Nu Holdings Ltd. Status update

Hello, everyone. Good morning. Thank you for being here. It's an honor to welcome you here into our new stadium. I see so many familiar faces. The room is packed, and we have over 10,000 people watching online. Really amazing special moment for us to share an incredible announcement. That video covered 13 years in just a few minutes. I wish building Nubank had been that smooth. The reality was considerably messier. It started with an ordinary moment. In 2012, I moved to São Paulo, and I needed to open a bank account. Very simple task. I walked into one of those very fancy branches from one of those very fancy bank, and then I hit a wall. I ran into an outrageous experience. I was stuck in a bulletproof revolving door. An alarm started sounding. Armed guards came to see me as almost a criminal, and I had to walk out back, leave my backpack outside in a locker, and then walk back in.

Then just begin. An hour and a half wait, begging to get a simple bank account. That entire process ultimately took over 5 months. 5 months until that final credit card arrived, carrying a 1,200% interest rate. I remember thinking, "I am trying to give my money to this bank. Why are they treating me like they're doing me a favor?" I would ask my friends, "Is there something wrong with this bank specifically, or what's the issue?" What I kept hearing was, "Don't waste your time trying to find a different bank. They're all the same. There are five, they all look the same, and so what is the point?" Another revolving door, another long wait, another set of fees, and just customers were not satisfied, and they had simply stopped believing that anything better, a better experience was possible.

That was the problem we set ourselves to create 13 years ago. We set ourselves to build a financial institution that was simple, transparent, and truly on the customer side. We started with a small team. You saw the little house in the beginning. Plenty of skeptics. Plenty of naysayers. Most of us came from outside the banking system, and we didn't have licenses or special connections with regulators or an established brand. We were a complete team of outsiders. What we did was we had a very clear conviction on the problem we were trying to solve.

Technology had enabled the reinvention of financial services, and perhaps that also enabled us to create something most people thought was impossible. Products and services that customers loved fanatically. We began with one very simple product, a purple credit card with no annual fee, or Roxinho, as we call it in Brazil. We put it in customers' hands, listened carefully, improved, and iterated very quickly, and then obsessed about solving every single little detail. Then something happened that none of us had put in our original business plan. People became fans. People painted their cars in purple. They did their birthday parties on Nubank. They had their dogs become customers. This became a fanatical brand, something you had never seen in financial services anywhere around the world.

People never behaved that way towards a bank, and this behavior told us that customers were readier for this type of experience. They were readier to be treated well, to be treated like human beings. Banking had become a source of constant unnecessary anxiety, and when you remove that anxiety and give people back a little control, they notice. We used to track, I remember this very well, the name of every new customer coming in through Slack, and we would celebrate every single customer. Then those 12 customers went into 1,000. And 1,000 to a million. In less than two years, it exploded. The channel in Slack went down immediately. And that 1 million became 5, and then 10, and then 100. Today, more than 140 million customers in Latin America use Nu and make it their most preferred financial services institution.

Take a second to think about that number, 140 million people. But scale can become abstract very quickly, so let me bring it down to think about specifically about every single one of our customers. We met them incredibly well, and some of them are actually here with us. It's Agda, it's Dario. It is the people whose stories you saw up there that we were trying to show and that we're trying to put front and center. Thank you for trusting us and for pushing us to keep getting better every single day. But as we grew, one question kept coming back. Is this fanaticism just unique to Brazil? Is there something specific about Brazil that is making this explosion in terms of customers? When we thought about first principles, we just didn't think so.

Every banking system around the world and every country has its own rules and history and regulation. Of course, it's a local business. But from a customer's point of view, the problems look remarkably familiar. People want to be treated well and want to be treated as we treat our friends and our families and our partners. The details are actually very similar around the world. High cost. Unnecessary complexity per service, products designed around the institution, wanting to figure out how to increase revenues versus increase consumer experience. Then, a few years ago, we decided to test that idea. Could the Nubank model travel across borders? We would enter each new market the way we built Nu in Brazil. Start very focused, earn the trust of each customer one at a time, and then build more of what people need.

In 2018, we entered Mexico, and today, Nu is the largest digital bank in the country, with over 16 million customers in Mexico. The business is profitable, growing very quickly, and the model traveled. Mexicans found a new way to manage and treat their money. Then in 2021, we entered Colombia. I'm Colombian, and I was born there, so it was a very meaningful moment for me as we launched Nu in Colombia. Then we got surprised once again as Colombian customers responded incredibly quickly. When you look at the course in Colombia and Mexico and Brazil, everyone grows faster and faster than the rest. The same model that worked in Brazil and Mexico was working again. Three countries, different systems, but the same basic customer need. People just want to be treated well.

And across those markets, the impact we've had over 13 years is actually incredibly substantial. Since then, we've paid over $10 billion in yield for our customers, and that is money working for customers that is not sitting idle in some bank account. We estimate that we have saved them over $28 billion in banking fees that, if we were not around, would still have been removed from our customers' pockets in fees back to those big banks. Then the most incredible statistics.

We actually did the calculation, and we think we've returned more than 77,000 years of time that otherwise. More valuable than money is time, and so 77,000 years that otherwise all these 140 million customers would have spent being locked in a banking branch, waiting to be let in, and begging to open a simple bank account, navigating that bureaucracy, or waiting to actually be served well with bad customer service. So 77,000 years, and that time goes back to their families and to their friends to do things that they actually love to do. This is not separate from our business model. This is the business model. Technology enabled the opportunity to operate at a significantly lower cost than our competitors. So we returned that efficiency back to our customers via better price, better product, and just a much faster customer experience.

Customers stay, use more of Nu, and then they tell their people, and they tell their friends, and it becomes a viral brand. When customers win, this business gets stronger. When the business gets stronger, we can create even more value for customers. Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia still offer enormous opportunity for growth. It's day one for us, even in Brazil. But they have also taught us something important, that the model can travel. Because the problems we're solving are not specific to Brazilians or Mexican and Colombians. These problems are global in nature and not specific to any single country. This is the most incredible statistics I think I'll present. More than 95% of the world's banking still happens today in 2026 through very big, fancy, expensive banking branches owned by incumbents.

After a decade of fintech around the world, it's so early in the development of this market. All of that market continues to be in banking branches. This means high fees. Every single customer is paying very high fees for an infrastructure they actually don't need. It's almost as if every single customer was paying for a rent of an apartment that they're actually not even using. After a while, banks forget the one thing that actually gives them the right to exist, which is the customer. That's for the people who actually have a bank account. There are still close to 3 billion people in the world that remain unbanked or underbanked that they don't even have the luxury of getting into that banking branch. They don't even get welcome to be trapped in a bulletproof door.

For us, as we think about the next few decades, the answer became obvious. Continue expanding our model globally beyond our core markets and try to serve those customers incredibly well. Wherever they are. We know how to enter a market, start with focus, earn trust, obsess about solving each little problem, and expand the relationship over time. Today, we are ready to take the next step, and I would like to invite my co-founder, Cris, to tell us about it. Go ahead, Cris. Come on.

Hello, and good morning. Thank you for coming. It is great to see so many familiar faces. Thanks for everyone that showed up today. We had a big turnout today, so I want to acknowledge that. Thank you. So happy to be here. Let us talk about the next step. Like David did in Brazil some 13 years ago, I had to open a bank account when I arrived here in the U.S. last year. I had to get the account, get a credit card, and after a while, I got the account, and then eventually, months later, they told me finally they were ready to approve a credit card for me. Of course, it took months, but I was like, "Okay, now we are ready." They said, "No, no, wait a minute.