Nubank
| Nu Holdings Ltd. (Nubank) | |
|---|---|
| Type | Public |
| Traded as | NYSE: NU |
| Industry | Financial technology Digital banking |
| Founded | 6 May 2013 |
| Founder | David Vélez Cristina Junqueira Edward Wible |
| Headquarters | São Paulo, Brazil; incorporated in the Cayman Islands |
| Key people | David Vélez (Founder and chief executive officer) Cristina Junqueira (Co-founder and vice chair) Youssef Lahrech (President and chief operating officer) |
| Products | Credit cards, digital accounts, personal loans, payroll loans, insurance, investments, marketplace |
| Employees | Approximately 8,000 |
| Website | nubank.com.br |
Nu Holdings Ltd., trading as Nubank in Brazil and as Nu elsewhere, is a digital bank headquartered in São Paulo and incorporated in the Cayman Islands. It is the largest financial technology company in Latin America and, by customer count, one of the largest digital banks in the world, serving more than 140 million people across Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and the United States with annual revenue of approximately US$16 billion.
The company was founded in 2013 by David Vélez, a Colombian former venture capitalist, together with Cristina Junqueira, a Brazilian banker, and Edward Wible, an American engineer. Its first product was an international Mastercard credit card with no annual fee, administered entirely through a mobile application, in a market where the incumbent banks charged substantial fees, required branch visits for routine changes and were regarded by their customers with a degree of resentment unusual even for retail banking.
Nubank listed on the New York Stock Exchange in December 2021 at a valuation of approximately US$45 billion, briefly making it the most valuable financial institution in Latin America, ahead of Itaú Unibanco. Berkshire Hathaway invested a total of US$1 billion before and after the offering.
The company is regulated and supervised by the Central Bank of Brazil as a financial and payment institution. It received conditional approval from the United States Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in January 2026 to establish a national bank.
History
Origins
David Vélez was a partner at Sequoia Capital responsible for Latin America when he attempted, in 2012, to open a bank account in São Paulo. The experience is the founding story of the company and is unusually well documented because Vélez has described it consistently and because the conditions he encountered were general rather than personal.
To open an account he was required to visit a branch, pass through a bulletproof security door operated by a guard, surrender his mobile telephone, wait, and then be told that a foreigner without a Brazilian credit history could not have a credit card. Annual fees on Brazilian credit cards at the time ran to hundreds of reais, interest rates on revolving credit exceeded 200 per cent a year and in some cases 400 per cent, and five banks controlled approximately 80 per cent of the market, a concentration higher than in almost any other large economy.
Vélez concluded that the conditions that made the experience unpleasant, high concentration, high fees, low service quality and near-universal smartphone adoption, also described an opportunity. He left Sequoia, which then funded him, and incorporated the company on 6 May 2013.
On his investors' advice he recruited two co-founders. Cristina Junqueira had run the consumer credit card business at Itaú Unibanco, the largest private bank in Brazil, and understood both the regulation and the economics of the product Nubank intended to attack. Edward Wible, an American engineer who had worked at Boston Consulting Group and in private equity technology, became chief technology officer.
Building the card, 2013 to 2016
The first two years raised approximately 600 million reais together with a US$14.3 million round led by Sequoia Capital with Kaszek Ventures and the investor Nicolas Berggruen.
The product was deliberately narrow: a purple international Mastercard with no annual fee, applied for through an application, approved or refused within days rather than weeks, and managed entirely on the telephone. A customer could see transactions as they occurred, block and unblock the card, request a limit increase and contact support without visiting a branch or telephoning a call centre. None of this was technically remarkable in 2014; all of it was unavailable from Brazilian banks.
The first transaction on a Nubank card was made on 1 April 2014.
Growth came almost entirely by word of mouth and through a waiting list with invitations, a mechanism that both managed the company's ability to underwrite and created the impression of exclusivity around a product whose defining feature was that it cost nothing. Nubank's customer service was the other engine: it answered messages in ordinary Portuguese rather than in legal formulae, and it built a practice of sending handwritten notes and small gifts in response to particular customer situations, episodes that customers photographed and circulated. The company was, for several years, the most talked-about brand on Brazilian social media.
Tiger Global Management led the Series B in June 2015 alongside Sequoia, Kaszek and QED Investors.
