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Nu Holdings Ltd. (NU)

Q2 2022 Earnings Call· Wed, Aug 17, 2022

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Nu Holdings Conference Call to Discuss the Results for the Second Quarter 2022. A slide presentation accompanies today's webcast, which is available in Nu's Investor Relations website at www.investors.nu in English and in Portuguese. This conference is being recorded and a replay can also be accessed on the company's IR website. This call is also available in Portuguese. To access it you can press the icon on the lower right side of your Zoom screen and then choose to enter the Portuguese room. After that select mute original audio. [Foreign Language] Please be advised that all participants will be listening only mode. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Jorg Friedemann Investor Relations Officer at Nu Holdings. You may proceed.

Jorg Friedemann

Analyst

Thank you very much operator. Good evening everyone and thank you for joining our earnings call today. If you have not seen our earnings release, a copy is posted in the Results Center section of our Investor Relations website. With me on today's call are David Vélez, our Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairman; Youssef Lahrech, our President and Chief Operating Officer; and Guilherme Lago, our Chief Financial Officer. Additionally Jag Duggal, our Chief Product Officer will join us for the Q&A session of the call. Throughout this conference call the company will be presenting non-IFRS financial information including adjusted net income. These are important financial measures for the company, but are not financial measures as defined by IFRS. Reconciliations of the company's non-IFRS financial information to the IFRS financial information are available in our earnings press release. Unless noted otherwise, all growth rates are on a year-over-year and FX-neutral basis. I would also like to remind everyone that today's discussion might include forward-looking statements which are not guarantees of future performance and therefore, you should not put undue reliance on them. These statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from the company's expectations. Please refer to the forward-looking statements disclosure in the company's earnings press release. Today our Founder and CEO, David Vélez will discuss the main highlights of our second quarter 2022 results and some of the opportunities ahead. Subsequently, Guilherme Lago, our CFO; and Youssef Lahrech, our President and COO will take you through our financial performance for the quarter. After which time we will be happy to take your questions. I would now like to turn the call over to David. David, please go ahead. Thank you. David Vélez: Thank you, Jorg. Hello everyone. Thank you for…

Guilherme Lago

Analyst

Thank you, David. Now before moving on to the quarterly results, let's recap our simple yet powerful value-generating formula. First growing our customer base across Brazil, Mexico and Colombia and turning customers into active customers. Second, expanding the average revenue per active customer or ARPAC through both product upsell and product cross-sell. And third, delivering all this growth while maintaining one of the lowest cost operating platforms in the industry through best-in-class, cost to acquire, to serve, of risk and of funding. Now let's take a deep dive into the quarterly results of our business. We added 5.7 million customers during the second quarter, in line with the net adds of the first quarter and mainly through organic channels. This brought total customers to 65.3 million by quarter end, a 57% year-on-year increase making us likely, the fifth largest financial institution in Brazil in terms of number of customers. We are also pleased with Mexico and Colombia continue to grow at faster rates compared to Brazil and having contributed together with over 700,000 unique customers additions this quarter. Importantly, we continue to drive customer acquisition, while increasing the monthly activity rates to 80%, up from 72% a year ago and 78% in the prior quarter, that marked the 90th consecutive quarter of higher monthly activity, another testament to our ability to continue to grow our ecosystem, while driving customer engagement. Now moving to an analysis of our customer cohorts. These three charts show how increasing engagement of our customer base and a higher number of products per active customers continue to drive up ARPAC. When looking at ARPAC in the chart on the far right one can see that, while we reach the monthly ARPAC of $7.8 in the quarter, mature cohorts are already at $21. One can also see…

Youssef Lahrech

Analyst

Thank you, Lago. Let me now walk you through a few key indicators that track the asset quality and overall health of our credit portfolio in the second quarter of 2022. As a reminder, we make underwriting decisions to optimize the return, resilience and payback of our credit originations. Let me start by reinforcing two key features of our credit business. First, we underwrite mostly unsecured credit through credit cards and personal loans. These products are expected to have higher loss rates and shorter durations than secured credit products and they are priced accordingly. We seek to optimize return for the amount of risk we take, not minimize risk. Second, as Lago mentioned, we have taken management actions to reprice our products and bolster the resilience of our credit underwriting. As a result, we expect risk-adjusted margins of 50% to 60%. These actions have resulted in even more resilient portfolios. These charts illustrate the unit economics of each of our core credit products, credit cards and personal loans, both expressed as an annualized percentage of receivables. On the left-hand side, you can see the unit economics of our credit card product. Revenues consist of non-interest and interest revenues, which together, amount to 27%. Deducting expected losses of 11%, we end up with a net lending margin of 16%. This results in a post-tax return on assets of around 7% and an ROE in excess of 80%. On the right-hand side, you have the unit economics of our personal loan product. The interest revenue yield is about 58% annualized, with a cost of funds of approximately 11%. The expected annualized losses for the portfolio are about 22%, yielding a net lending margin of 25%. This results in a return on assets of about 14% and a return on equity in excess…

