Héctor Cárdenas and the sale that could not happen

On September 28, 2011, Héctor Cárdenas flew from Toronto to Mexico City. The day before, he had received permission to work in Canada. After six years there, he finally had a document that would let him stay. He chose to leave. There is something pleasingly awkward about that sequence: acquire the option, then decline it. The paper was useful. It clarified what he wanted.

He wanted to build a technology business in Mexico. He had an engineering education, two future cofounders and a country full of problems that software might help solve. He did not yet have the right problem. Finding it would require abandoning a directory, building online shops and discovering that a handsome storefront was rather little use when the customer could not pay.

Today, Cárdenas is the CEO and cofounder of Conekta, the Mexico City payments company. Its story begins with a young programmer’s confidence and proceeds through a long education in listening. For a business that handles money, the most interesting early transaction may have been this exchange: the founders gave up their preferred idea, and their customers gave them a better one.

A Canadian education, a Mexican destination

Cárdenas grew up in Torreón, in Coahuila. His mother’s background was computer science; his father’s was electronics. Technology and entrepreneurship were familiar subjects at home, well before anyone needed to explain the word startup. At eighteen, he left the region to study mechatronics engineering at the University of Waterloo.

Mechatronics brings mechanical systems, electronics and software together. For someone who already expected to start a business, that breadth had an obvious attraction: learn enough to make things. His Waterloo studies ran from 2006 to 2011. The ambition preceded the qualification. As he put it later, “Siempre supe que iba a ser emprendedor.” He had always known he would be an entrepreneur.

Waterloo also supplied the people. At Velocity, an entrepreneurial residence and workspace, he met Cristina Randall, who had returned from an exchange in Monterrey. Leo Fischer was her engineering project partner. Their conversations turned toward Mexico. Randall and Fischer had seen the country; Cárdenas knew it as home. An emerging market offered problems they could work on together.

That connection matters because Conekta is sometimes compressed into a single-founder story. There were three engineers, with different experiences and a shared willingness to move. The work ahead would demand both technical skill and the ability to question what that skill was being used for. A university could supply the former. Customers would supply the latter, with considerably less ceremony.

The customers wanted something else

The first venture in Mexico was a business directory. The founders imagined making local companies easier to discover, with reviews and paid visibility. Cárdenas went door to door in Condesa, trying to sell businesses a premium listing. The owners had a simpler request: they wanted their own websites and online stores. He was offering better placement on his platform; they were asking for a place of their own.

It is an almost comic sales predicament. The prospective customer explains what he would buy, while the seller explains what he would prefer to sell. Cárdenas has recalled it without pretending he understood immediately. The directory represented work, conviction and code. Giving it up meant conceding that building something complicated did not guarantee that anyone needed it.

The next version was a cloud-based storefront builder. It brought the founders closer to the practical business of selling: products had to be listed, orders fulfilled and money collected. They integrated shipping services through Estafeta. For merchants, software was becoming useful when it connected the attractive website to the distinctly unglamorous work that followed an order.

Then another obstacle appeared. A shop could launch and still struggle to take payment. For a company charging merchants to run online stores, that was a rather serious defect. The founders considered the underlying logistics and payments problems and chose payments. By late 2012, the business was moving toward the model that would become Conekta. Cárdenas later dated its first processed payment to February 2013.

The checkout had to speak cash

Conekta built a payment API, an interface that let developers connect payment processing to their own applications. Larger businesses could preserve their own customer experience instead of accepting a fixed storefront. The founders had moved a layer down: other people could build the visible shop while Conekta worked on the machinery beneath the checkout.

For Cárdenas, Mexico’s habits had to shape that machinery. A person could be comfortable online and still want to pay in cash. Those preferences could coexist. In his 2023 discussion of e-commerce, he argued for integrating cash into online buying rather than expecting every shopper to arrive with a card. The relevant question was how to complete the purchase using a method the customer trusted.

The OXXO relationship gave that idea a physical route. A shopper selected the cash option online, received a payment reference and took it to a convenience store. The merchant then received confirmation of payment. The web order and the cash counter became parts of one transaction. There was no requirement that the customer become a different sort of customer first.

