Nubank’s (NYSE: NU) senior executives explained how the company’s artificial intelligence underwriting framework is driving sustainable expansion in credit services. The update from Nubank’s professional team emphasized that core risk protocols stay firmly in place, with delinquency levels holding steady even as more customers gain access to financing. Chief Financial Officer Guilherme Lago joined Jeremy Selesner, General Manager of Credit Card Foundations, and Tyler Horn, Vice President of Credit Risk, to unpack the strategy.
They highlighted the role of refined data analytics and predictive modeling in responsibly widening credit availability while safeguarding overall loan-book health.
From its founding, Nubank took a distinctive path by launching with credit cards in Brazil rather than easing in through simpler deposit or payment products.
This upfront commitment to lending meant the bank had to navigate economic volatility from the outset.
“We had to manage credit and manage economic cycles,” Selesner noted, explaining that delaying a shift to credit-led operations would have been far more challenging.
The early focus yielded successive waves of refined models—seventeen iterations for credit-limit adjustments and ten for customer acquisition—along with an enormous repository exceeding 100 terabytes of customer-behavior information.
A dedicated risk team now scrutinizes more than 1,000 monitoring indicators each week.
The latest breakthrough is nuFormer, a transformer-based AI model that has achieved a 70 percent drop in projected risk for comparable customer segments relative to earlier versions.
Successive upgrades across the modeling pipeline are delivering roughly triple the typical performance leap seen in a standard model refresh.
Importantly, Nubank channels these technological gains into sharper customer selection rather than easing approval criteria.
In the final quarter of 2025, this precision translated to a 50-basis-point rise in the firm’s share of credit card spending volume in Brazil—the biggest single gain recorded by any competitor over the past ten years. Risk discipline remains uncompromising.
“We continue to expect the future to be worse than the past to maintain that bar of resilience,” Horn stressed.
As a result, write-off rates for the current portfolio stayed flat at 2.8 to 2.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2025. Executives pointed to substantial headroom for further responsible growth.
Revenue generated per active customer averaged $15 in late 2025, well below the roughly $40 posted by traditional Brazilian banks. This gap reflects a customer base still early in its credit journey, leaving ample scope to serve existing users more comprehensively.
The overall credit portfolio expanded by about 40 percent year-over-year, while customers already approved for credit hold roughly US$11 billion in untapped lines.
The videocast timing aligns with Nubank’s confirmed role in the federal government’s Novo Desenrola Brasil debt-relief program. Beyond assisting qualified participants, the bank rolled out an in-house initiative for those who fall outside official eligibility.
Both efforts are delivered entirely through the Nubank app and rely on individualized assessments of repayment ability.
Built-in safeguards cap future debt accumulation, and users receive ongoing guidance on budgeting and financial habits to support lasting recovery and healthier money management. By blending AI with proper risk standards, Nubank continues to demonstrate that broader credit inclusion and portfolio strength can advance together—setting a model for fintech platforms across Latin America.