Operator

Operator

We will now start a Q&A section for investors and analysts. [Operator Instructions]

Jorg Friedemann

Analyst

Thank you operator. We are collecting questions and our first question comes from the line of Jorge Kuri from Morgan Stanley. Could you please open his line? Thank you

Jorge Kuri

Analyst

Hi everyone. Congrats on the great results. Could I ask you about the growth in the portfolio? You've made some comments about the slowdown particularly on personal loans being driven by the environment that you're seeing in Brazil now. Maybe we can just double-click on that. Brazil is actually growing more than what consensus expected. The economy will probably grow almost 2.5%. Unemployment is now at a seven-year low. The consumer is getting more handouts from the government. And your early delinquency kind of like points to a risk on scenario if you will. I mean there's evidently nothing that's going wrong with the portfolio probably maybe because you're slowing down. But given that your personal loans particularly are in such early stages of growth where the cross-sell vis-à-vis your total clients, your credit card clients is still small, it is a bit surprising in the context of everything that I said that the slowdown is so sharp versus the previous quarter. And I am looking at FX-neutral numbers and according to my calculations on a quarter-on-quarter basis, the growth really slowed down basically was cut in half. And so just wondering if you can provide a little bit more color on all of these. Thank you and again congrats on the numbers.

Guilherme Lago

Analyst

Jorge, thank you so much for the question. Look I would start by referring you to slide 35 of the earnings deck because you will note that a material portion of the decrease in the velocity of our growth in our credit book actually stems from the FX devaluation. If you look at our portfolio growth on an FX-neutral basis, you will see that the growth remains quite healthy. You see that our credit portfolio went on an FX-neutral basis from about $7.9 billion to $9.2 billion. Now, we are certainly cautious about the environment. Now, being cautious does not mean stopping to grow. In the second quarter, we grew personal loans originations by about 7% quarter-on-quarter on an FX-neutral basis and almost 2.5 times year-on-year also on an FX-neutral basis. So, we believe we are remaining growing at paces that are materially higher than the market. The second thing is that the growth in personal loans and the growth in credit card is by no means constrained by demand. Like our customers account for about one-third of the consumer finance profile in the country. The growth is also not constrained by product. We believe that our credit card and personal loan products have the best NPS in the markets and some of the best conversion ratios in the market. It is also not constrained by capital and liquidity Jorge. Now, we have plenty of capital and liquidity available in our balance sheet. So, it is only constrained by our credit underwriting appetite, which is 100% under our control. And we have chosen to be slightly more selective in the second quarter, but we've chosen to actually be also repricing our products more aggressively, as you may note in the presentation that we have shared with you. Going forward, we do expect that we will remain to grow at levels that are much higher than the average growth pace of the market, but we will continue to be quite selective and conservative as we have been over the past seven to eight years. I would say, that irrespective of a potential decrease in the velocity of growth in the second quarter, we continue to grow our customer base very aggressively. Our customer base already accounts for about 35% 36% of the entire adult population of Brazil. It accounts for about one-third of the entire consumer finance pool in Brazil, so we have plenty of room to cross sell in the future when the market proves itself.

Jorge Kuri

Analyst

Thanks for that Lago, that was very clear. And if I may follow up on the point you made about increasing rates for the personal loans business, which is your Slide 16 of the presentation. With an average rate of 4.6% in this quarter up from 4%, how much of this is a mark-to-market of the increase in funding costs? And how much is actually going to increase the net NII of the product? And is -- more has been done in the third quarter, so we should expect sort of like the NII of the product to go up over time?

Guilherme Lago

Analyst

Yes. So, just a small correction. It's 5.6% in the second quarter. But I think, the growth in pricing that we did in the second quarter of the year, more than offset the increase in funding cost and should therefore, help us expand our risk-adjusted margin. I think for the first time we are providing disclosure, if you take a look on Slide 20, of the expansion of the -- of our net interest margin. So notwithstanding a scenario in which interest rates are going up, we have proven that we can put to work our very large low-cost deposit base and actually expand by taking our net interest margin from about 5.2% to almost 10%. We expect this trend to continue and compound over time, not only as we lower our cost of funding, but also as we increase our interest-earning portfolio IEP and therefore, increase the carry of our positions.

Jorge Kuri

Analyst

Thank you, Lago. Thanks

Jorg Friedemann

Analyst

And our next question comes from the line of Thiago Batista from UBS. Operator, could you open his line. Thank you

Thiago Batista

Analyst

Hi, guys. Thanks for the opportunity. Very good top line, not so good asset quality. I have a question on the asset quality. Trying to understand, why Nu has changed the write-off methodology for personal loans this quarter, if there's any strong motivation to do this right now.

