Banxico

Banxico is the common name for Banco de México, the country’s central bank. Mexico’s 1917 Constitution called for a single, government-controlled bank of issue, and Banco de México opened on September 1, 1925 to fill that role. A 1993 constitutional reform took effect in April 1994, making Banxico autonomous: no other government authority can order it to extend credit, and a governing board, a governor serving a six-year term and four deputy governors serving eight-year terms, sets policy independent of day-to-day political control. Banxico’s constitutional mandate is to preserve the purchasing power of the peso, pursued mainly through monetary policy and inflation targeting. It is also the sole issuer of Mexican banknotes and coins, manages the country’s international reserves, and operates SPEI, the real-time system Mexican banks use to move pesos between each other. Bank supervision itself sits with CNBV, a separate agency.

See also: SPEI, CNBV, and CEP — the payment system Banxico operates, the regulator that supervises the banks connected to it, and the receipt Banxico issues to confirm a SPEI transfer.