Nu Holdings began operating in the United States on 10 September 2026, unveiling a Global Digital Account in Miami as it pushed deeper into a financial system built to sort people by borders, fees and access. Founder and CEO David Vélez and co-founder Cristina Junqueira, who heads Nu’s US business, presented Nu Global as a multicurrency digital account that lets users move money without fees across more than 35 countries. The pitch is simple enough. The machinery behind it is not.
Who Gets the Account
Nu Global is aimed at people with what the company calls global lives, including migrants, remote workers and families moving money between the United States and Latin America. Deposits are converted into the USDC and EURC stablecoins, earning 3.50 percent and 2.20 percent APY respectively, and the account comes with a virtual card. The company says the product is built for people whose lives already cross the lines drawn by states and banks, especially those sending money across a corridor where remittances from the United States to Latin America run into the tens of billions of dollars every year.
That corridor has long been a toll road. The article says incumbents charge fees Nu is betting it can undercut with stablecoin settlement. Nu’s own logic is blunt: tens of millions of its Brazilian, Mexican and Colombian customers travel, work or hold family ties in the US. When Nu filed for the charter, Vélez said the move would help the company better serve its existing customers based in the country. The people at the bottom of the transaction chain are the ones expected to adapt, pay, and keep moving money through whatever system survives the next round of corporate competition.
Who Has the Power
The launch marks the start of US operations with a full suite of financial products. Alongside Nu Global, the company is offering a high-yield savings account, credit cards and remittance services, initially through partner banks while Nu’s own charter proceeds. That charter process sits squarely inside the state’s gatekeeping apparatus. Nu applied to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on 30 September 2025 for a de novo national bank charter. On 29 January 2026, the OCC granted preliminary conditional approval to Nubank, National Association, with its main office in McLean, Virginia.
The company still needs to satisfy the OCC’s conditions and secure deposit insurance from the FDIC and a Federal Reserve account before Nubank, N.A. can operate as a full national bank. So the “launch” comes wrapped in permissions, conditions and institutional blessing. The state doesn’t disappear here. It sets the terms, stamps the papers, and decides who gets to play banker.
What They’re Selling as Freedom
Nu enters the US with 139 million customers at the end of June 2026, including 118 million in Brazil, 16 million in Mexico and more than 5 million in Colombia. The company crossed US$1 billion in quarterly profit for the first time in Q2 2026, and first-quarter revenue topped US$5 billion. It carries a market value of about US$74 billion and announced a US$1 billion share repurchase program in June. The article says Nu is profitable in all three of its home markets.
That scale gives the company a ready-made base for its US push, and it also explains why the launch matters to investors. Nu’s edge, the article says, is a defensible niche among the tens of millions of US residents with financial lives spanning Latin America, combined with a cost structure built in Brazil that runs at a fraction of US peers. Wise, Revolut and Remitly crowd the same corridor, but none of them arrives with 139 million customers already in hand.
The Miami announcement also comes as Nu already holds naming rights to Inter Miami’s new Nu Stadium at Miami Freedom Park, announced in March 2026, and Junqueira has relocated to lead the US push personally. American retail banking is famously hard to crack, and no foreign-founded digital bank has taken meaningful deposit share from the giants. Nu is trying anyway, with stablecoins, partner banks and a federal charter process that keeps the whole thing tethered to the same old hierarchy.