Youssef Lahrech

Analyst

Hi, Thiago. This is Youssef. Thank you for the question. So a couple of things on the write-off methodology change. First of all, it is -- it has nothing to do with asset quality in the quarter. It is basically us following IFRS 9 guidelines. So IFRS 9 doesn't specify exactly the timing of write-off for a particular asset class or type of loan. However, it provides that you must write off a loan when there's no more reasonable expectation of partial or full recovery of that asset. So when we started the personal loans business a couple of years ago, we didn't have any actual experience with recovery rates. So as a default, we started with write-off timing that was similar to credit cards i.e. 360 days. Now two years later, we actually have actual recovery rate data to base our write-off methodology on and we find that 120 days is a more appropriate reflection of the IFRS guideline. The other thing to note is, writing personal loans at 120 days is generally, best practice amongst fintechs and financial institutions globally and we're following that practice. Now as I mentioned earlier, it's also important to know that these write-off methodology changes have no bearing whatsoever on our P&L or income statement, because the assets written off had been already fully provisioned for in earlier periods.

Thiago Batista

Analyst

No, very clear. And just one very small follow up. If I'm not wrong you mentioned, during the call that you guys are expecting a more stable asset quality going forward. Is this the right message, on what you guys are expecting for the legacy ratio going forward?

Youssef Lahrech

Analyst

Yes, Thiago. So I think it's - as I said earlier, it's important to distinguish two things. One, is lead indicators of asset quality, which is you can look at 15 to 90 delinquency rates as we disclosed. Those have been stable now for a couple of quarters. So you can -- this suggests that the so-called normalization to pre-pandemic risk levels may have run its course when you look at early delinquency indicators. Now on the -- in contrast when you look at 90+ NPLs that's a lag metric and that metric is still in the process of catching up to what early delinquencies are showing. So I expect that that just mechanically will continue to rise for the next couple of quarters as it catches up to what early delinquencies have already reached.

Thiago Batista

Analyst

Very clear. Thanks a lot.

Jorg Friedemann

Analyst

And our next question comes from the line of Mario Pierry from Bank of America. Could you open his line, please operator.

Mario Pierry

Analyst

Hi, guys. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. Let me ask you the question on deposits, right? You showed that you continue to grow your deposit base at a healthy pace. But we saw a meaningful slowdown. I think it rose above $3 billion in the previous quarter and this quarter it was less than $1 billion. At the same time you changed the remuneration of your deposits. So I was wondering has that impacted your ability to grow your deposit base? Clearly we do see the benefits right of lower funding costs. But do you have any data that you can share with us what has been your – the impact on your ability to grow your deposit base since you changed the remuneration of the accounts?

Guilherme Lago

Analyst

Sure, Mario. Thanks for your question. So I think if you – you're probably referring to Slide 17. And if you take a look at the slide, the apparent decrease in the velocity of our deposits from $12.6 billion to $13.3 billion, stems mostly from the FX devaluation in the quarter. On a quarterly FX-neutral basis so same FX, deposits would have grown $1.9 billion quarter-over-quarter, right? So it would have grown largely at the same pace as the prior quarter. So just wanted to flag that FX devaluation plays a role in the way that we present those numbers. So that's one thing. The second thing is that no I think the changes to the NuConta remuneration to which you alluded has not had any impact so far in the velocity with which we are – we continue to accumulate deposits. We have now done the rollout of the NuConta remuneration for a relatively small portion of our customer base and we are doing no massive AB testing. We have not observed as of today any difference in any of the relevant KPIs including the amount of deposits, including engagement, including NPS. We will continue to monitor this very closely going forward. And the speed at which we roll it out to the entire base will largely depend on those observations. But so far we are quite encouraged by what we have seen. David Vélez: Just wanted to add very quickly on the deposit product. One thing that's important to consider is this was a project that we worked on over a year that had us a goal to ultimately create a better deposit product at lower cost. And part of the challenge was to redesign the product so that customers could have access to investment products that have higher than 100% CDI, as we got to integrate a new investment product. And so ultimately what we're looking for is we should see an increase in deposit flow at a lower cost. That's at least our goal. The deposit product today is much better than two months ago as customers have access to a number of different functionalities. And so ultimately we're – it's very early days. We're still trying to monitor basically daily all those different metrics. But if things play out that's where we're ultimately going.

Mario Pierry

Analyst

Okay. No that's clear. And let me ask a follow-up question, right? It has been asked already about the NPLs and your risk appetite, you're diminishing the growth of personal loans. But I was wondering if you're making any adjustments on your credit cards. Are you reducing credit card limits? Is there anything that you're doing? Clearly you're seeing – even though you showed the NPLs are fairly stable do you think it's more prudent to be a little bit more cautious on personal loans? Are you also going to be a little more cautious on credit cards? Are you seeing anything that worries you on the credit card book?

