What is CEP? Mexico's official payment receipt

A CEP (Comprobante Electrónico de Pago) is the official electronic receipt Banxico issues to confirm that a SPEI transfer between two Mexican banks has actually settled. Anyone involved in the payment can look one up directly on Banxico’s own portal, without logging into a bank account, using the transfer’s tracking code, amount, and the two banks involved.

What a CEP actually shows

CEP stands for Comprobante Electrónico de Pago, or electronic payment receipt. Banco de México, the country’s central bank, issues it once a SPEI transfer clears between two Mexican banks. The document itself is short but specific: it lists the payment date, the transfer’s tracking code (clave de rastreo) or reference number, the exact amount sent, and the names of the sending and receiving institutions.

Because Banxico generates the CEP directly from the transfer data both banks already recorded, the receipt works the same way regardless of which two banks were involved. A CEP for a transfer between two large national banks carries the same format and the same weight as one for a transfer between two smaller regional banks — Banxico sits above all of them, the same way it does for SPEI itself.

That is also what separates a CEP from a screenshot of a banking app. A screenshot only shows what one bank’s own app displays, and either side of the transfer could edit or misrepresent it. A CEP is pulled straight from Banxico’s central record of the transfer, so it reflects what both banks actually reported to the central bank rather than what one app happens to render on screen.

How to get a CEP

Getting a CEP does not require logging into any bank. Banxico runs a public lookup tool at banxico.org.mx/cep where anyone party to a transfer can retrieve the receipt directly. The lookup asks for the tracking code or reference number, the payment date, the sending and receiving institutions, the beneficiary’s account (a CLABE, debit card, or registered mobile number), the amount, and a CAPTCHA check. Banxico’s portal is open every day of the week, from 9:30 a.m. to 11:00 p.m.

Because the lookup runs on the transfer’s own details rather than a bank login, either the sender or the recipient can pull the CEP, as long as they have the reference information from the original payment. Neither side needs the other’s cooperation or their banking-app credentials to produce it.

Why the CEP matters

A CEP matters because it is the one payment confirmation that comes from Banco de México itself, not from either bank involved in the transfer. If a payment gets disputed — a landlord says rent never arrived, a supplier says an invoice went unpaid — the CEP is the document each side can point to, since it is generated from data both banks already submitted to Banxico’s own systems rather than from a record either party could edit on their own.

Banxico is explicit that the CEP is issued for informational purposes, and that the receiving institution supplies the underlying payment data at its own responsibility; Banxico is relaying that data rather than independently certifying it. In practice, that caveat does not stop the CEP from functioning as the standard proof of a completed SPEI transfer in Mexico — it is simply worth knowing that the document is an official record of what the banks reported, not a guarantee issued by the central bank itself.

What a CEP can’t do

A CEP only exists for transfers that already cleared through SPEI, so it only covers Mexican-peso payments between two Mexican bank accounts. It has nothing to say about money that has not yet entered Mexico’s banking system, or about transfers that move through a different rail entirely, such as CNBV-supervised banks’ own international-wire channels.

That gap is exactly where sending money from the US to family in Mexico runs into trouble: dollars sent from abroad do not arrive as a SPEI transfer, so there is no CEP waiting on the other end until the money has already been converted to pesos and deposited into a Mexican bank account. Moni is a mobile-first US dollar wallet for Latin America built to sit on the sending side of that gap: it moves dollars to a recipient’s Moni balance directly, and the recipient decides when to spend or cash them out, rather than waiting on a wire or remittance service to land as pesos before any confirmation like a CEP even exists.