Companies Should Own Their Data and Decide How It Is Shared – Mexico Business News

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Your business is growing. You want to open a bank account, apply for credit, register as a supplier to a new customer or send money abroad. Each organization needs to verify your company and who can act on its behalf. These are Know Your Business (KYB) checks. For you, they can mean collecting and sending the same documents again and again and can take up to 6 months to complete. Why should choosing a new provider mean starting the paperwork over, when the information is about your own company?
For a business owner, that is what control over data should mean in practice: the freedom to pursue a better deal. Information about the company you built should help you open doors. You should be able to put it to work with the providers you choose, without repeatedly paying to retrieve it or acting as the courier between institutions.
This is the conversation I want to bring to Mexico Tech Week. We talk about innovation expanding access and creating competition. A useful test is whether an entrepreneur can use their own company’s information to get more options and negotiate better terms.
The issue reaches well beyond credit. A business may need to register as a supplier, open a bank account, arrange a foreign exchange transaction or transfer money across borders. Compliance officers, credit teams and risk managers each have legitimate questions about who they are dealing with and who can represent the company. The owner can end up supplying versions of the same evidence to all of them.
Take commercial registry records. Mexico’s Public Registry of Commerce operates through SIGER, a national platform for registered commercial acts. Its official consultation instructions require payment where applicable under each state’s rules. A national platform therefore does not mean that every business faces the same cost of accessing its records.
When an institution asks the company to obtain those records, the owner must pay where required, download the documents and send them on. Another institution may ask for a fresh copy. Alternatively, each provider can retrieve the information independently. At an illustrative MXN 750 per retrieval, ten purchases would total MXN 7,500. Even when one copy is shared, someone must distribute it and respond to requests for updates.
The cost is also measured in choices abandoned. If approaching another provider means another round of documents and verification, staying with the existing one becomes easier. A smaller competitor may struggle to justify the cost of assessing a prospective customer. My concern is that this friction can protect an existing relationship from competition, even when another provider might offer the business better value.
And the paperwork does not necessarily give the recipient the confidence it needs. A compliance officer may receive an emailed PDF or a scanned image supplied by the company being reviewed. The document could be genuine but outdated, incomplete or difficult to verify. We have AI capable of reading large volumes of information, yet the person responsible for the decision may still need to establish whether that image matches the official record. Better document reading cannot resolve uncertainty about the source.
There is an important distinction here: registered commercial acts are already public. Article 21 of the registry regulation allows anyone to consult them, subject to the applicable procedures and any required fee. The company does not decide who may see those public records. Charging for access therefore does not make the information private or give the owner control. It creates a price barrier around information intended to be available to the public.
Imagine the same owner being able to direct several chosen providers to verified records at the source. Each could obtain traceable evidence, with a retrieval date, rather than another forwarded attachment. The owner could compare offers without repeatedly assembling the same registry documents. Providers would still carry out their own checks and make their own decisions, but the business would have a more practical way to invite them to compete.
The benefit could be a lower borrowing cost, more suitable payment terms or a better foreign exchange offer. Easier sharing would not guarantee any of these outcomes. It would make seeking them less burdensome. Greater transparency matters when it gives someone enough credible information to make an offer, and gives the owner a meaningful choice between offers.
If information is public, make it meaningfully accessible to everyone: free, or at a minimal, transparent cost. I favor free routine consultation or a modest fixed annual fee, rather than repeated charges for each record. A company should not be more expensive to verify simply because it is registered in Mexico City rather than Quintana Roo. Registries need sustainable funding, and formal certification can remain a separate paid service. But geography and willingness to pay should not determine how useful public information is.
Control also needs to be real where information is genuinely restricted. In that case, access should depend on the company authorizing a recipient and purpose, or on a clearly defined legal basis. Its verified representative should be able to grant permission to a bank, a notary, a lawyer or another party with a legitimate reason, specify how long it lasts and stop future access. A professional title or payment alone should not grant unrestricted access. Public records should remain public; restricted information should have meaningful access rules.
Return to the owner trying to grow their business. Success would mean completing the necessary checks, comparing credible offers and choosing the terms that best support the business. Public records should be easy to verify, while sharing restricted information should involve real control. The information generated by building a company should give its owner more bargaining power and make the market compete harder for their business.

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