Brazil’s digital bank powerhouse Nu on Thursday announced its launch in the United States, bringing its low-fee, customer-centered banking to the world’s biggest financial market.
Nu’s co-founder and US CEO Cristina Junqueira said the bank will offer at least 3.5 percent annual interest on deposits, no-fee credit cards, and a minimum 1.5 percent cash-back on credit-card purchases. among other features to US customers, starting up in partnership with an existing US financial institution, Lead Bank.
Nu also has conditional approval for U.S. authorities to start its own national charter bank, which could come next year.
“Launching through a partner bank model today allows the company to start serving customers and gathering feedback early,” Nu said in a news release Thursday, inviting US customers to sign up through its app, nu.com.
Junquiera and Nu’s global CEO David Velez made the announcement to more than a hundred people gathered in Nu Stadium in Miami – Nu’s new US headquarters – and in a broadcast carried live on Nu’s YouTube Channel. More than 14,000 devices streamed the event. Listeners chatted online in Portuguese from Brazil, Spanish from Colombia and Mexico, and English from the USA, some posting heart emojis in Nu’s signature color of purple.
“This is an infinite game for us, and honestly, we’re just getting started,” Velez said to rounds of applause.
Velez [pictured below] also announced another initiative, Nu Global, that uses stablecoin to speed and simplify international transfers and will extend Nu to 35 more countries beyond the US and its current base of 140 million clients in Brazil, Mexico and Colombia.
Seeking to fight complexity in banking
Velez said the spark for Nu was his own agonizing experience trying to open a bank account and obtain a credit card in Brazil after his move there in 2012. It took five months, he said, to obtain a credit card with a whopping 1,200 percent interest rate.
“Why are they treating me like they’re doing me a favor?,” Velez asked. He decided with co-founders to open an all-digital bank with no branches, offering systems that are “simple, transparent and on the customer’s side.”
After business exploded in Brazil, the bank entered Mexico in 2018, now serving more than 16 million customers there. In 2021, it started up in Colombia, expanding fast, because “people just wanted to be treated well.”
Velez estimates Nu so far has saved customers more than $28 billion in fees they would have spent at banks if Nu did not exist. What’s more, Nu has saved customers 77 years in time they’d otherwise spent on banking, he added.
Now, Nu wants to take its “customer-obsessed, digitally-native” model global, eventually serving even the nearly 3 billion worldwide who are either unbanked and underbanked, Velez said.
Why the US? Why now?
Junqueira [pictured below] said many of Nu’s customers from Latin America who live, work or travel in the US had been asking the bank to expand into the USA. Her own experience also proved the need for a customer-focused approach: After moving to South Florida, with her husband and four children, it took months to obtain a US credit card from the same US bank that held her mortgage.
She’s excited that Nu now can offer US customers not only unlimited cash back and strong interest rates on deposits but also “a real person to talk to” by phone round-the-clock, she said.
Nu is expanding in the US from a US headquarters in Coral Gables. That South Florida office and its staff across the US are sure to grow as the new partnership with Lead Bank takes off online.
All photos by Maria Derchi Russo/Refresh Miami
READ MORE IN REFRESH MIAMI: Brazil-based digital bank Nu prepares to start US operations, building from its US headquarters in South Florida – Refresh Miami
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