Youssef Lahrech

Analyst

Yes. So just to address the question on our current stance in both credit cards and personal loans, I would say, we're consistent across both. We're not reducing credit card limits at the moment. What we're doing is we're erring a little bit more on the side of building resilience. If you look at the unit economics chart for both credit cards and personal loans in the earnings presentation, that's basically what we're targeting at the moment in terms of returns ROA, ROE margins and resilience. So it's resulting in growth that is – that has not increased as much if you will compared to prior time periods but is absolute levels of growth that are fairly stable about $5 billion in personal loans we've added in the quarter which has been consistent with the prior couple of quarters and about five million new customers, which is also consistent with prior time periods. So we're basically taking a slightly more cautious approach in terms of resilience but not really taking any drastic approach. We're not seeing any worrisome signs. And if you look at the delinquency metrics we went over if anything they show signs of stability in the early delinquency metrics. So it's more of an abundance of caution given the uncertainty in the environment looking forward, not necessarily based on anything worrisome that we've seen in the data so far.

Mario Pierry

Analyst

Okay. Thank you very much.

Jorg Friedemann

Analyst

And the next question comes from the line of Ashwin Shirvaikar from Citi.

Ashwin Shirvaikar

Analyst

Hello and congratulations from me as well. My first question is obviously your front-loading loan loss provisions, is required. But your early delinquency indicators show, stability as you pointed out in the 15-90 range. And while the mathematical impact, as it relates to NPL 90+ is there to see. I was trying to think ahead if you were to see continued stability in delinquency indicators, could you provide a framework for how to think of gross margins. heading into next year?

Guilherme Lago

Analyst

Ashwin, it's a good question. We believe, in general, even though we don't guide for next year or the next year, that there are two things that affect largely our gross profit margin. Number one is the velocity at which we grow our credit portfolio. Number two is, interest rate moves. As interest rates go up, it somehow increases the -- both the numerator and the denominator of the formula and therefore decreases the gross profit margin. If you take a look at our cohort basis, the unit economics to which Youssef pointed out, we believe that once both of those things stabilize we should get to gross profit margins around 60%, 6-0. But I'm not saying that this is something that we will attain in 2023 or 2024. It's basically that is the steady state gross profit margin of a mature cohort.

Ashwin Shirvaikar

Analyst

Understood. Thank you for that. And just staying on the topic of scaling, as I'm looking at the various operating expense lines, should we look at G&A as a primary source of operating leverage, or are there opportunities in customer support and ops using automation and other techniques, or I would imagine you probably want to continue increase marketing at a robust pace.

Guilherme Lago

Analyst

Yes. No that's a great question. And I think for the first time we are providing one metric that we track very closely within Nubank with the evolution of our efficiency ratio with and without share-based compensation. I would draw your attention to slide number 20. You can see that, since the beginning of last year we have driven our efficiency ratios from about 90% to 58%, if you include share-based compensation or from about 70% to 50%, if you exclude share-based compensation. We believe, we are only at the beginning of this journey, to get more efficiency. From where this efficiency will come from, I think it will largely come from two places. First, our cost to serve is expected to remain flat at the dollar level whereas our average revenue per active customer is expected to continue to expand as we have seen in the prior quarters. And secondly, our G&A will grow at materially lower pace than the growth that we will have in our gross profit and our revenues. In fact, if you take a look and you know -- dissect our G&A, you're going to see that between 50% and 60% of our G&A is driven by our head count and the velocity at which we're going to grow head count over the course of the next two years should be materially lower than the velocity at which we grew head count over the past two years. That should also be a fairly relevant boost to operating leverage going forward.

Ashwin Shirvaikar

Analyst

Thanks, very clear. Thank you.

Jorg Friedemann

Analyst

And our next question comes from Tito Labarta from Goldman Sachs. Could you please open his line? Thank you.

Tito Labarta

Analyst

Hi. Good evening and thank you for taking my question also. My question is on the revenue side showing very healthy ARPAC trends. Looking at the chart on page 11, right, your more mature cohorts are around the $20 level, although it does seem to maybe beginning to peak. Do you think for the more mature cohorts there's still more upside on that ARPAC? And then, thinking overall on that chart, it looks like most -- in about another 30 months a lot of your cohorts would be closer to that $20. Is that a fair way to think of it that maybe three years or so a lot of your cohorts should be close to $20 or even higher?

Guilherme Lago

Analyst

Tito, we don't think that our mature cohorts have plateaued. We think there is still quite a lot of room for them to continue to expand. If you take a look at both -- what drives our -- the expansion of ARPAC, two things drive the expansion of ARPAC product cross-sell and product up-sell. And if you take a look we are driving both up-sell and cross-sell up quarter-after-quarter including in our more mature cohorts. The more mature cohort that you see on slide 11, they show primarily the penetration of Credit Card and NuConta. The penetration of personal loans, investments, insurance and the large number of additional products that we will launch has not -- is not even close to where we think it will be. So there's a lot of cross-sell and up-sell still to come. Just to give you an order of magnitude, the ARPAC of incumbent banks, the ARPAC of the retail operations of incumbent banks is estimated to be at $40, four-zero. We don't expect that we will get to $40 because a substantial amount of this ARPAC of incumbent banks comes from no fees that we will not charge. But there is still plenty of gap for us to close between our current average of $7.8 and the $40 of incumbent banks.

