The battle for market leadership drives moves among banks, virtual wallets, and investment platforms, and even among oil companies and telecommunications firms.
Key points
Highlight Competition between banks and virtual wallets is already centered on financial ecosystems, aiming to become the user’s everyday interface.
Highlight Key alliances such as Santander-YPF, Macro-Personal Pay, and Grupo Galicia-Naranja X reflect new strategies to secure market leadership.
Highlight Salary accounts no longer guarantee retention; market leadership is now won through frequent use and personalization.
The battle between banks and virtual wallets for users’ share stopped being product against product on an "options ring" and adopted a deeper logic: that of competing financial ecosystems that aim to become the everyday interface from which each person manages their money.
In this dispute, they’re not fighting only 'a bank versus a wallet,' nor entities of the same type against each other. Instead, different strategies coexist: being the platform on which the 'financial life' happens—where payments are made and money is managed; functioning as the 'financial layer' within broader ecosystems, or 'appropriating' the customer relationship or their usage frequency.
This logic explains moves that seem isolated, but they all point in the same direction:
The integration of Banco Santander and YPF
The alliance between Banco Macro and Telecom for Personal Pay
The coordination of Banco Galicia and Naranja X within the same financial group
The integration of IOL InvertirOnline within Supervielle
The role of Mercado Pago as a 'thermometer' of frequency and habit
Why did the payroll account lose its power over the customer?
"For many years, if a bank had the payroll account, it had already won the customer. That’s not true anymore," says Tomás Fulop, iProUP’s specialist in financial innovation, Senior Partner & Managing Director of the consulting firm Brain Network.
The diagnosis is supported by an increasingly common behavior. "A customer can get their salary paid into a bank, pay with a wallet, invest on another platform, and finance themselves wherever they find the best offer. That’s where the logic of competing 'product against product' starts to break," he emphasizes.
Online, it says that "the discussion is no longer only about who offers the best card, the best loan, or the best fixed-term investment" but rather that it "revolves around who manages to become the place the customer chooses every day to solve more and more things".
The strategy of banks and wallets for share
Behind these figures is the fact that users today don’t "marry" to a single entity. During the second four-month period of 2026, the system reached 354 million digital accounts, and each person has on average 4 CBU and 4 CVU, according to the recent COELSA Indicator.
The same report showed that during that period more than 14 million new accounts were created, a four-month growth of 4.22%. In total, 190 million CBU and 163.5 million CVU will be recorded.
For its part, Stefanini Group’s Payroll Account Share Survey shows that 78% of Argentines still get their salary paid in traditional institutions, a "leadership" backed mainly by regulatory factors, since current regulations prevent salaries from being received in wallets and maintain exclusivity in traditional banking.
However, if you look only at Generation Z—the 18- to 28-year-olds—Mercado Pago leads in share with 31%, while Banco Nación appears second with 18%, a position it owes precisely to salary crediting. Wallets, moreover, show the highest conversion rate from holding an account to having a share among young people, at 41%.
On the payments side, the Central Bank’s July Minor Retail Payments Report revealed that 76.5% of instant transfers had a CVU as their origin and/or destination. In addition, 115.6 million payments via QR transfer were recorded in the country.
At the same time, cash is giving ground: for every $1 in bills that moved in the second four-month period of 2026, $2.53 circulated between banks and wallets virtually, according to COELSA. The same agency revealed that 8 out of 10 people who chose to pay with QR in July did so again in August, an 80.89% loyalty rate to this payment method.
In summary, historically the payroll account guaranteed banks user retention. A person used all the products from that entity because that’s where their salary was paid, and unless they went to another bank, they could only access those services—unless they signed them up at another bank, with the associated costs.
That equation clearly broke, and today people split salaries, payments, investments, and finances across several platforms at the same time. "The payroll account is still extremely important, but it’s no longer enough. You have to earn share later," Fulop notes.
Four strategies from banks and wallets to win the user
For the co-founder of the market research firm specialized in the financial industry, in Argentina a map took shape in which not everyone competes in the same way or from the same place—and in which each player chose a different path to pursue the goal of becoming 'indispensable'.
"When we talk about being the platform, we mean being the place from which the customer starts solving a growing number of needs," explains Tomás Fulop to iProUP and places Mercado Pago as "probably the clearest example".
"Payments, transfers, investments, credit, merchants, consumption. Its strength is being at the middle of an enormous number of interactions," highlights.
Keep in mind that Mercado Libre’s fintech arm is Argentina’s most-used wallet. It has around 25 million users in the country, according to industry estimates, and represents about 64% of the revenues generated locally by the company founded by Marcos Galperin, according to its financial report submitted to the SEC.