FEMSA joined Conekta’s 2016 Series A, alongside other investors. The partnership helped develop OXXO Pay, with real-time confirmation for cash purchases. Cárdenas’s work was now joining two kinds of infrastructure: the software developers used and the shops people already visited. A convenience store could serve as a practical doorway into e-commerce. Progress, in this instance, still required a walk down the street.

The programmer learns to sell

The job was also changing Cárdenas. In an early interview, he described handling sales or support for Conekta’s first hundred customers. That contact brought product feedback directly to someone who understood how the system was made. It also gave customers a clear view of the company’s stage: a young business asking them to help improve a service they needed.

His advice grew out of that experience. Founders should take early customer conversations themselves. An unhappy merchant was supplying information that a quiet departure would never provide. A checkout problem is wonderfully difficult to dismiss: someone was trying to buy something, and the money failed to arrive. A founder who answers that call gets a brisk education in priorities.

He also had to learn how to let other people build. In 2024, Cárdenas described the difficulty of releasing technical responsibilities to Fischer. He began studying sales, marketing and management, and asking mentors and investors for help. He acknowledged the value of bringing in people whose experience exceeded his own. Engineering confidence had got the company started; it could not cover every job the company created.

The result was an unexpected enthusiasm for sales. He enjoyed understanding a customer’s needs and working toward a solution. That is a revealing development for someone trained to write software. The conversation became part of the design process. A useful question could change the product before a line of code changed, and sometimes save the team from writing the wrong thousand lines altogether.

“We’re technologists building financial products.”

Héctor Cárdenas, 2016

A camel, and a wider circle

Capital was another education. Conekta developed in a market where financing and supporting infrastructure were harder to assemble than the founders’ Canadian experience might suggest. Cárdenas has embraced the camel analogy associated with investor Alex Lazarow: a company capable of surviving difficult conditions. The animal offers fewer decorative possibilities than a unicorn, but a rather better relationship with a long journey.

By February 2024, he was describing a conservative emphasis on profitability and improving the product. Those choices belong to a particular moment, rather than a timeless company slogan. They show a founder thinking about the resources available, the conditions ahead and how to keep working. Survival had become a business consideration he could discuss openly.

His circle widened through Endeavor, which recognized him as an entrepreneur in 2018. He subsequently completed Endeavor programs at Harvard Business School in 2019 and Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2022. In 2023, he shared lessons about entering Mexico with twenty-five entrepreneurs at Endeavor Argentina. The returning graduate was now explaining the terrain to others.

In 2025, he announced a FinTech México Festival panel with Cobre’s Jose V. Gedeon, focused on payment infrastructure. Such appearances fit the work he had described as CEO: communicating the company’s purpose, building a team and considering what comes next. They also make his experience available beyond Conekta. The early mistakes have acquired a second use, as warnings someone else might heed.

Another turn beneath the storefront

On April 29, 2024, Conekta and Digital@FEMSA announced an agreement covering the sale of assets that enabled OXXO Pay. Cárdenas said Conekta would continue independently and focus on its other payment products. It was a substantial change in the relationship that had helped define the company. The cash-payment bridge had become something valuable enough to hand to a different operator.

His plans included cards, bank transfers, the company’s Fortress fraud-prevention technology and better analytical tools for merchants. An accepted payment can still become a costly disputed transaction. Helping a merchant collect money therefore involves more than making a button work. The sale announcement repositioned Conekta around that continuing problem of reliable, secure commerce.

In September 2026, Conekta announced CNBV authorization to operate as a direct non-bank acquirer. The company said the change would reduce dependence on banking intermediaries and give it more control over card processing. It also reported more than 428 million transactions and over US$15 billion processed. Those are company totals, rather than measures of Cárdenas’s personal wealth or a promise about the next payment.

On October 6, 2026, his remarks at Mexico Digital Summit returned to merchants’ access and the need for industry cooperation against fraud. He also discussed Conekta’s ambition to eliminate merchant chargebacks. That remains an ambition. The distinction matters: a founder can identify the next problem without having finished solving it.

The Toronto work permit offered Cárdenas a way to stay where he had studied. He chose a more uncertain route, then revised it repeatedly. The continuity lies in the customer: first the business asking for a website, then the shop unable to collect money, now the merchant wanting a payment to remain a payment. His career keeps returning to that ordinary request. Someone has made a sale. Help them get paid.