Tito Labarta

Analyst

Great. That's very clear Lago. Thank you. And on the terms of the total cohorts. Is like another three years a reasonable assumption for when those begin to mature and get to the same level as your current mature cohorts?

Guilherme Lago

Analyst

I think in general, we expect to see the maturation of our cohorts to happen slightly faster of that of our older cohorts, simply because if you are a customer of Nu today, you join an ecosystem with plenty of products that you didn't have if you had joined Nu five years ago. So the ability for you to consume more products is much higher and greater today than it was three four five years ago. And, therefore, the speed with, which the monetization happens over the next two years, should be slightly faster than the speed with, which we saw over the past three years.

Tito Labarta

Analyst

That's great. That's very clear Lago. Thank you. And can you say the same thing, I guess about the primary banking accounts that are around 55% and keep -- the newer cohorts getting there much faster? Would that be upside as you introduce these additional products as well?

Guilherme Lago

Analyst

I think the upside, the primary banking relationship we do expect that it will continue to go up. I personally believe, however, that the upside from product to cross-sell and up-sell is even more pronounced than our getting marginally more primary banking relationship even though both trends should continue to grow and compound.

Tito Labarta

Analyst

Okay. That's great. Thanks a lot Lago.

Jorg Friedemann

Analyst

And our next question comes from the line of Neha Agarwala at HSBC. Thank you.

Neha Agarwala

Analyst

Hi. Congratulations on the results. Thank you so much for taking my question. Thank you for the additional disclosures. I think it's very helpful. I was looking at your chart, which you showed the NPL metrics under the previous methodology. And in that we see that the NPL ratio was up 120 basis points quarter-on-quarter, of which product mix explains about 60 basis points. So there seems to be some worsening in terms of asset quality. Is that one of the reasons why you're kind of being more conservative and cautious in terms of asset quality? If we keep the previous methodology was the deterioration in line with what you had anticipated? Further on this, you mentioned that the change in methodology is more in line with the other global fintechs and what they follow. What do you see the other players in Brazil, what kind of methodology do they follow for personal loans? And what is -- what do you think would be the average for the system if you want to compare your numbers with that for the system as a whole? What would be the right way to do that? Thank you.

Youssef Lahrech

Analyst

Neha, thanks for the question. So let me try to address your questions in turn. So in terms of the trend and the quarter-on-quarter movement in the NPLs. You are correct in that if you look at 90 plus under the previous write-off methodology, which was provided in the appendix section there was an increase of about 120 basis points nominally and it would have been around 60 basis points in a constant product mix scenario. The reality as I think you were alluding to is that's pretty much expected. If you look at the left part of that slide you look at 15 to 90 in -- a quarter ago that metric actually went up by a similar amount, 110 basis points nominally and around 80 basis points mix adjusted. So basically what the 90 plus movement reflects this quarter is just the mechanical impact of what already happened a quarter or so ago in 15 to 90. So it's not unexpected by any stretch of the imagination. Now you were also asking about the write-off methodology and how it compares to other players in Brazil. I can't personally comment on any specific methodology of other FIs or fintechs in Brazil. I think there are some players that I know follow Brazilian GAAP rules, which is distinct from IFRS 9, which is the regime that we follow. Some of them have 360-day write-offs. But you have to put that in the context of the portfolios that they run that generally tend to be longer maturities more secured. So it's not necessarily an apples-to-apples comparison.

Neha Agarwala

Analyst

Perfect. And if I can follow-up on the credit card receivables, I think the interest-bearing portion of the credit card is now higher as you showed in one of your slides. Should we expect that to continue rising further, or should we expect some stability there? And I think you mentioned previously that, this is mostly being incentivized it's driven by you and you are not seeing any worsening in terms of people not paying or more people being late in the credit card payments. Could you confirm the trend? Thank you.

Guilherme Lago

Analyst

Thanks, Neha. Yes, I think you were referring to slide number 15 in which we showed the interest earning portfolio of our credit card against the market. And yes, I think both of your assertions are correct. We have increased our interest-earning portfolio over the past four, five quarters mostly as a result of actions that we have taken and things that we have incentivized more specifically the launching of new financing products and new financing features. With our credit cards, you can basically finance specific purchase. You can finance boletos, which are called now bank slips. You can now also finance fixed transactions. So we have been adding those features that allow our customers to basically finance a greater number of their transactions and hence foster the increase in IEP. Now, even by doing so, we are still quite behind the average of the Brazilian market. We started I believe a year ago being about 50% of the market. Now, we are around 60% of the market. We expect to continue going up. We don't guide and it's very hard for us to be more precise on if and when we're going to catch up with the market. But we do expect this to go up, over the course of the coming years; not necessarily coming quarters, but coming years. To your second question, which is, is the increase in IEP, a sign of credit degradation. Our observation given the AB testing that we have done and we've done a few control groups is no is that most of the increase in IEP comes from our launching new financing products not necessarily as a signal of overall credit degradation in our books.

