Comunicación A 8020 — Interoperabilidad de Pagos Inmediatos
in-forceEffective · 2023-04-01
Mandates QR interoperability across all BCRA-licensed payment-account providers. Foundation for MP vs MODO vs Ualá competition.
Source · BCRA
Latin America · GDP rank #23
Argentina
AR · ARS @ 0.0007140/USD
Two years into Milei-era reform, inflation has fallen from 211% (Dec 2023) to roughly 32% YoY (Apr 2026), the parallel-FX premium has collapsed, and the payments landscape is a three-way contest between Mercado Pago's incumbency, MODO's bank consortium, and a USD-stablecoin retail economy that has reached the second-largest per-capita base globally.
Tab 04
Economics
The macro backdrop that actually bends payment behaviour. Nominal GDP, real growth, CPI, policy rate, and FX volatility set the backdrop; interchange, MDR, FX regime, and capital-control posture set the industry-specific dynamics.
Nominal GDP
US$686B
USD · 2025
Population
47M
people · 2025
Adults with a bank account
92%
% · 2024
CVU virtual accounts (Mercado Pago, Ualá) included; bank-only penetration roughly 75%.
Smartphone penetration
84%
% of adults · 2024
Interchange caps
What the issuer receives per transaction
Interchange is the per-transaction fee an acquirer pays an issuer — the floor underneath every MDR merchants see. Domestic caps (where they exist) shape the market far more than individual network schedules.
Regulator · BCRA (under Comunicación A 6212) — caps debit and credit interchange
Argentina caps both credit and debit interchange by regulation, unusual in Latin America. Caps were scheduled to step down across 2024-25 but the Milei administration paused further reductions pending wider acquiring-market review.
Credit interchange (domestic)
1.30%
% · 2025
Debit interchange (domestic)
0.60%
% · 2025
Merchant discount rate
What merchants actually pay to accept cards
The MDR is the fully-loaded cost of card acceptance to the merchant — interchange, scheme fees, and acquirer margin. Small-merchant pricing is routinely 2-3x the large-merchant average.
2.0-3.5% for SMB on credit (Mercado Pago, Payway, Prisma, Naranja Acquiring); QR-at-POS via T3.0 typically 0.6-0.8%.
Avg. credit MDR (large merchant)
1.80%
% · 2025
Avg. debit MDR
0.90%
% · 2025
Active regulation
Resolución General CNV 994/2024 — PSAV registry
in-forceEffective · 2024-03-25
Establishes the Virtual Asset Service Provider registry under CNV. Bitso, Lemon, Ripio, Buenbit and Binance Argentina received first-wave authorisations.
Source · Comisión Nacional de Valores
FX liberalisation programme (post-cepo)
in-forceEffective · Dec 2024 onwards (staged)
Milei administration lifted cepo restrictions on retail USD access; corporate dividend-repatriation queue progressively shortened. Full unification targeted for end-2026.
Source · BCRA