Nubank: Credit where it’s due

The Brazilian neobank is growing its number of clients faster than perhaps any financial institution on earth. Combine this with static unit costs and the operational leverage potential is big. CFO Guilherme Lago explains how its business model is now focused on the next five to 10 years as open banking generates unprecedented price transparency, customer portability and opportunity.

Nubank has revolutionized digital banking in Latin America. But the foundational ingredient to the bank’s extraordinary growth lies elsewhere, in something a little more humdrum, a little more fundamental: credit.

Not many digital banks actually like credit. Some offer credit reluctantly, such as Banco Pan, whose CEO, Eduardo Carlos Guimarães, told Euromoney last year that “the credit-card business generates a loss, not only to Banco Pan but to the market as a whole”.

A few don’t offer it at all.

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