Neha Agarwala

Analyst

Perfect. Thank you so much.

Jorg Friedemann

Analyst

And our next question comes from the line of Eduardo Rosman from BTG Pactual.

Eduardo Rosman

Analyst

Hi, everyone. Can you hear me?

Guilherme Lago

Analyst

Yes.

Eduardo Rosman

Analyst

Hi, guys. So congrats on the numbers. My question here is just trying to think about your potential future profitability, right? You showed two very interesting graphs in your presentation that show the potential or the expected ROE for your credit card and personal credit at around 80% and 100%. When we look to Itaú's results right naturally Itaú is very different from Nu right. But Itaú's perceived as the premium retail bank in Brazil. They break it down the retail and the wholesale units. And the retail units used to deliver a 30% ROE in the past then that went down to 20% and now it's at 16%, because it has been suffering let's say from higher provisions. So just trying to think about here is, do you think trying to look to that metric it's a good one? Not as such the 16%, but trying to look how much let's say, a leading kind of a retail bank is delivering in retail is a good metric for us to follow. I know that, you mentioned that your ARPAC is going to be smaller than the big banks, but you're going to be more efficient as well. So just trying to think here about how you think about the business and that comparison. Thanks.

Guilherme Lago

Analyst

Hey, Eduardo, thank you for the question. Look, it's very hard for us to provide you with a specific number or reference. However, I would discourage you from eventually anchoring the profitability of our business in the profitability of an incumbent bank. However, well run this incumbent bank, maybe we just believe that, we have been with digital banking, redefining a new category in which we will have a completely different cost base of an incumbent bank, and also a completely different revenue stream of an incumbent bank to a large extent. Of course, we still believe that we will have consumer finance as our core. But if you take a look at our four cost pillars, cost to acquire, cost to serve, cost of risk, and cost of funding and we see the examples of other digital banks around the globe that have also started with consumer credit, they have been able to obtain levels of profitability and returns materially higher than those of incumbent banks in the markets in which they operate, even in markets that have substantially lower NIMs than Brazil. So I wouldn't necessarily compare our target profitability with those of a local incumbent bank. And of course, we will try to gain the game or win this game on the cost base. We believe that, the winners in the long term in Latin America will be the lowest cost producers. And we will – we want to be as David mentioned the lowest cost manufacturer in the banking industry in Latin America. David Vélez: Hi, Eduardo, David here. Just to add one point here to Lago's answer. The way we think about our balance sheet and our capital is – at scale has been a generally small balance sheet that dedicates its capital to extremely high return on equity operations. And so, when there are financial products that we think are below a certain narrow threshold, we'd rather be a distributor that a manufacturer. So for example, we have some partners -- we have a partnership with Creditas, where we do secure lending and secure lending for auto and for home. In those type of situations, we rather become a distributor that maintains that high ROE on capital versus being a manufacturer ourselves, which is different I think that the model that a lot of the banks in Brazil follow, where you -- in that ROE for retail that you look, you see a weighted average of a number of different retail businesses that have different types of ROE. So, I think, it's important to mention that we want to continue to maintain a strategy of capital efficiency, where we'll be very disciplined on how that capital gets allocated and have the possibility to be both a distributor, as well as a manufacturer.

Eduardo Rosman

Analyst

Great. Thanks a lot, [indiscernible] and Guilherme.

Jorg Friedemann

Analyst

And our next question comes from Jamie Friedman from SIG.

Jamie Friedman

Analyst

Hi. Thank you for the opportunity. Lago, in your answer to I think Thiago's previous question on slide 11, I think you inferred that the number of products per active customer is in your opinion more important than the primary banking account anchor. I'm just curious, why you view it that way and -- well, if you view it that way. And if you didn't say that, I apologize. But if you do, why you think that's the way to look at it.

Guilherme Lago

Analyst

Jamie, I think from where I was coming is, if you take a look at the product penetration that we have across our customer base, you largely see that we have, I want to say about slightly more than 60% of our customers with credit card, slightly more than 80% of our customers with bank account, but about 5% of our customers with personal loans. We have no -- an even smaller portion of our customers with crypto, with marketplace, with insurance. So, the potential that we have to claim what we call to be our fair market share in each of the product verticals we operate is largely going to bring a materially bigger gap in value creation than eventually our ability to take the primary banking relationship from 55 to 65. That is what we want to -- that is more of the magnitude that I wanted to convey. However, there is in fact a very strong correlation between you being a primary banking customer and the ability that we have to cross-sell more and more products to you. So, I'm not saying that primary banking relationship customers is not a fairly critical KPI. I was more drawn into the material product penetration that we still have to acquire across each of the verticals that we already have, not to mention the new verticals that we will be launching in the coming quarters and years.

