Nubank Marks 100 Million-Plus Digital Banking Customers

Brazilian digital bank Nubank now has more than 100 million customers.

The company announced the achievement in a Wednesday (May 8) press release, saying it was the first digital banking platform to mark this milestone outside of Asia.

“In 2013, we had set ourselves the ambitious goal to reach 1 million customers in five years, which seemed almost impossible at the time,” Nubank founder and CEO David Vélez said in the release. “In a decade, we have surpassed 100 million, which is a testament to the trust our customers place in us and to the power of a truly customer-centric business model.”

Nubank has more than 92 million customers in its home country, another 7 million-plus in Mexico and almost 1 million in Colombia, according to the release.

The company said in the release that the news follows “record” 2023 financial results, with more than $1 billion in net profit and revenues in excess of $8 billion.

“It’s the first time a western neobank reaches that milestone, so it should give peers and investors confidence in what can be achieved,” Christoph Stegmeier, of management consulting group Simon-Kucher & Partners, said in February.

Vélez predicted at the time that Nubank would eventually become Latin America’s largest financial service company amid a push into Mexico.

That country “has the potential to be as important as Brazil for us,” said Vélez, noting its population of nearly 130 million and higher income per capita.

It’s also a place where more than half of the adult population has no bank account and a high percentage of mobile banking users.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS last month examined the embrace of digital financial services among banking giants.

It’s a development that coincides “with a growing consumer preference for digital channels in conducting financial transactions, compelling financial institutions … to innovate and offer solutions to meet this need,” the report said.

James Butland, vice president of payments and U.K. managing director at Mangopay, explored the trend in a March interview with PYMNTS, underlining the challenges faced by traditional banks because of their legacy infrastructure and technology.

“The challenge that a traditional bank has is that they sit on 150, 200 years of legacy infrastructure and probably 60 years of legacy technology,” Butland said. “So, banks have found it difficult to innovate quickly.” 

He added, however, that change is happening as “banks are starting to realize the speed at which technology has changed the world.”