Nu Holdings Cleared $1 Billion. Almost Every Growth Rate in the Release Is FX-Neutral
Nu Holdings closed Friday at $15.23, up 9.33% from Thursday's $13.93 close, after the Latin American digital bank reported second-quarter results on Thursday evening. Volume ran to about 156 million shares against roughly 61 million the prior session, per the daily record on stockanalysis.com. The wire copy circulating during the session put the move at 10% or better, and it was: the stock opened at $15.74, printed a high of $16.22, traded down to $15.00 and closed near the bottom of its range. The gain was real; it was also a good deal smaller by the bell than at the open.
The headline is that net income cleared a billion dollars for the first time. The precise figure disclosed in the Form 6-K is $1,061.1 million, and the important thing about it is what it is not. Nu reports under IFRS, not US GAAP, and its release does not present an adjusted or managerial alternative that gets to a different profit number. The billion-dollar quarter is the reported one. That is worth stating plainly because a large share of this earnings season has consisted of companies whose headline profit exists only after adjustments.
The qualifiers are somewhere else entirely. In the results snapshot Nu states: "Unless otherwise noted, all the growth rates presented herein are on an FX neutral basis (FXN)." That single line governs almost the whole release. The 49% year-over-year and 17% sequential growth in net income are FX-neutral. So is the 39% year-over-year growth in gross revenue, the 43% growth in gross profit, the 37% growth in the credit portfolio and the 18% growth in deposits. The company defines FX-neutral measures as what the prior-period figures would have been had exchange rates remained stable from those periods to the date of the more recent financials.
Here the qualifier cuts the way a reader should welcome rather than the way it usually cuts. Set the two press releases side by side. Nu reported $637 million of net income for the second quarter of 2025; against $1,061.1 million this quarter, the raw dollar arithmetic is about +67%, well above the +49% the company prints. Independent write-ups of the quarter reach the same place: Stock Market Nerd and Global Equity Briefing both put reported net income growth at roughly 66%. Deposits tell the same story - $36.6 billion a year ago against $45.3 billion now is close to +24% in dollars, versus the +18% FX-neutral. So does revenue per customer: monthly average revenue per active customer of $17.1 against $12.2 a year earlier is about +40% in dollars, versus the +22% the company prints. On every line we could compute from the two releases, the FX-neutral number is the smaller one. The gap implies the Brazilian real translated more favorably this quarter than a year earlier, and Nu chose to strip that out of its headline growth rates rather than bank it.
The revenue line needs a caution of a different kind, because three different revenue figures are circulating for one quarter and they are not interchangeable. Nu's own headline is gross revenue of $5,875.7 million - nearly $5.9 billion - which the filing labels a managerial measure. Investing.com's coverage of the results deck puts net revenue, after funding and interchange costs, at about $4.13 billion. The figure the estimate aggregators scored against consensus was a third construction again: $5.51 billion, above a $5.45 billion Zacks consensus, per the Zacks-sourced recap carried by FXStreet. Anyone comparing a revenue print to a revenue estimate this week should check which line the estimate was built on; a beat measured on Zacks' basis says nothing about the company's own gross revenue headline. Earnings per share came in at $0.22 against a Zacks consensus of $0.20, a 10% surprise, versus $0.14 a year ago - though Zacks notes those figures are adjusted for non-recurring items, so that comparison is on Zacks' basis too, not the company's.
Margins are where the quarter turned. Net interest margin expanded 180 basis points to 22.9% from 21.1% in the first quarter, against 17.7% in the year-ago quarter. Risk-adjusted net interest margin, the metric Nu has pushed as its core disclosure, reached 12.4% from 9.5% three months earlier - an expansion the company describes as 290 basis points in a single quarter.
That metric also carries a base-period wrinkle worth naming. Nu's second-quarter 2025 release printed risk-adjusted NIM at 9.2%, which against 12.4% would imply 320 basis points of year-over-year expansion. The comparatives in this quarter's materials instead show 9.9% for the year-ago period, giving 250 basis points. The current filing is explicit - "Risk-adjusted NIM widened to 12.4% from 9.9% a year earlier" - so the company's own current answer is 250 basis points, and the earlier 9.2% appears to have been restated or redefined between the two documents. We use the company's current comparative and note the change rather than treat the older print as live.
