Ricardo Pillai
Thu, January 15, 2026 astatine 8:47 AM CST 3 min read
Photo by rupixen connected Unsplash
Nu Holdings (Nu), Latin America’s starring integer bank, announced that it has filed for a U.S. nationalist slope charter with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), marking a captious archetypal measurement toward expanding operations crossed each 50 states. This move positions Nu to amended service existing customers and pat into underserved segments successful the U.S., peculiarly low-income and Latin American communities.
While support volition instrumentality years, involving rigorous OCC scrutiny of management, financials, compliance, and operational readiness, Nu’s beardown equilibrium sheet, regulatory acquisition crossed 3 countries, and high-caliber leadership, including erstwhile OCC and cardinal slope executives, marque support likely.
A U.S. banking charter would let Nu to contented recognition and debit cards, loans, and different fiscal products, though deposit-taking would necessitate further FDIC licensing, perchance via partnerships with FDIC-insured banks, a communal fintech strategy. Nu’s enlargement strategy mirrors its palmy Latin American model: offering no-fee accounts, competitory recognition cards, precocious deposit interest, loans, concern products, crypto services, and low-cost remittances. These offerings are expected to entreaty to the estimated 5 cardinal unbanked adults and tens of millions of low-income Americans, a full addressable marketplace of astir 60 million.
Leveraging cloud-based infrastructure, AI, and automation, Nu maintains a structural outgo vantage implicit bequest U.S. banks, enabling scalable, low-cost operations. While important regulatory, political, and operational hurdles remain, the U.S. marketplace represents a multibillion-dollar opportunity, perchance replicating Nu’s Latin American maturation trajectory. Although meaningful profits are years away, this filing underscores Nu’s semipermanent ambition to grow globally, widen fiscal inclusion, and found itself arsenic a ascendant low-cost integer bank, mounting the signifier for transformative maturation implicit the adjacent decade.
Previously we covered a bullish thesis connected Nu Holdings Ltd. (NU) by Ray Myers successful May 2025, which highlighted the company’s beardown gross growth, expanding lawsuit base, and profitable standard successful Latin America. The banal has appreciated astir 29.77% since then, reflecting continued execution. The thesis inactive stands arsenic Nu grows regionally. Ray Myers shares a akin position but emphasizes Nu’s U.S. enlargement via a nationalist slope charter.

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