This fact is not minor, considering that the regional unicorn grew huge thanks to its e-commerce—still a business with significant weight—but in recent times it has taken a back seat in the balance sheet to the financial services segment.
After "being the platform," Fulop describes a second position, one that’s quieter: "being the financial layer".
"Maybe I’m not the one who generates the frequency, but I provide the account, the payments, the financing, the risk, the investments, and all the financial infrastructure," Fulop explains, and cites as an example "the integration of Santander into the YPF ecosystem".
It’s worth remembering that in February, Santander and YPF announced what both companies defined as "the first alliance of this kind between leading companies in Argentina".
The bank began administering YPF Digital’s virtual accounts and its YPF app—a wallet that the oil company grew within its network of service stations and, at the time of the announcement, had 3 million active users and 2.6 million CVU. It also accounted for 4 out of every 10 payments at its stations and positioned itself as the second platform for physical payments in the country, behind only MODO.
The alliance allowed YPF to make different subsequent announcements, among which stand out the possibility of remunerating balances in users’ accounts and, later on, the ability to buy shares of the oil company through the wallet. All this gave the company the chance to enhance new financial products and embedded services without needing a banking license.
For Fulop, the appeal behind this union is mutual, because "Santander has enormous financial muscle and YPF has frequency, mobility, consumption, and millions of interactions".
A month earlier, in January, Banco Macro announced the purchase of 50% of Personal Pay for about u$s75 million from Telecom. The wallet was born within the mobile phone company as a payments and loyalty tool, and grew supported by the company’s customer base in mobile, internet, and streaming. At the time of the acquisition, it had 4.7 million users and was the second player in the market to remunerate balances with Mutual Funds (FCI).
"Macro and Personal Pay combine a bank with financial clout and a wallet that already builds a digital and transactional relationship with its users," Fulop comments.
The third position that the co-founder of Brain Network highlights in this fight for share is already coexisting "under the same roof".
Within Galicia Financial Group, the bank and Naranja X complement each other. The bank is now the largest private bank in the country, with more than 5 million users after integrating the former HSBC and its local operations in 2025, and Naranja X, which was born in Córdoba as a card of its own sports chain, expanded to other merchants until it became one of the country’s largest issuers of credit and today is one of the leading fintechs in the ecosystem.
"Galicia and Naranja X have different characteristics, but within the same group they can complement traditional banking, payment methods, fintech, and consumption," the expert argues.
Meanwhile, the fourth and final stance is played "on the ground" of investments, hand in hand with Grupo Supervielle and IOL InvertirOnline, a reference broker in the retail market, with more than 1.7 million accounts, according to company data.
In 2025, it was integrated within the financial group, which added it to the company’s app so its clients can trade stocks, CEDEARs, bonds, and funds without transferring their money to another platform.
"With Supervielle and IOL, we can integrate the banking relationship with a much deeper investment proposal," Fulop summarizes.
All these moves, the financial innovation specialist at iProUP argues, "aren’t the same, but they respond to the same idea." "Instead of trying to build everything from scratch, each one starts by combining its capabilities with assets that already exist."
So, in his analysis, "the fight stops being about who has 'more products on the shelf' and starts being about who manages to put together a combination of capabilities that is difficult for the rest to copy."
However, it indicates that none of them can meet those four positions, since they "require completely different capabilities".
"One thing is having scale and millions of interactions. Another is having balance, regulation, and the ability to manage risk. Another is building a personalized relationship. And a very different thing is generating reasons for someone to come in ten times per week. Wanting to be everything for everyone can end up being a very expensive strategy and, besides, not very differentiated," he asserts.
Habit and frequency as the most coveted resource
Building habit has always been more of a mass consumption arena than finance—and today it has perhaps become the most coveted resource in the entire industry.
This happens because it makes people use a product out of habit—and that is, in fact, how you end up prevailing in the fight for share. In this regard, Fulop says: "Frequency generates something tremendously valuable, which is the context."
"A person can ask for a loan every few years or sign up for a financial product now and then. But they buy, pay, travel, buy fuel, use their phone, or get entertained all the time. Each of those interactions makes it possible to understand better what the customer is doing, what moment they’re in, and what they might need. Retail understood this a long time ago. Selling once isn’t enough—you have to get the customer to come back," he says.
In line, and to wrap up, it reinforces that this shift in paradigm even redefines what the word 'share' means. "For that person to come back, discounts aren’t enough. It has to have been simplified, a good experience, relevant benefits, personalization, and some concrete reason to choose you again. I think that’s where the definition of share changes," he emphasizes.
"For years, banks measured share by number of products. Today, it starts to be about what proportion of the customer’s everyday decisions and flows go through them. That is the real value of alliances and ecosystem-building. Instead of manufacturing a financial habit from scratch, they embed finances into a habit the customer already has," concludes.
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