Jamie Friedman

Analyst

Okay. That makes sense. I follow now. And then, also Lago, I think in your prepared remarks, you said and I may have written this down wrong that similar levels of origination lead to slower growth rates because of replenishing the amortized loans. I was just wondering, if you -- if that's right, if you could be more explicit about what you meant there. Do you mean the growth in percentage terms?

Guilherme Lago

Analyst

Yes, growth in percentage terms. And I would draw Jamie your attention to slide 35, which basically shows the evolution of our credit portfolio on an FX-neutral basis. And the underlying thesis there is that, our credit portfolio has a very low duration. The weighted average life of our personal loan business has -- is about six to seven months. So, there is a volume that we need to originate every month, just to replenish the personal loan that is being repaid or prepaid every month. That is what I meant, when I made that remark.

Jamie Friedman

Analyst

Make sense. Thank you very much.

Guilherme Lago

Analyst

Thank you.

Jorg Friedemann

Analyst

And our next question comes from the line of Geoffrey Elliott from Autonomous.

Geoffrey Elliott

Analyst

Hello. Thanks very much for taking the question. You touched on the benefit to funding costs from the change in deposit pricing that you announced. Can you elaborate a little bit on that? How significant do you think the benefit can be?

Guilherme Lago

Analyst

Geoff, it's very hard for us to provide any indication. We are in the very early days of deploying this in our base. We have deployed this to about five, seven -- 5%, 6% of our customer base as of today. We will probably have to track this over the course of the next coming quarters to be able to provide with a more well-grounded estimate for you.

Geoffrey Elliott

Analyst

Thanks. And if you just took that change and assume there were no changes in customer behavior, so customers didn't use the money box option for example, can you give us a sense without changes in customer behavior what the impact would have been if you had used this new pricing say in the second quarter? Thank you.

Guilherme Lago

Analyst

We don't have that information Geoff, as we believe that it's very hard for us not to foster a change in customer behavior with the money box. In fact, we've already seen customers using money box quite extensively even for the relatively small number of customers that we have today in our base. We believe that, as David mentioned, that it will be perceived by customers as being an all-in combo of offering that it's even stronger and more compelling than the one that we had before. We will offer on one hand a money box through which you can have access to investments that will have targets above 100% of CDI. On the other hand, you will have kind of your NuConta account that will yield 100% of CDI for the money that you leave there for more than 30 days. So the combination will ideally be perceived by customers as much stronger than what we have today. So really hard for us to come up with an estimate at this point in time as to what is going to be the decrease in funding. We do expect to see a decrease in funding costs, the magnitude of which remains quite uncertain. We will come back to the market with our observations over the coming quarters.

Geoffrey Elliott

Analyst

Thank you.

Jorg Friedemann

Analyst

And our next question comes from the line of Alexander Markgraff from KeyBanc.

Alexander Markgraff

Analyst

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to first follow-up on the question around portfolio growth. Just curious what you need to see to kind of remove some of the caution that you've recently introduced in the underwriting practice. Either on the macro front or customer specific just what would cause you to remove some of that caution that's been introduced?

Youssef Lahrech

Analyst

So I would say, there's several things that we would -- we're looking at day in and day out. One category of things is certainly the performance of our cohorts in terms of returns, in terms of delinquencies some of those metrics you see in the earnings presentation. But I would say, there's also a qualitative considerations in terms of how much uncertainty we have in the environment going forward, both on the sort of macroeconomic, but also political landscape and so forth. And so it's hard to give you a sort of formula. If we see XY and Z, then we'll step on the gas more. And if we don't we'll step on the gas less. So it's a little bit of a preponderance of evidence that we're looking at both backward-looking and forward-looking.

Alexander Markgraff

Analyst

Okay. That's helpful. And then just one question around the activity rate. Just curious how you all think about the upper bound of this metric. There's obviously been some really nice progress and imagine that continues as customers take on more products. Just kind of curious what you see as kind of the upper bound of that metric here.

Jag Duggal

Analyst

Hi, there. This is Jag Duggal, Chief Product Officer at Nu. I think there are a few things to say about that. As Lago mentioned during some of his remarks, we see great momentum in customer adoption. We don't see that plateauing in the short-term and we have newer cohorts that are adopting at a much faster rate. At the same time, we have really focused over the last couple of years on building the infrastructure to allow us to launch products at a greater velocity. So in H1, we launched several high potential products to extend our franchise. David mentioned crypto investing. We launched a credit card product for our individuals [ph] or small medium enterprises. We launched mobile phone insurance. We launched NuPay so Buy Now Pay Later products and fixed rails. We launched the money boxes which Lago and David have talked about. We expect that product momentum to continue. So we're not at the point where there's a fixed number of products for customers of Nu to continue to adopt and then we run out. We're continuing to expand that frontier of new products. And so even as customers adopt the products we've already launched, we're going to continue to push that out. So we see a lot of potential and momentum as we continue to deepen. David spoke in his opening remarks about the success we've had in the four new verticals in the two new countries that we've been launching over the last two to three years. We are now -- we're now working very hard on deepening the number of insurance products, the breadth of investment products, the number of lending products the full suite of small, medium enterprise products and take all of that across the three countries we operate. So that frontier, we know we can push out even as the products we’ve already launched in the last three years are still in very early stages of their adoption. So there is a lot of room to run here. And we're sort of working on both fronts, the adoption of what we've launched and the continuing acceleration of launches over the next six, 12, 18 months.

