What cartera vencida means for a Mexican lender

Cartera vencida is the past-due part of a Mexican loan book. For banks and regulated lenders the regulator fixes when a loan enters it: 30 days late for a single payment at maturity, 90 days for loans paid in instalments, 60 days for revolving credit. Since January 2022 it is called etapa 3. An unregulated lender sets its own rule.

For a bank, cartera vencida is a day count written by the regulator, not a judgement

The rule is Criterio B-6, Cartera de crédito, in Anexo 33 of the Circular Única de Bancos, the accounting criteria the Comisión Nacional Bancaria y de Valores (CNBV) sets for Mexican banks. It moves a loan into cartera vencida on one of two events. The first is the borrower being declared in concurso mercantil, Mexico's court insolvency procedure. The second is a payment unpaid past a threshold that depends on how the loan amortises, down to revolving credit with «dos periodos mensuales de facturación vencidos», two monthly billing periods past due.

Two details change how the number reads. What moves is the «saldo insoluto», the whole outstanding balance of the loan, not the late instalment. And from the moment of the transfer the lender stops recognising accrued interest as income, as the notes of Banco Base for the second quarter of 2018 and of Banco Azteca at 30 September 2025 both state. A loan in cartera vencida earns nothing on paper until it is cured.

Since January 2022 the same bucket is called etapa 3, and the day counts stayed

On 13 March 2020 the CNBV published a resolution aligning the banks' accounting criteria with IFRS 9 through the Mexican standard NIF C-16, on impairment of financial instruments. A later resolution of 4 December 2020 set the start for 1 January 2022, and Criterio B-6 was restated once more in the Diario Oficial on 30 December 2021. Banobras described the result in its 2022 disclosure as the change from «cartera vencida a Cartera de crédito con riesgo de crédito (Etapas 1, 2 y 3)».

The new name did not move the line. Banco Azteca's notes at 30 September 2025 list the thresholds for transfer to etapa 3 as 30 days for a single payment at maturity, 90 on interest or 30 on principal for a bullet loan with periodic interest, and 90 days for periodic instalments, the same counts B-6 used for cartera vencida. The old term survives outside the financial statements: HR Ratings' sector report on non-bank lenders of 9 September 2025 still measures them by cartera vencida.

A SOFOM E.N.R. answers to no CNBV day count, so its cartera vencida means what its policy says

A SOFOM, sociedad financiera de objeto múltiple, is a Mexican company that lends without taking deposits. The CNBV describes two regimes. A SOFOM is regulated, an entidad regulada or E.R., when it has a capital link to a bank, a popular savings company or a credit cooperative, when it funds itself with debt securities registered in the Registro Nacional de Valores, or when it asks to be. Every other one is an entidad no regulada, E.N.R., which the CNBV inspects only for anti-money-laundering rules, under article 95 Bis of the law on auxiliary credit organisations.

An E.N.R. keeps its books under the Normas de Información Financiera like any Mexican company, and Criterio B-6 does not bind it. When one of its loans enters what it calls cartera vencida, and when that loan is written off, is its own accounting policy. The audited notes describe the policy where audited statements exist. A presentation that prints the percentage usually does not.

A write-off takes a loan out of cartera vencida, which is why the ratio flatters

A past-due ratio counts only the loans still on the book. Once a loan is written off, a castigo in Mexican usage, it leaves both the numerator and the denominator. In HR Ratings' sample of non-bank lenders at June 2025 the reported past-due ratio was 3.9%; adjusted for twelve months of write-offs it was 7.1%. In pesos the two halves were almost the same size: MXN 10,630m of cartera vencida against MXN 9,636m written off over the year. What that gap looked like in lenders that later defaulted is the subject of The eleven dark months.

The sector's trade body uses a looser word still. ASOFOM reports cartera catastrófica, which its national president Javier Garza Hoeffer described as the equivalent of a bank's cartera vencida, «pero se saca después de agotar todas las instancias para recuperar el adeudo», taken out only after every route to recovery is exhausted. A category with no date in it cannot be compared across two lenders or two quarters.

A fund rebuilds it from the loan tape with the regulator's rule, whatever the lender calls it

The comparable number comes from loan-level data, not from the ratio. The loan tape, the file with one row per loan, gives each loan's repayment schedule and days past due at every month end; the write-off file gives the date and amount of every castigo. Apply the five B-6 thresholds to the first, add back twelve months of the second, and the result is an etapa 3 that means the same thing for every lender in a fund's pipeline.

Three questions close the remaining gaps. Which day count moves a loan, product by product. When a loan is written off, and whether that comes before or after it reaches cartera vencida. And when a restructured loan returns to performing: B-6 requires pago sostenido, at least «tres amortizaciones consecutivas» paid in full and on time. Read by origination cohort, as in a static pool, the same data shows whether a newer vintage is deteriorating faster than an older one.

Effect is not a bank, a lender, a broker-dealer, an investment adviser or a credit rating agency. Nothing here is investment, legal, accounting or tax advice. Every rule carries the version of the document it was read from, read on 7 October 2026.