Neobanks/GuideEdition №08
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LatAm / Argentina · Updated 11 March 2026

Argentina's neobanks,
by BCRA licence class.

Argentine neobanking sits across three regulator surfaces: a BCRA full-bank licence (Ualá Banco, post-Wilobank), the BCRA Proveedor de Servicios de Pago (PSP) wallet class (Mercado Pago, Brubank, Naranja X — wallet balances are NOT SEDESA-covered), and the CNV brokerage / ALYC regime that governs the FCI money-market funds — Rendimientos, Ualá Bis, Mercado Pago Inversiones — most ARS holders use as an inflation hedge. Layered on top is the federal Impuesto PAIS, which makes cross-border card spend materially more expensive than the Mastercard or Visa rate alone suggests. The licence class drives the protection — read it before the marketing.

1SEDESA-covered chartered bank
3BCRA / CNV regulator surfaces
~30%Impuesto PAIS on cross-border card spend
Last verified11 March 2026
01 — The licence taxonomy

Three regulator surfaces,
one SEDESA-covered class.

Argentina's framework reads in three layers. Two BCRA licence classes govern the everyday spending and savings products, and a separate CNV regime governs the peso money-market funds that ARS holders use as an inflation hedge. Only one of the three carries deposit insurance — the chartered-bank class. Read the licence on the receiving entity before assuming a balance is protected.

BANK · BCRA full-bank licence
Ualá Banco S.A.SEDESA
BCRA-published ceilingInflation-indexed
Banco comercial primer gradoFull BCRA supervision
PSP · Proveedor de Servicios de Pago
Mercado Pago, Brubank, Naranja XBCRA Com. A 6885
NOT SEDESACustody-bank chain
Wallet-class balancesSegregated, not insured
ALYC · CNV brokerage (FCI)
Rendimientos, Ualá BisCNV-regulated
NOT a depositInvestment product
Money-market fund (FCI)Variable yield
02 — The ranking

All 4, by licence + protection class.

01
Ualá BCRA banco comercial de primer grado (post-Wilobank, 2022)
BANK Ley de Entidades Financieras
SEDESA-covered (deposits) Eligible
SEDESA
→
02
Mercado Pago BCRA Proveedor de Servicios de Pago (Comunicación A 6885)
PSP BCRA Com. A 6885
NOT SEDESA custody-bank chain
—
→
03
Brubank BCRA-supervised digital wallet (PSP-class)
PSP BCRA Com. A 6885
NOT SEDESA custody-bank chain
—
04
Naranja X BCRA-supervised wallet (Grupo Galicia / ex-Tarjeta Naranja)
PSP BCRA Com. A 6885
NOT SEDESA custody-bank chain
—

Structured-data rows for Ualá and Mercado Pago sourced from the neobanks index · uala, mercado-pago

Deposit protection LATAM-AR
Scheme
SEDESA
Ceiling
AR$6,000,000
Regulator
Banco Central de la República Argentina (BCRA)

Seguro de Depósitos S.A. (SEDESA) cubre hasta AR$6.000.000 por depositante por entidad financiera autorizada por el BCRA. La cobertura aplica únicamente a entidades financieras supervisadas (bancos y compañías financieras). Las billeteras digitales y PSP (Proveedores de Servicios de Pago) registrados en BCRA no son miembros de SEDESA — los fondos de clientes están segregados en cuentas a la vista en bancos, pero no están asegurados como depósitos. Importante: el tope nominal en pesos no se ajusta automáticamente por inflación, por lo que su valor real en USD puede erosionarse rápidamente; verifique el monto vigente con SEDESA antes de asumir cobertura.

Primary source: https://www.sedesa.gob.ar/

03 — SEDESA: who's covered, who isn't

Read the licence,
not the marketing.

The Sistema de Seguro de Garantía de los Depósitos (SEDESA) covers eligible Argentine peso and US-dollar deposits at BCRA-licensed banks up to a per-depositor per-institution ceiling published by BCRA Comunicación A. The ceiling is inflation-indexed and is updated periodically — it has been raised repeatedly since 2018 to track ARS inflation, so the headline figure on a third-party page can be out of date within months. Verify the current peso ceiling on bcra.gob.ar or sedesa.gob.ar before relying on the cover. Membership is statutory for BCRA-licensed banks: Ualá Banco S.A. — the post-Wilobank entity — is a SEDESA member, and an eligible peso deposit there sits inside the same statutory envelope as a deposit at Banco Galicia or BBVA Argentina.

PSP wallets are not SEDESA-covered. Mercado Pago, Brubank, and Naranja X operate as BCRA-supervised Proveedores de Servicios de Pago under Comunicación A 6885 and successors. The PSP regime requires customer funds to be held in segregated accounts at custody banks — segregation protects funds from the failure of the PSP itself, but it is not deposit insurance. Recovery in a PSP failure depends on the segregation arrangement and the custody bank, not on a state-backed compensation scheme. The brand on the app is the same family of products consumers use every day; the licence on the receiving entity is categorically different from a chartered bank's.

