Money on the Move.

Manuel Monroy is a motorcycle loan officer. Not police officer. Loan officer. Every day he rides the streets of Mexico City, ringing doorbells and dodging barking dogs to visit customers. He is one of 3,000 motorcycle agents of the new Banco Azteca, a revolutionary effort to revive the moribund Mexican banking system by extending its services to the poor and middle class for the first time. Stopping at a house on the impoverished fringe of the outskirts of Mexico City, Monroy fails to get a payment from an overdue customer who recently bought a stereo. "She's just waiting for her paycheck so she can pay, and then she'll borrow some more," says Monroy.

One of Latin America's biggest economies, Mexico also has one of the most crippled banking systems in a hemisphere filled with financial ruins. The peso crisis of 1994 drove Mexican banks into a retreat from which they never fully recovered. Even as Mexico's economy became the region's growth superstar, its banks lagged behind those of its neighbors. According to the World Bank, credit amounts to only 10 percent of GDP in Mexico, compared with 30 percent in Brazil, 20 percent in Argentina and 65 percent in Chile. It is now all but impossible for ordinary Mexicans to get bank credit to buy an appliance, car or house, or to expand a small business. By offering credit in limited forms, and only to a narrow elite, Mexico is failing to build a crucial source of growth for any modern economy. Azteca CEO Carlos Septien says that one way to measure a nation's wealth is to count the ways people can borrow money--just look at the United States, where "everybody owes money."

Hailed by President Vicente Fox as "good for Mexico," Azteca became the first new Mexican bank to win an operating license since the peso crisis. Owned by Grupo Elektra, the new bank extends the credit service Elektra has been offering customers at the three big discount stores in its retail chain for 50 years. Since its November launch, the bank has opened more than 800 outlets by plunking down giant metal safes in Elektra stores. Opening 5,500 new savings accounts a day, with a minimum deposit of just $2, it began last month to offer personal loans for use outside the Elektra stores. This month, it will expand its offerings to include house and car loans and, eventually, microloans for small entrepreneurs.

Even before the peso crisis, Mexican banks shunned the poor. Of the 40 million working Mexicans, half are in the "informal sector," meaning they don't pay taxes or get pay stubs to prove they are employed. About 20 million earn less than $5 a day. They would appear to be bad credit risks. Enter the motorcycle loan officers: they play a role that is part debt collector, part social worker to ...