The rise in Argentine household debt has begun to show an increasingly hard-to-ignore signal: delinquency in the universe of virtual wallets, fintechs, and non-banking financial institutions skyrocketed at the start of 2026 and is now hovering around 25%, with private estimates even placing it above that level. The data is particularly sensitive because, according to the same reading, 100% of the top 25 banks recorded an increase in family delinquency, reinforcing the idea that this is not a matter of isolated imbalances but a broader macroeconomic phenomenon. The background of the problem is closely linked to the cost of credit. A report noted that between 2019 and mid-2025, the nominal interest rates on personal loans from non-financial entities were, on average, 90% higher than those from financial entities. This report also warns that delinquency on household loans within the regulated financial system rose for the fifteenth consecutive month, increasing from 9.3% in December to 10.6% in January, marking a high in over two decades. Nevertheless, the deterioration continued to advance and began to be flagged by Moody's, which warned that asset quality has become the main challenge for Argentine banks, with rising delinquency at least in the short term before a possible stabilization towards mid-2026. The underlying signal is unsettling. The deterioration does not appear as an isolated problem of one or two companies, but as an extended phenomenon that affects a large part of alternative credit and, moreover, begins to coexist with a sustained worsening also within the traditional banking system. According to a survey by EcoGo, delinquency in non-banking credit portfolios reached 23.9% in January 2026. The BCRA itself had reported in its latest available report that delinquency in private sector credit was increasing and that household delinquency had risen in the last months of 2025, while the system continued to show resilience due to still high levels of capital and provisions. Analysts from 1816 link the worsening of delinquency and the slowdown in private credit to the new monetary regime established since mid-2025, after the end of LEFI and the elimination of the interest rate corridor. According to their calculations, delinquency on these loans exceeded 27% in January, a level not seen since episodes of strong macroeconomic stress such as 2019 and 2020. The same report showed a strong deterioration in portfolio quality: the portion of loans in a normal or low-risk situation fell from 92.1% in December 2024 to 76.1% in January this year, while loans classified as 'irrecoverable' escalated from 2.7% to 8% in the same period. And even with the drop in inflation, the weight of the installments continued to be suffocating: for February 2026, the real effective annual rate of personal loans in financial entities was around 39.7%, while in non-financial entities it could climb up to 149.1%, according to that estimate. The report also calculated that non-banking credit already represents 13.3% of the system's total financing and 17.1% of consumer credit, with a stock of 13.84 trillion pesos. The consultancy 1816 paints an even more severe picture for the non-banking segment focused on families. According to their reading, since then, short-term rates have started to move abruptly, forcing banks, financial companies, and alternative lenders to make decisions in a much more marked climate of uncertainty. This instability, added to the tightening of conditions for debt refinancing, would have further aggravated the fragility of many portfolios. The problem is no longer confined to the fintech segment. Credit started to grow again, but part of that growth was at very high rates, targeting households with still fragile incomes in a disinflation context that, paradoxically, also complicates things for those who took fixed-rate loans and now feel the real weight of the installments more acutely. In the non-banking world, where access is usually faster but much more expensive, that tension has already turned into massive delinquency. In other words, an increasing number of households have been trapped in a scheme where refinancing or taking on debt outside the banks meant doing so at an extraordinarily high cost. To this pressure was added another ingredient: the volatility of money. And in traditional banking, although with smaller numbers, the trend also ceased to be an isolated episode to become a systemic wake-up call.