Becoming a bank, 2017 to 2020
Nubank launched two products in 2017 that changed it from a card issuer into a bank in everything but the formal designation.
NuConta was a digital account paying interest at the benchmark rate on balances, with free transfers and no maintenance fee, in a market where current accounts typically carried a monthly charge and paid nothing. Nubank Rewards was a loyalty programme whose points could be applied against the customer's own statement or redeemed for travel and services, offered free for 30 days and then charged.
Debit payments followed in late 2018, personal loans entered testing in early 2019, and insurance, investments and a marketplace were added over the following years. The Ultravioleta card, a premium product launched in 2021 with a metal body and cashback, was Nubank's move upmarket, and NuInvest, built on the Easynvest acquisition, gave it a brokerage.
The company reached a valuation of US$1 billion in 2018. In October 2018 Tencent took a minority stake worth US$180 million, half in new capital and half in existing shares. Nubank entered the Guinness Book of Records the same year for the world's largest unboxing, a marketing exercise built around a new card design.
Its first international step was Mexico, announced in May 2019 and operated through a subsidiary named Nu, chosen because the Brazilian brand did not translate and because Mexico presented the same structural conditions: high concentration, high fees and low banking penetration, with roughly half the adult population outside the formal financial system. Colombia followed in November 2020.
Acquisitions began in January 2020 with Plataformatec, a São Paulo software consultancy known for its work on the Elixir programming language and on agile practice, bought principally for its engineers. In July 2020 Nubank acquired Cognitect, the American company behind the Clojure programming language and the Datomic database, which Nubank used extensively in its own systems; the purchase made the company the steward of a widely used open-source language, an unusual position for a bank. In September 2020 it bought Easynvest, a Brazilian investment brokerage with more than a million customers.
Edward Wible stepped down as chief technology officer in April 2021 after eight years, moving to direct technological platforms.
Listing and scale, 2021 to 2026
Nubank listed on the New York Stock Exchange on 9 December 2021, raising approximately US$2.6 billion at a valuation of about US$45 billion. Berkshire Hathaway invested US$500 million before the offering and a further US$250 million in it, together with earlier participation totalling around US$1 billion, an unusual position for a company whose investment philosophy has generally avoided both technology and emerging markets.
The listing made Cristina Junqueira the second woman in Brazil to become a self-made billionaire, on a holding of approximately 2.9 per cent then worth about US$1.3 billion.
The share price fell sharply in 2022 along with the rest of the technology sector and amid scepticism about whether a bank that had grown by giving away fee-free products could earn an adequate return on its customers. It recovered strongly from 2023 as the company demonstrated that it could: revenue per active customer rose steadily as customers moved from a single free card to lending, investment and insurance, while the cost to serve each customer stayed at a small fraction of what a branch-based bank spends.
Forbes ranked Nubank first among fifteen Brazilian banks in 2022.
The company has been an early and prominent adopter of large language models. In October 2023 it announced a system built on OpenAI's GPT-4 to support credit decisions and to act as a virtual assistant advising customers on card use. In March 2025 it announced a broader partnership with OpenAI covering internal enterprise search, giving employees access to policies, guidelines and documentation, and the use of GPT-4o to assist customer service agents. Nubank's chief executive has said that a bank whose entire relationship with customers is conducted in text is unusually well positioned to apply language models, and that the company expects to operate at a materially lower cost per customer as a result.
Also in October 2023 Nu México applied for a banking licence in Mexico, having until then operated under narrower authorisations, and Nubank began offering payroll-deducted loans to Brazilian social security pensioners, a large and low-risk lending category previously dominated by the incumbents. In May 2024 it launched a travel eSIM with the connectivity company Gigs.
Following an application in late 2025, the United States Office of the Comptroller of the Currency granted conditional approval in January 2026 for Nubank to establish a national bank, its first regulated presence in a developed market. The initial focus is expected to be customers with ties to Latin America, including remittances.
On 4 March 2026 Nu announced a multi-year partnership with Inter Miami CF as a main partner, under which the club's new ground at Miami Freedom Park is to be named Nu Stadium, a substantial statement of intent in the American market and one attached to the most visible football club in the country.
