North America has spent three decades learning how to produce together. Inputs, workers, data and goods now move through the region in billions of dollars and billions of bits. For market infrastructure, including exchanges such as BIVA, the next step is to help finance more effectively behind that productive integration. The upcoming USMCA review on July 1 offers a timely place to begin.

We have already taken a step

From NAFTA to the USMCA, North America deliberately deepened its financial connectivity: Chapter 17 has now modernized the financial-services rules and, for the first time, allowed the cross-border transfer of financial data and barred forced local storage, exactly what a bank and a market operating at regional scale require.

Technology has been connecting the three countries, and Mexico has done its part. Our payments infrastructure settles in seconds, year-round. At BIVA we moved to T+1 settlement on the same day as our partners and adopted the most demanding disclosure standards global investors expect (Mexico’s Interbank Electronic Payment System -SPEI operates 24/7 and settles a payment in 1.9 seconds on average, with 99.98% availability. BIVA adopted the IFRS S1 and S2 sustainability disclosure standards). In sustainable finance we are in fact ahead: Mexico is Latin America's second-largest thematic-bond market and has its own taxonomy.

These advances do not create a regional capital market, but they open the next conversation: what mechanisms will allow that strategy to finance what North America already produces?

First, financing infrastructure together

That agenda should begin with shared infrastructure; financing it jointly is the clearest form of the North American Way. Cross Border Xpress, the bridge linking San Diego with the Tijuana airport, opened in 2015 with about USD 120 million in private capital and debt arranged by Mexico's development banks; a decade later, as part of Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacífico, it closed at a USD 2.2 billion valuation. North American infrastructure, well structured, finances itself without leaning on public balance sheets.

Second, financing industrial policy

Financing industrial policy jointly is more ambitious. The USMCA review ahead points to a tougher agenda: more regional content, stricter rules of origin, and strategic sectors. The United States is backing semiconductors and the energy transition through the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. Canada is using a financial route: clean-economy tax credits and the Canada Growth Fund, designed to foster clean technology, critical minerals, and energy infrastructure.

Mexico is responding through "Plan México" and can scale that response from its greatest strength: the capital market. The instruments already exist: energy and Mexican REIT’s (FIBRAs, in Spanish) serve the logistics corridors and transmission that nearshoring demands; co-investment certificates let pension funds and institutional investors from the three countries invest side by side; and green bonds finance mixed public-private energy schemes, some of this already announced.

Against deeper U.S. and Canadian markets, Mexico lacks the cost and volume of capital those instruments can mobilize. Domestic credit to the private sector is close to 35% of GDP in Mexico, versus roughly 190% in Canada and near 200% in the United States. Mexican small and medium-sized firms (SMEs) may pay around 15% to fund a project that would cost a comparable firm six or seven percent across the border.

Mexico's constraint is not a lack of projects, but the cost and depth of capital available to firms that must become regional suppliers. SMEs generate roughly 30% of census value added and employment, yet less than 5% participate in global value chains. In an integrated supply chain, the most expensive link to finance becomes a cost for the whole region.

Mexico already has the financial capacity required to support a new phase of investment and industrial development. Institutional savings held by pension funds, mutual funds and insurance companies now approach USD 1 trillion, equivalent to nearly half of GDP, while pension fund assets alone represent approximately 24% of GDP and are projected to nearly double as a share of GDP by 2030, Combined with an increasingly sophisticated investment ecosystem that includes global asset managers, private equity firms and the recent opening of the market to hedge funds, this capital base is well positioned to finance infrastructure, industrial expansion and long-term productive projects. International investors, including US asset managers such as BlackRock and Apollo, as well as leading Canadian institutional investors such as CDPQ and Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, continue to actively evaluate and deploy capital in Mexico. The key variable for unlocking further investment is no longer the availability of capital, but the degree of legal certainty, regulatory consistency and policy predictability that underpin investor confidence.

Financial capacity becomes investment only when the financial system puts it to work. Strengthening that system to finance the next phase of industrial development is Mexico's homework, and it works on two fronts. The first is to rethink development banking: development banks should work less as direct lenders and more as catalysts. Their role should be to crowd in private money rather than competing with it. One public peso should help mobilize several pesos of private capital. That can be done through instruments such as partial credit guarantees, which unlock credit for exporting firms. It can also be done through delivery and performance guarantees, which back a Mexican supplier’s commitment in a cross-border contract. These tools should complement the credit-and-guarantee schemes already in use, rather than replace them.

The second is to continue betting on technology and financial connectivity. That is the channel that has already brought the region closer. Accordingly, the next step is to finish the digital-payments ecosystem that most quickly links a small business to financing.

And then, the medium and long term

Beyond the immediate, the North American Way invites us to keep our eyes on the medium and long term, where the financial systems of the United States and Canada are deeper and more mature. The best version of integration is to converge toward that standard rather than run in parallel. There is a piece worth recognition, the Multijurisdictional Disclosure System (MJDS) system that lets a company issue and report across the border using the disclosure it already files at home. Mexico is not yet at that table; the useful lesson is the method: comparable standards, defined eligibility and a narrow channel before any broader ambition.

The steps outlined so far are not to be rushed, but neither can they wait. North America has already made the productive leap; now it needs a financial one. There is an underlying logic behind this tenet, which the evidence supports: the more complex an economy, the more sophisticated the financial vehicles it demands, and attracts.

The region learned to produce together. It should finance together too.