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BFD Expert Voices - Private Credit

BFD Expert Voices

Nubank, the Brazilian neobank, officially launched its U.S. operations Thursday with a 3.5% APY deposit account, a credit card starting with 1.5% cashback, and no-fee transfers to Brazil and Mexico.

The company plans to boost those figures in the future.

Why it matters: Many foreign neobanks have tried, and failed, to crack the U.S. market.

Now a friendlier regulatory environment has a new wave of better capitalized players making their entry.

Between the lines: Nu, the U.S. neobank, is hoping to move beyond FICO scores, and believes that the lack of fees, it's brand-recognition among the U.S. hispanic population, and rewards will help jumpstart its entry stateside, co-founder Cristina Junqueira tells Axios Pro.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Axios Pro: Many neobanks have tried to plant a flag stateside and eventually withdrew. What are you doing differently?

Junqueira: We spent time studying the ones that tried and failed, and even some of the people that tried and kind of succeeded.

A lot of people underestimated the specificities of the U.S. market, and most started with a deposit account and a debit card. 

The reality is that a [deposit product] is a hard trust hill to climb. You're asking people to give you their money without necessarily having a brand. 

We're not charging fees, we're paying the high yield, and [we have a population that] knows us here. That gives us not the right to win, but certainly the right to compete.

What is different about this product vs. your product in Brazil?

The U.S. is a very credit-card reward oriented market. When we started out of Brazil and out of Mexico, it was with a credit card that didn't have any rewards or any like bells and whistles. That is something mandatory here.

Will the hispanic community in the U.S. be Nu's main focus here?

It's a very multicultural country. We definitely don't want to pigeonhole ourselves into a specific niche in that sense.

Focus on FICO scores in the U.S. have been blamed for shortfalls in banking coverage. Do you plan to use FICO scores?

Coming into the U.S., we don't have any data on the U.S. market, so we're definitely going to have to rely more on the FICO scores. But we are already preparing our models to use sanitized data from other markets and transport those features into the U.S. market.

The goal is to eventually have an internal model that supersedes any other model. If that doesn't require FICO scores anymore, that's great. 

Speaking of this interest in the entire U.S. market — have you thought about acquiring one of the neobanks out there to jumpstart the process?

Yes, we did. We looked at every single one out there — even non-neobanks, companies that had a customer base, or had licenses. It would have been lovely to have found a target that met the criteria. It didn't happen.

The reality is: Acquisitions are very tricky. Often in that process, you need to rebuild the whole tech stack.

What about something like PayPal's Venmo (even if they've not offically put it up for sale) for the sake of customer acquisition?

Well, it could. They have a very big customer base. 

And to be clear, this is just speculation. Nu hasn't had discussions with PayPal or anything.

Totally speculation. There's a lot of chatter in the media, we'll see where it goes.

We'd love for [instant payments] to evolve a bit in the U.S. We're going to allow transfers between Nu users, instant and free within the U.S.

Nu's been really touted for its high efficiency ratio and return on equity — what's the thinking behind getting U.S customers to that level of profitability?

We're going to make money as we make money everywhere else. Interchange on the credit card and on the debit card here are slimmer, we know, but a lot more people revolve on the credit card.

APRs are lower, but delinquency rates are also lower. So there's going to be net interest margins on the on the credit business.

Nubank launches U.S. bank, eyes future beyond FICO scores

The looser regulatory regime has neobanks eyeing the U.S. again.

Cristina Junqueira, co-founder of NU Holdings Ltd., at Bloomberg's Women, Money and Power conference in London, UK, on Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2025. 

Cristina Junqueira, co-founder of NU Holdings in London in 2025. Photographer: Betty Laura Zapata/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Nubank, the Brazilian neobank, officially launched its U.S. operations Thursday with a 3.5% APY deposit account, a credit card starting with 1.5% cashback, and no-fee transfers to Brazil and Mexico.<ul><li>The company plans to boost those figures in the future.</li></ul>Why it matters: Many foreign neobanks have tried, and failed, to crack the U.S. market.

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Nubank launches U.S. bank, eyes future beyond FICO scores

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