Mexico’s Coppel Brothers Unmasked With $16 Billion Fortune

In 1970, Enrique Coppel Tamayo introduced a credit card that allowed his working-class customers to buy clothing and furniture at a handful of retail stores he owned in Culiacan, Mexico.

Four decades later, his five billionaire sons have leveraged that idea into a countrywide network of 1,000 emporiums, where low-income shoppers buy goods such as smartphones, washing machines and Lacoste perfumes on credit. They often opt to pay interest rates of as high as 60 percent -- more than 13 times the central bank’s benchmark -- to stretch their purchases over multiple installments.