Nubank didn’t want to wait anymore.
The Brazilian neobank launched operations in the U.S. last week using a partner bank model.
The move – announced as Nubank also debuted a multicurrency digital account to support no-fee money movement across more than 35 countries – comes before the Sao Paulo-based lender receives word on whether it’ll obtain full approval for a U.S. banking license.
Nubank received conditional approval in January from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to launch a national bank in the U.S. While that is still projected for a 2027 rollout, proposed banks generally wait for the unconditional all-clear from regulators to go to market.
"I suspect that they have timed this in accordance with the OCC's openness to fintech expansion," Dylan Lerner, digital banking senior analyst at Javelin Strategy and Research, told American Banker.
Indeed, Nubank’s U.S. launch comes during a month in which U.K. fintech Revolut secured conditional charter approval from the OCC and Chime bought a bank rather than wait on the charter process.
Nubank is launching in the U.S. through a model in which Kansas City, Missouri-based Lead Bank, insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., holds its deposits. The arrangement allows Nubank to gather feedback early on its customer experience, the company said in a statement.
Nubank CEO David Vélez said his company wanted to accelerate because of the time-consuming nature of regulatory approvals – despite evidence that the lag between application and approval has shortened during the second Trump administration.
“We began to work on this project with Lead Bank before we had decided to apply for a banking license,” Vélez told Bloomberg.
Nubank launched in the U.S. on Thursday with what it calls a full suite of financial products. That includes an account that offers a 3.5% annual percentage yield – a figure that could grow to 4.5% APY on a savings goal of up to $10,000 if users opt in for a Mastercard-partnered Nu credit card. The card offers unlimited 1.5% cash back on every purchase and carries no annual fees, Nubank said.
“We want to earn the place of being people's primary banking relationship, and capturing even a small share of the U.S. market will be transformative for our business,” Nubank’s U.S. CEO, Cristina Junqueira, said in a statement last week.
Nubank’s U.S. rollout comes amid a fair share of cautionary tales: Several international neobanks – Monzo and N26, to name just two – have pulled up stakes on their attempts to broach the U.S. This year, Dutch neobank Bunq and U.K. fintech Wise saw their U.S. charter applications rejected by the OCC.
Lerner, for one, said he thinks Nubank is “aggressively targeting [the] window of opportunity in administrative policy.”
“This launch may be more of a bet on regulators' timing than Nu's product," Lerner said.
But the Brazilian neobank is touting new products, too. Its new multicurrency account, dubbed Nu Global, offers a platform in which deposits are converted into Circle’s dollar-backed stablecoin (USDC) or digital euros. U.S.-based deposits can earn 3.5% APY, while European ones can earn 2.2%, the company said.
Further, customers can hold and trade digital assets including bitcoin and Ethereum.
Nu Global, the company said, aims to solve for a cross-border money-transfer experience that has historically encompassed “multiple apps, confusing exchange rates, long waits, and high fees.”
“Entering the U.S. is a strategic step in Nu's evolution into a global digital financial services platform. But building that platform also means looking beyond any single market to problems that are universal,” Vélez said. “Since our founding, we have believed that consumer-obsessed digital banking is the future of retail banking globally, and after proving this hypothesis with over 140 million fanatical customers in Latin America, we are excited to start executing our thesis beyond our core region.”
