Nubank sets Latin America benchmark

Nubank turned regional expansion into a scale advantage that new entrants now have to fight uphill against. In practice, it is not just a well known app in Brazil. It is a huge local bank relationship with 93.9 million customers globally at the end of 2023, including 87.8 million in Brazil, plus growing operations in Mexico and Colombia. That scale lets it spread product costs, fund lending, and cross sell deposits, cards, loans, and investments much faster than a new market entrant can.1 2 3 4

• Nubank won first by going deep in Brazil before going wide. By the end of 2023, more than 61% of monthly active customers used it as their primary bank. That matters because a primary bank gets paycheck deposits, bill pay, card spend, and the first shot at making loans, which is where neobanks earn real money.1 2 5
• The hard part for a challenger is that Latin America is not a blank slate anymore. Revolut has moved faster than other foreign neobanks, launching full banking operations in Mexico in January 2026, advancing in Colombia, and taking a licensing step in Peru. Even so, it is entering markets where Nubank already has local brand trust and an installed customer base.3 6 7 8
• The benchmark is not just customer count, it is monetization. Internal research on Revolut notes Nubank at roughly $8B of revenue across Latin America, and also highlights how lending became a major earnings engine, with $1.6B from lending in 2023. That shows what challengers are really up against, a large deposit base turning into a credit machine.4 9 10

Going forward, the winners in Latin America are likely to look less like lightweight card apps and more like full local banks with strong underwriting, deposit gathering, and daily use products. Nubank set that template. New entrants can still grow, especially in underserved markets, but they now have to beat an incumbent neobank that already behaves like the regional default.2 4 6 7 8