Greater financial education will help grow investments in the Mexican stock market

Increasing financial education along with greater use of digital platforms will help attract more players and investors to the Mexican stock market, which will eventually pay for its development, experts agreed.

During the panel “What is the future in investments?: wealthtech and its expansion in Mexico”, organized by Fintuala digital investment platform, Eduardo Morelos, a partner at Brixton Ventures Lab, mentioned that, since March 2020, when the pandemic began in Mexico, the opening of investment accounts in brokerage houses accelerated.

He recalled that at that time there were 383,000 stock investment accounts and by December 2021 there were more than 3 million, this number has increased to 4 million 144,131 until June of this year. In the last seven months it has increased about 33 percent.

This record growth is an “example of how the industry (of wealthtech or platforms to manage investments) has been changing,” said Eduardo Morelos as he moderated the panel.

Although this growth has been favorable for the stock market as well, the challenge is for the amount of these investment accounts to grow, since currently people can invest in the stock market minimum amounts (from 100 pesos) through different technological platforms and the stock exchange houses.

According to data from the Mexican Association of Stock Market Institutions (AMIB), until June of this year, the 35 brokerage houses that operate in Mexico had 8,092 billion pesos in custody, while in December 2021 there were 7,662 billion, a growth of 5.61 percent.

“The number of accounts has grown, but they are relatively small compared to traditional accounts (…) This growth has to occur naturally over time because people who have an account grow their assets and invest more,” he commented. after his participation in the panel Andrés Fuentes, managing partner of EY Latin America North Financial Services.

In this sense, he stressed that the great challenge is to increase financial education, since it will not only help to increase the amount of managed assets, but also to understand what is being invested in and how to invest to maximize returns.

“If those 3 million clients grow, it is fabulous, but if it grows to 6 million with very small accounts, it is not really creating the objective neither of the population nor of the players that we are within the sector because really for it to be a competitive environment it has to There must be a significant base of managed assets so that it is a well-distributed cake among all the players”, Andrés Fuentes stressed.

In his speech, Omar Larré, CIO and co-founder of Fintual, agreed that Mexico needs to promote financial education and have the ability to transmit knowledge so that people can make more informed investment decisions.

“Financial knowledge so that people can make more informed decisions and technology so that the industry is more agile, democratic and accessible, are key to transforming investments in Mexico,” he said.

Julio González, Business Development Executive of the Property Segment at Vanguardmentioning that financial education is necessary to democratize investments, but advice also helps to have clear investment goals to achieve the objectives and to bring financial products closer to investors, not only the large ones, such as institutional ones, but also to retailers or individuals.

“The best strategy for an investor is to focus on what they can control, have clear goals, discipline, and costs. All this accompanied by diversification. Advice is key and using tools such as robo-advisors can help massify the offer and care for sectors of the population that perhaps did not have access before,” he considered.