Alexander Markgraff

Analyst

Great. that makes sense. Appreciate the efforts. Thanks all.

Jorg Friedemann

Analyst

And our last question comes from in Eugene Simuni from MoffettNathanson.

Eugene Simuni

Analyst

Hi, guys. Thank you for taking my question. I wanted to ask about user growth. Obviously, an impressive number again this quarter with 5.7 million added and in Brazil, you said 36% of the adult population. So I'm just wondering, where your incremental users especially in Brazil where you're getting quite saturated, coming from how much success are you seeing in the cohorts that maybe you have not addressed before. Maybe you can talk a little bit about your success in penetrating kind of older more excellent cohorts and where do you go from here to sustain this kind of user growth. David Vélez: Sure. Thank you for the question. So, the way we like to think about the addressable market for Brazil specifically is starting with the addressable market, for the most popular financial services product that exists in the country, which is payments. So that really is PIX. And the way PIX is developing, we've effectively seen a few years everybody from let's say seven, eight years old to 90-plus will have an app with smartphone users in PIX And we think that ultimately means it's an addressable market of something like 170 million Brazilians, that will be connected with a smartphone, paying for absolutely everything paying people, paying businesses and being a really integral part of their life. So we have 45 million active NuContas, and the addressable market there is 170 million. And by the way a lot of times, customers don't necessarily only have one app they might have two or three. So you actually end up seeing something like 600 million or 700 million accounts, which means there is still a lot of growth ahead even for us in Brazil. We have this proportionate market share on PIX. What we're focused on usability, on transactionality, on really providing the best user experience has allowed us to gain a very significant market share on PIX and that continues to grow. Part of that also to some previous question, is what explains the increasing activity rate that you're seeing around increases. They also explain the increasing primary bank accounts. So a lot of these metrics end up, being very much correlated with each other. And so we think we could literally double or even more our customer base in Brazil, starting with a payment product. And that is the first product, eventually we really diversify across the entire financial services space. So it's still a very large addressable market, to grow into that's Brazil. And really Mexico, Colombia we're in the early stages. And while we've said, we are hyper focused on these three countries over the next few years, over a longer period of time we might go beyond. So from a customer perspective still a lot of growth.

Eugene Simuni

Analyst

Got it. Got it. Thank you. And I actually wanted to follow up on PIX, with my other question. There were some headlines that recently the Head of the Central Bank, kind of making this the prediction that PIX will eventually lead to elimination of credit cards, I'm sure that's a longer goal in the future. But was curious to hear your guys' thoughts, on that sort of competitive dynamic between PIX and your card business, how you're seeing that evolving and how much of a threat do you see that to your card business. David Vélez: Yes. So we very much agree, actually with that statement. That's something we've been saying for a long time. I even compare the physical credit card to Netflix, sending physical DVDs to people's homes and eventually a migration towards a full streaming, that's effectively digital payments in Brazil. So, we think that's true. We've started our strategy to use payments in a number of different payment rails like PIX, to start diversifying away through credit cards. So while you see for example, in some of the products that we have a BNPL, through a company we bought called Spin Pay, we are now enabling a number of merchants to pay via BNPL or PIX at checkout. Then we announced this quarter, credit on top of PIX. So eventually this is becoming an alternative to the credit card rails. We think that there might be some potential cannibalization of first probably debit, then eventually credit but the addressable market size increases significantly. So ultimately, we are happy to cannibalize ourselves. We're happy to skate to where the puck is going. And we think that ultimately a lot of it is digital payments. But it's probably going to take a number of years to get there, just specifically on credit card. As credit card itself has other usability like international payments, like payment in installments, that PIX still hasn't really enabled. So we'll be working on a number of different scenarios, but we absolutely think that the puck is going in that direction.

Eugene Simuni

Analyst

Thank you very much. David Vélez: Thank you.

Operator

Operator

The Q&A section is now closed. I would like to turn the call over to Mr. Jorg Friedemann, at Nu Holdings.

Jorg Friedemann

Analyst

I appreciate the participation of all of you. And if you had any questions that were not responded, the IR team will be following up with you off-line. Thank you once again, and hope to hear from all of you soon. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

The Nu Holdings conference call has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.