For the first time in its 12-year history, Nu Holdings generated more than US$5 billion in revenue in a single quarter — and it did so while deploying a proprietary AI foundation model that now prices and approves every personal loan request in Brazil and Mexico in under a second. The Q1 2026 results, released 14 May 2026, confirmed what the company's customer trajectory had long telegraphed: Nubank is no longer a fast-growing challenger. It is the market.
The Numbers
The credit portfolio reached US$37.2 billion, growing 40% year-on-year, while the deposit base hit US$42.4 billion — up 22% over the same period. The efficiency ratio fell to 17.6%, a record low for the group. Net interest income came in at US$3.25 billion, up 12% quarter-on-quarter.
Country Breakdown
Brazil remains the engine: 115 million customers, cementing Nubank's position as the largest private financial institution in the country by customer count. Mexico crossed 15 million customers and is now the third-largest financial institution in that market — a ranking that would have seemed implausible when Nubank launched there in 2019. Colombia is approaching 5 million customers.
The strategically significant number is that Mexico has reached break-even. It shows the unit economics that worked in Brazil — low acquisition costs, digital-only servicing, data-driven credit — can be replicated in another major market. Nu described this as the "earnings-generating formula that built Brazil" reaching its inflection point in Mexico. Every market Nu enters will be measured against this proof point.
NuFormer: AI at the Credit Layer
The headline technology development in the quarter was the production deployment of NuFormer, Nu's in-house set of foundation models. NuFormer is live for credit card decisioning in both Brazil and Mexico, and for unsecured lending in Brazil. The practical output: every personal loan request is priced and approved individually, based on predicted net present value, in real time.
The company's AI Private Banker features — covering financial insights, payments, credit advice, and debt resolution — are now serving more than 15 million monthly active users. According to Nu Holdings' investor relations release, these are not pilot programmes; they are integrated into the core credit decisioning workflow.
Most incumbent banks still use bureau scores and rule-based credit models. A neobank running its own foundation models on daily transaction data from 135 million customers has a feedback loop that traditional lenders cannot easily match.
Asset Quality
Credit growth at this pace invites scrutiny of the loan book. The 15-to-90-day non-performing loan (NPL) ratio rose 89 basis points from Q4 2025 to 5.0%, which Nu attributed to seasonal patterns. The over-90-day NPL ratio was 6.5%, down 10 basis points quarter-on-quarter. Neither figure signals stress at current provisioning levels, though the loan-to-deposit ratio has moved from 49.1% to 58.3% in a single quarter — worth watching as the credit portfolio expands.
What This Sets as the Benchmark
Nubank's Q1 2026 results will be read carefully in Nairobi, Jakarta, and Manila. Every African and Southeast Asian neobank that has raised capital on the promise of "becoming the Nubank of [region]" now has a harder set of numbers to justify that comparison. A 29% return on equity and a sub-18% efficiency ratio, backed by a proprietary credit AI, are not the marks of a startup. They belong to a mature financial institution that just happens to be growing at 40% a year.
The question for the neobank cohort outside Latin America is not whether the model works — Mexico reaching break-even has settled that — but how long the path to break-even actually is when the macro environment is less accommodating than Brazil's high-rate, credit-hungry consumer market.
Net income passed a billion dollars in the following quarter
The second quarter, reported on 13 August, cleared a threshold the first had approached. Net income reached US$1.1 billion, up 49 per cent year on year and 17 per cent on the quarter, the first time Nu Holdings has passed a billion dollars in a single period.
Gross revenue came in near US$5.9 billion, up 39 per cent. Gross profit was US$2.4 billion, up 43 per cent year on year and 25 per cent sequentially. Return on equity moved from 29 per cent to 33. Customers reached 139 million, roughly four million added in three months, with Brazil close to 118 million, Mexico at 15.8 million and Colombia above five million.
The credit book slowed while profit accelerated
Underneath the headline there is a change of shape worth reading, because the two lines moved in different directions.
The consolidated credit portfolio reached US$39.4 billion, up 37 per cent year on year and 5 per cent sequentially, against 40 per cent year-on-year growth the quarter before. Net income growth went the other way, from 41 per cent to 49.
When profit rises faster than the loan book, it means margin is expanding, not just volume. For a lender, that is the healthier kind of growth; the existing portfolio is performing well, rather than new loans masking problems with the old ones. It also means the growth story and the earnings story have started to separate, and the earnings story is now the stronger one.
NuFormer went from pricing loans to making growth decisions
A foundation model approving every personal loan request in Brazil and Mexico in under a second was the scope described here. Three months later the company says the same model powers underwriting, customer service and growth decisions across the business.
Each of those extensions carries a different risk. Underwriting has a measurable ground truth: loans repay or they do not, and the model can be scored against it within a cycle. Customer service has a slower and softer signal. Growth decisions have almost none, because the counterfactual is unobservable — nobody sees the customers a model declined to pursue.
This is the thing to watch when a company puts one proprietary model at the centre of underwriting, service, and growth. A model that quietly narrows the population it targets would show up as improving credit metrics for several quarters before it showed up as a growth problem, and both of those numbers are moving in exactly that pattern right now.
The innocent explanation is that the portfolio is maturing and the company is choosing margin. It is the likelier one. It is not distinguishable from the other, from the outside, on the disclosures available.
The regional comparison holds up
Nubank is not an ASEAN business, and the read-across is in the model rather than the market.
Sea's Monee arm grew its loan book to US$11.1 billion in the second quarter, up 62.5 per cent, with ratios described as stable — faster growth from a much smaller base, inside a commerce platform rather than a standalone bank. In the Philippines, Tonik reached consolidated cash profitability on credit-led digital banking and the non-bank lender Skyro reached operating break-even.
The difference is that Nubank has been around for twelve years. With 139 million customers, its credit model has seen a downturn. No ASEAN digital lender can say the same. When regional operators cite Nubank as the template, that history is the part they are not copying.
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