Is fintech actually improving lives or just expanding access to financial products?
As Latin America’s fintech sector grows, this question is becoming harder to ignore. Mexico alone now hosts over 1,100 fintech companies (803 domestic and 301 foreign) with revenues growing 31% year-over-year.
Access metrics have long served as a proxy for impact in financial inclusion. But access is not the same as outcomes. The gap between “people served” and “people whose lives improved” remains largely unmeasured. An AI-based solution offers a path toward affordable and effective measurement.
Bkaya, an embedded finance platform operating in Mexico, seeks to “empower all of Mexico with financial and digital freedom to break barriers and achieve more.” Through its own platform, Bankaya, and partnerships like the Uber Pro Card, Bkaya provides credit access to consumers traditionally overlooked by conventional lenders. The company’s leaders wanted to go beyond access metrics and understand whether their services were making a meaningful difference in clients’ lives.
Measuring impact is often out of reach for startups. Traditional methods are costly, time-intensive and typically designed for large institutions. To address these challenges, Bkaya partnered with 60 Decibels to perform an impact assessment that could provide high-quality impact performance metrics. 60 Decibels specializes in collecting insights directly from end users, usually via phone surveys. 60 Decibels used AI-powered interviews for the Bkaya study, allowing the company to gather high-quality data affordably and efficiently.
Bkaya’s experience points toward a future where impact measurement is no longer reserved for large, well-resourced organizations as AI-enabled client research tools become more accessible.
Translating access into real wellbeing
Between September and October 2025, 60 Decibels’s AI bot spoke with 117 randomly selected Bkaya clients across Mexico. To ensure a fuller picture, 15% of the people who were sampled were asked to dive deeper into possible risks that credit access could be generating.
The survey found that 77% of clients had never accessed a service like Bkaya before, and that women were more likely to be first-time borrowers than men (87% vs. 72%). For many, Bkaya is more than a credit provider. It is their entry point into formal financial services. As Bkaya COO and co-founder Alberto Gutiérrez says, “Mexico’s National Survey of Financial Inclusion shows that much of the population remains excluded from formal credit, which limits not just their liquidity but their ability to acquire essential household goods or access productive loans.”
Yet first access isn’t the same as impact. The real question is: What happens after people gain access?
The results suggest meaningful wellbeing improvements: 72% of clients reported that their quality of life had improved because of Bkaya, with 37% saying it “very much improved,” a result that far exceeds the 60 Decibels Global Fintech Benchmark of 26%. Clients were then asked — without pre-set prompts to choose from — why credit access improved their quality of life. 60 Decibels coded the responses, and the top outcomes were the possibility to purchase household goods, have access to finance for essential items, and boost their purchasing power. The impact was especially notable for women: 92% reported improved quality of life, compared to 65% of men.
Importantly, these improvements didn’t come at the cost of financial stress. 87% of clients reported that their loan repayments were “not a burden;” 79% said their ability to manage finances had improved and 88% agreed that Bkaya’s fees and terms are easy to understand.
For impact investors, these findings suggest that access-focused credit products can translate into wellbeing gains, but only when paired with product design that avoids excessive repayment stress.
Outcome data as a management tool
Impact studies often sit on a shelf. What makes this case notable is how the findings are being used. The study surfaced both strengths and friction points. For example, 20% of clients reported challenges with delayed transfers and app functionality.
Bkaya is operationalizing these insights. The data has become a baseline for the company’s 2026 strategy, with concrete changes already underway. Bkaya is re-prioritizing its product roadmap to focus on reducing operational friction and improving immediate problem resolution, directly attacking the pain points detected in the study. This illustrates how outcome data can function as a management tool and not just a reporting exercise by offering fintechs a feedback loop that connects client experience to operational decisions.
An opportunity for early-stage fintechs
This case study offers broader lessons for financial inclusion investors and operators. It demonstrates that serving first-time borrowers can generate meaningful impact and not just access numbers.
It also highlights the limits of transaction data: While it can reveal what happened, only direct client feedback reveals why it mattered.
Bkaya’s experience demonstrates the value of affordable, AI-enabled client research tools. They open the door for earlier-stage fintechs and their investors to build feedback loops that inform strategy, strengthen accountability and move beyond access as the primary measure of success.
As the financial inclusion sector matures, the ability to demonstrate real outcomes will matter more and more. The companies and investors that treat client feedback as a strategic necessity rather than a compliance exercise will be better positioned to deliver on the promise of inclusive finance. The data suggests something hopeful: Thoughtfully designed fintech services can genuinely improve lives, particularly for people accessing formal financial services for the first time.
Explore Bkaya’s full impact data here.
Carla Grados Villamar is co-head of Latin America for 60 Decibels. Alberto Gutiérrez is the co-founder and COO of Bankaya.
Guest posts on ImpactAlpha represent the opinions of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of ImpactAlpha.