Not everything improved. The efficiency ratio was 19.5%, better than the 21.3% of a year earlier but worse than the 17.6% posted in the first quarter, meaning costs grew faster than revenue sequentially. On the call, management said it continues to expect the efficiency ratio to average about 20% for the full year, per the Investing.com transcript, which would leave the second half roughly where the second quarter landed rather than back at first-quarter levels.
Credit is mixed in the same way. Short-dated delinquency improved: the release says the leading-indicator 15-to-90-day non-performing loan ratio improved 16 basis points to 4.8%. The longer-dated bucket went the other way, with 90-plus-day NPLs up 35 basis points to 6.9%, which the company attributes largely to seasonal migration. Management said it saw no broad-based deterioration, which is a reasonable position and also the position management always takes; the 90-plus number is the one to watch next quarter.
The balance sheet: total credit portfolio of $39.4 billion, up 37% on an FX-neutral basis, split roughly $26 billion of credit cards, $10.3 billion of unsecured lending and $3.1 billion of secured lending. Deposits of $45.3 billion, up 18% FX-neutral, at a consolidated cost of deposits equal to 88% of interbank rates, three percentage points lower than a year ago. Return on equity was 33%, against 28% in the year-ago quarter.
On customers, Nu added roughly 4 million in the quarter to reach 139 million globally, up from 122.7 million a year earlier, with almost 118 million in Brazil, 15.8 million in Mexico at the June 30 balance-sheet date and more than 5 million in Colombia. The consolidated monthly activity rate expanded sequentially to 83.5%, and the company said Brazil surpassed 86% for the first time.
Founder and global chief executive David Vélez framed the quarter this way in the release: "Thirteen years ago we started with a simple hypothesis: that a bank built on technology, with no branches and no legacy to defend, could serve hundreds of millions of people better, and at a fraction of the cost. This is no longer a hypothesis, and we are now generating more than a billion dollars in quarterly net income. Earlier this month, we launched our bank in Mexico, becoming the largest digital bank in the country with 16 million customers. That completes our transformation there, unlocking capabilities we did not have before. In Brazil, we are evolving our structure, adding a full banking license to our operations. We also launched Croma for our Super Core customers, taking the same primary banking playbook upmarket into an even larger profit pool. Underpinning all of it, NuFormer, our foundation model for financial behavior, now powers underwriting, customer service, and growth decisions across the company."
Two of those items are new this quarter rather than restatements of strategy. Nu México began operating as a full bank on August 6, according to Mexico Business News and Tech Times, and the release says the Mexican customer base had reached 16 million as of July, up from the 15.8 million counted at quarter-end. Croma, launched in July for what the company calls Super Core customers, is a fresh line rather than an extension of the mass-market card business, and it has no revenue history to point at yet.
On the call, chief financial officer Rob Livingston - appointed on June 1 and effective in the role from July 13, succeeding Guilherme Lago - told analysts that margins should remain in the same region for the foreseeable future while cautioning that the 12.4% risk-adjusted NIM should not be treated as a floor, according to Zacks' summary of the call carried by Yahoo Finance. Vélez said AI agents now handle more than 60% of customer-support conversations in Brazil at or above human parity, and argued artificial intelligence could make employees two to five times more productive over the next few years, with headcount not changing significantly from roughly 10,400. Those are management characterisations of a trajectory, not disclosed results, and the productivity claim in particular has no reported metric attached to it in the release.
The summary that the disclosures support is that Nu delivered a profitability inflection on its own reported IFRS numbers, described that inflection using the more conservative of two available growth conventions, and saw its shares finish 9.33% higher after opening far above where they closed. The 90-plus-day delinquency print and the sequential slippage in the efficiency ratio are the two lines that did not cooperate, and both are disclosed in the same document as the billion-dollar headline.
