Regulatory frameworks often use the term microinsurance. CGAP has adopted the use of the term “inclusive insurance” rather than microinsurance.
Financial inclusion in Mexico has come a long way over the past decade. Access to bank accounts has grown, digital payments have expanded, and credit has reached new segments of the population. Yet adoption of one financial service consistently lags behind: insurance. According to Mexico's 2024 National Financial Inclusion Survey (ENIF), only 23% of the adult population holds an insurance policy of any type — down from 25% in 2015 and 2018.
The gender gap is significant, with just 18% of women insured, compared to 28% of men. Among products intended to reach underserved and low-income populations, the picture is even more concerning, as microinsurance accounted for only 1.2% of Mexico's total insurance premiums in 2024, according to the National Insurance and Surety Commission (CNSF).
The reasons Mexicans do not acquire insurance are telling. The ENIF 2024 data shows that 34% cite a lack of need or interest, 24% point to a lack of money or unemployment, 15% consider products too expensive, and 13% say they do not know how to use insurance. These are not simply consumer preference issues — they reflect a systemic failure to design and communicate products that resonate with the realities of underserved populations and segments and bring value to them.
Inclusive insurance is key to enabling customer financial resilience and health, which in turn can drive economic growth. It protects individuals and entrepreneurs from a range of increasing risks, including climate change and health crises — and beyond protection, it can help users identify and assess risks and adopt risk reduction and mitigation strategies. It also supports investments in productive, revenue-generating activities by reducing or eliminating the fear of catastrophic losses that can cause significant harm to consumers, enterprises, and the economy.
An existing framework, an untapped opportunity
Mexico is not starting from zero. A dedicated microinsurance regulatory framework has been in place since 2008, yet it has not effectively fostered the development of this segment. Several entities currently offer inclusive insurance products, but they classify them as conventional or mass insurance instead of microinsurance — bypassing a framework that many perceive as too rigid and expensive to comply with. In practice, this can make it harder to develop and distribute low-premium products through digital, embedded, or other high-reach channels in a commercially viable way.
Public and private stakeholders broadly recognize several challenges with the framework: microinsurance definitions, regulatory compliance costs, access to distribution channels, and limited consumer understanding. All of these require much greater dialogue among different actors. As CGAP noted in April 2026, the challenge in many markets is not the absence of regulatory frameworks, but the frictions embedded within them — slow and inflexible product approval processes, constraints on bundling insurance with other services that reach low-income clients, and supervisory capacity gaps that delay innovation without meaningfully improving consumer protection.
Putting collaboration and customers at the center of the conversation
Fundación MetLife México, with support from MetLife Foundation, organized a roundtable with CGAP that brought together financial policymakers, regulators, supervisors, and other key public and private sector actors to discuss how to advance inclusive insurance in a way that strategically contributes to improved financial resilience and wellbeing in Mexico. The dialogue was frank, constructive, collaborative, and evidence-based. It produced clarity on four interconnected opportunities.
1. Shifting the regulatory framework from a narrow focus on microinsurance as a product type to a broader, inclusive insurance approach consistent with good international practices
This means risk-based, proportionate regulation, evidence-based regulation that enables innovation and scale — particularly through alternative distribution models, proportionate onboarding and know-your-customer (KYC) requirements for low-premium, high-volume offerings. Additionally, this means ensuring adequate consumer protection in such aspects as transparent information, effective claims and complaints handling, and product suitability.
2. Putting customers at the center
This means, first, user-centered business processes that account for user experiences, needs, constraints, and outcomes — from product design, distribution, usage, and renewal through to product improvements — so as to strengthen public trust. It also means customer-centric supervision that includes analyzing segmented data to better understand how users experience products, the risks and challenges they face when acquiring and using insurance, how their complaints are addressed, and the results they obtain.
3. Fostering an ecosystem approach that involves all relevant stakeholders from public, private, and nonprofit sectors
These stakeholders must collaborate on initiatives to test and learn from innovations. This includes initiatives that rely on partnership-based and nontraditional distribution models to reach underserved populations, mechanisms to discuss feedback on proposed or existing measures, and spaces to improve transparency in consumer communications and develop coordinated activities to strengthen consumer awareness and financial capability.
4. Leveraging opportunities to position insurance as a key activity to advance strategic nationwide efforts to promote financial inclusion and wellbeing
This must be done in a way that aligns innovative product design and the use of broad distribution channels with customer-centricity and protection, alongside proportionate regulation and risk-based supervision. As CGAP's February 2026 analysis makes clear, insurance remains underrepresented in major financial inclusion frameworks, and integrating it more concretely, with defined targets and cross-agency accountability, is a precondition for moving from individual product experiments to market-wide change.
Stakeholders working together can make inclusive insurance work
Other countries could follow the same self-reflective and collaborative approach to move the inclusive insurance agenda forward and strengthen the financial resilience and health of the population — especially the most vulnerable segments. The starting point is rarely a new regulation. It is a willingness among policymakers, regulators, insurers, and civil society to examine the evidence together, learn lessons from previous experiences, and commit to the kind of sustained, cross-sector action that no single actor can deliver alone.
This is the spirit behind the Cape Town Declaration on Inclusive Insurance, endorsed by 18 countries thus far, which represents a shared commitment to the high-level goals that the Mexico dialogue brought to life. Mexico’s experience shows what is possible—and the Declaration offers a framework to build on it at scale.
Add new comment