Products and business model
Products
Nubank's product set has expanded from one item to a full retail bank.
Credit cards remain the core: the standard purple Mastercard with no annual fee, and the Ultravioleta premium card. NuConta is the digital account, paying interest on balances and offering free transfers through the Brazilian instant payment system Pix. Lending covers unsecured personal loans, payroll-deducted loans for public sector employees and pensioners, and secured credit against investments and vehicles. NuInvest offers brokerage and funds. Insurance includes life and mobile telephone cover, distributed rather than underwritten. Nu Marketplace sells third-party goods and services within the application, and the company has added mobile telephone service and a travel eSIM.
The design principle throughout is that the product is the application. Nubank has no branches, its customer service is conducted principally in writing, and every action a customer might need is available without speaking to anyone.
How it makes money
Nubank's economics differ from those of an incumbent bank in a way worth stating precisely, because the difference explains both the growth and the profitability.
A traditional Brazilian bank acquires customers through branches, which are expensive to build and staff, and earns much of its revenue from account maintenance fees, transaction charges and the spread on deposits. Its cost to serve a customer is high and largely fixed.
Nubank acquires customers almost free, principally by referral, and its cost to serve is a small number of dollars a year because there is no branch and very little human contact. It gives away the products that incumbents charge for, and earns instead on the interest spread on lending, on interchange from card transactions, and on the distribution of investments and insurance. Because the cost base is so much lower, it can lend profitably to customers the incumbents decline, which is the mechanism by which it has brought tens of millions of people into formal credit for the first time.
The credit strategy is deliberately incremental. New customers receive very small limits, often the equivalent of a few dozen dollars, which rise as repayment behaviour is observed. This produces a low initial loss rate, a large volume of behavioural data on customers with no bureau history, and an underwriting model that improves with scale in a way competitors cannot easily replicate.
Technology
Nubank was built from the start on cloud infrastructure and on a microservice architecture, without the mainframe core banking systems that constrain incumbent banks and that consume a large share of their technology budgets.
Its engineering is unusually associated with functional programming. The company is among the largest commercial users of Clojure, a Lisp dialect running on the Java virtual machine, and its 2020 purchase of Cognitect brought the language's creator Rich Hickey and its principal maintainers in house, together with the Datomic database, whose immutable append-only model suits financial records particularly well since every historical state remains queryable. Nubank has continued to fund and release both as open source, and its engineering blog and conference presence have made it one of the better-known technology employers in Latin America.
Machine learning underpins credit decisioning, fraud detection and customer service routing, and the company has published on the specific problem of underwriting people with no credit history, where conventional models have nothing to work from.
Markets
Brazil
Brazil is the great majority of Nubank's customers and revenue. The company serves well over half of the adult population, a penetration that few retail financial institutions anywhere have achieved, and it is the primary banking relationship for a growing proportion of them, which is the measure that matters commercially.
The Brazilian market has been unusually receptive for two reasons beyond the incumbents' unpopularity. Smartphone penetration is high and mobile-first behaviour is the norm. And the Central Bank of Brazil has been among the most activist regulators in the world in promoting competition, introducing the Pix instant payment system in November 2020, which is free, works between any institutions and has been adopted with extraordinary speed, and open banking arrangements requiring incumbents to share customer data on request. Pix removed a large part of the incumbents' transaction revenue and, more importantly, removed the friction that kept customers attached to a single institution.
Competition has intensified accordingly. Mercado Libre's Mercado Pago, PicPay, Inter, C6 Bank and the incumbent banks' own digital offerings all compete for the same customers, and the incumbents have responded by cutting fees and improving applications, which is the outcome the regulator intended.
Mexico
Mexico is the second market and the principal growth opportunity. Approximately half the adult population is outside the formal financial system, cash remains dominant in retail, and concentration among a handful of largely foreign-owned banks is high.
Nu Mexico launched with a credit card in 2019 and has since added a deposit account whose interest rate has at times been the highest available in the market, a deliberate customer acquisition instrument. It obtained approval to operate as a regulated bank following its October 2023 application, which permits a wider product range and reduces its funding cost.
Growth has been rapid and the market has proved harder than Brazil: credit information is thinner, informality is higher, and the regulatory process has been slower.