FCI / Rendimientos balances are not deposits at all. The peso money-market funds Argentine fintechs market as Rendimientos, Ualá Bis, or Mercado Pago Inversiones are FCIs (Fondos Comunes de Inversión) regulated by the CNV (Comisión Nacional de Valores), not bank deposits. They are investment products: returns can fall, the fund administrator carries the credit and operational risk, and the balance is NOT covered by SEDESA. Treating a Rendimientos balance as equivalent to a savings account is the single most common Argentine retail-banking misread — it is an investment in a CNV-regulated fund that happens to track short-tenor BCRA-regulated peso instruments, not insured savings.

See the individual Ualá review, Mercado Pago review, Is Ualá safe?, and Is Mercado Pago safe? pages for product-level and licence-level detail on the two structured rows.

04 — The Argentine inflation playbook

Why ARS holders don't leave pesos in a demand account.

Argentine inflation makes leaving pesos in a non-yielding account a guaranteed real loss. Through 2024–2025 the BCRA monetary policy rate sat well above 70% nominal as the central bank fought peso inflation; the published yield on Rendimientos and peer FCIs moved in sympathy. That is the headline number on every wallet — but the published yield is nominal, not real, and for most of that window inflation outpaced it. Rendimientos was an inflation-tracking holding pattern, not a real-return product. The structural pattern almost every Argentine retail user runs is: keep daily-spend pesos minimal, sweep idle ARS into a Rendimientos / FCI position, and hold longer-term wealth in USD-denominated instruments outside the wallet entirely. The choice between Ualá Banco's SEDESA-covered peso deposit and a wallet-level FCI is not a like-for-like comparison: one is statutory deposit cover at a small ceiling, the other is a CNV-regulated investment with a higher but variable yield.

The federal Impuesto PAIS layers a separate problem onto everyday cards. It applies to foreign-currency consumer purchases by Argentine residents — most cross-border card spend, most foreign-currency online subscriptions, and most travel — at a rate set by federal decree (historically ~30% on most consumer categories, with the rate and scope adjusted multiple times since 2019). The AFIP income-tax pre-payment runs on top, and provincial Ingresos Brutos applies in some jurisdictions. None of this is a fintech fee, but it is the structural reason an Argentine resident travelling abroad will see card statements that look two to three times more expensive than the Mastercard or Visa rate alone implies. Pair an ARS-denominated daily card with a separate USD-denominated card or USD-denominated holding for any cross-border use case.

05 — Methodology

How this ranking is built.

Each candidate is scored on licence class (BCRA full bank vs PSP vs CNV ALYC), SEDESA membership status, the published Rendimientos / FCI yield where applicable, parent backing, and product surface (peso deposit + card vs wallet-plus-FCI vs distribution-led). The ranking is editorial and explicitly excludes affiliate compensation as a ranking input — none of the structured rows on this page carry an affiliate relationship at the time of writing. Licence-status references and SEDESA-membership statements were verified against BCRA's published licensee register at bcra.gob.ar, the SEDESA member list at sedesa.gob.ar, the CNV registered-fund list at cnv.gov.ar, each operator's public deposit-product page, and reporting from Reuters, Bloomberg, La Nación, Infobae, El Cronista, and Buenos Aires Times on the dates noted in data_as_of. Where Argentine federal-decree changes (Impuesto PAIS rate adjustments, SEDESA ceiling updates) shift the underlying numbers, the relevant prose calls it out and points readers at the BCRA / AFIP primary sources for current status. We do not reproduce BCRA-confidential supervisory ratings.

06 — Verdict

For SEDESA-covered pesos, only one of these is a bank.

For ARS-denominated peso deposits where statutory cover is load-bearing, Ualá Banco S.A. is the only structurally clean pick in the cohort — the post-Wilobank BCRA full-bank licence puts an eligible peso balance inside the SEDESA envelope at the BCRA-published ceiling. Mercado Pago is the dominant merchant-acceptance and QR-payments wallet and the natural home for Rendimientos as an inflation-tracking holding pattern, but the PSP licence carries no deposit cover. Brubank and Naranja X sit in the same wallet class as Mercado Pago — useful for distribution and product-surface reasons, not for deposit-protection reasons. The rational pattern for an Argentine resident is: Ualá Banco for SEDESA-covered peso savings up to the ceiling, Mercado Pago (or peer) for daily QR and merchant flow, Rendimientos / FCI on whichever app has the better same-day rate, and a separate USD-denominated holding outside the wallet entirely for cross-border and inflation-hedge use cases. Splitting balances by use case — and by licence class — is how the structural Argentine inflation problem is managed at retail scale.