in January.

Then, operations in self-service stores advanced 7 percent. Activities related to leisure also showed good dynamism, since spending on fast food rose 24 percent annually; in entertainment, 14; in restaurants, 8, and in hotels, 6 percent.

In the mobility segment, spending on parking skyrocketed 38 percent annually and tolls 20 percent, while land passenger transportation services fell 15 percent.

In the health sector, purchases in retail pharmacies increased 16 percent and in hospitals increased 8 percent.

Weakness in aggregators

According to the GBM analysis, the main source of weakness was the aggregators, which registered an annual contraction of 21 percent, prolonging the downward trend that has influenced the general deceleration of the indicator.

Aggregators are terminals that are not operated by traditional banks but by companies such as MercadoPago or Clip, both in formal businesses and in the informal economy.