Colombia
Colombia, entered in November 2020, is the smallest of the three Latin American markets and has followed a similar path, beginning with a card and adding deposits and lending.
United States
The conditional national bank approval granted in January 2026 marks Nubank's first move into a developed market. The strategic logic rests on the very large population of Latin American origin in the United States, on remittance flows to Mexico and Brazil that are among the largest in the world and that carry substantial fees, and on the company's existing brand recognition among that population.
The Inter Miami sponsorship and the naming of Nu Stadium are the first large marketing commitments attached to this.
Leadership and culture
David Vélez remains chief executive and the company's controlling shareholder through a dual-class structure that gives his shares twenty votes each. Born in Medellín and educated at Stanford, he worked at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs before Sequoia. He and his wife signed the Giving Pledge in 2021, committing the majority of their wealth to philanthropy, and have funded education and entrepreneurship programmes in Latin America.
Cristina Junqueira, co-founder and vice chair, ran consumer credit cards at Itaú before joining and has been the public face of the company in Brazil. She has spoken frequently about the difficulty of building a company while having children and about the small number of women in senior positions in Brazilian finance, and the company has pursued gender balance targets that it publishes.
Youssef Lahrech, previously of Capital One, is president and chief operating officer.
The internal culture is explicitly modelled on Silicon Valley rather than on Brazilian banking, with a flat structure, open information, English as a working language in much of the technology organisation, and equity granted widely. The company recruits heavily from outside Brazil and operates engineering offices in São Paulo, Berlin, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Bogotá and Durham, North Carolina.
Criticism
Nubank's reception has been notably favourable by the standards of financial institutions, and the criticisms that exist fall into several categories.
Credit quality is the standing question. A business that grew by extending credit to people the established banks declined will, in a downturn, discover whether its underwriting was better than theirs or merely newer. Non-performing loans rose in 2022 and 2023 as Brazilian interest rates rose sharply and household indebtedness increased, and the company's provisions rose with them. Its loss rates have remained within the range it guided, which is the principal evidence for the underwriting, and the model has not yet been tested by a severe recession.
Customer service complaints have grown with scale. The written-only model that delighted early customers is less satisfactory when something goes seriously wrong, and Nubank has periodically appeared in the Central Bank's complaint rankings, though generally at rates per customer below the incumbents. Account blocks arising from fraud controls, which can leave a customer without access to money and without a branch to visit, are the most frequent specific complaint.
Fraud and security pressures are severe in Brazil, where coerced transfers under physical threat, known as sequestro relâmpago, and application cloning are common. Nubank has introduced controls including night-time transfer limits and delayed high-value transfers, which reduce losses and inconvenience legitimate customers.
Profitability and valuation were disputed for several years, with sceptics including short sellers arguing that the customer numbers concealed a large proportion of inactive accounts and very low revenue per customer. The company's subsequent results have largely answered this, and revenue per active customer has risen consistently while cost to serve has not.
Governance criticism concerns the dual-class share structure and the Cayman Islands incorporation, both common for companies listing from emerging markets and both reducing the influence of outside shareholders.
Assessment
Nubank is the most successful financial technology company to have emerged outside the United States and Europe, and its success rests on a proposition that was not technically difficult and that the incumbents could have offered at any point: a bank account and a credit card that cost nothing and that work on a telephone.
That they did not is the interesting part. Five banks holding four-fifths of a market of 200 million people, earning very high returns on fees that customers resented and could not avoid, had every commercial reason to leave things as they were. Nubank's achievement was to recognise that the resulting resentment was an asset, that the cost of acquiring customers in such a market approaches zero, and that a technology base without legacy systems could serve them at a cost the incumbents could not match.
The Central Bank of Brazil's decisions, particularly Pix and open banking, were at least as important as anything Nubank did, and the company's growth would have been considerably slower without them. This is worth stating because the lesson most often drawn from Nubank, that a good application beats an entrenched incumbent, is incomplete: a regulator determined to remove the incumbents' structural advantages was the other half of it.
The open questions are whether the credit book survives a serious recession, whether Mexico and the United States can be made to work as Brazil has, and whether a company that grew by charging nothing can raise revenue per customer far enough to justify a valuation that assumes it will. The evidence since 2023 has favoured the company on all three, and none is yet settled.