Brazil’s Digital Bank Nubank In Talks To Go Public In US

Brazil’s Nubank is in talks to go public on the U.S. stock market via an initial public offering (IPO), Reuters reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

The digital bank is coordinating with advisers in New York, but further details, such as when the IPO would happen, are unclear, according to Reuters.

“We will probably do an IPO at some point in time, but it is not among our current priorities. We have the support of an amazing group of investors that share a long-term vision on our business,” Nubank told Reuters in an email.

Nubank was most recently valued at $25 billion, after a $400 million Series G funding round in January. The IPO would be one of the largest to come out of South America recently. The FinTech’s Co-Founder Cristina Junqueira said at the time that the bank could reach profitability within 18 months.

“We’re really hopeful that 2021 is a year we’re going to be able to maybe increase our exposure on the credit side tenfold,” Junqueira said.

Nubank, which launched in 2014, started first with just a credit card offering, building trust with customers without requiring them to hand over any money upfront, as they would with a debit card. This is still their model today when entering new markets.

“Once we’re able to build that trust with customers, then we launch debit and savings accounts. That’s the playbook we followed [in Brazil], and today we have more savings accounts than credit customers,” CEO and Founder David Vélez told PYMNTS in a recent conversation.

Building customer’s trust has been especially important this past year amid the COVID-19 pandemic, when even the least digital-friendly consumers have had to make the switch.

“The crisis is forcing adoption in demographics that in normal times would have taken a long time to digitize,” Vélez told PYMNTS. “After the crisis passes, we’re only going to see even more acceleration of customers willing to use digital banking.”

Nubank, which posted a net loss of $41.9 million at the end of 2020, now serves over 35 milloin clients across Latin America, according to Bloomberg.