Inter & Co Inc (INTR) 2025 Q4 法說會逐字稿

Hi everyone, I'm Hafa Vittore, IR officer at Inter, and I would like to welcome all to Interno's 4th quarter 2025 earnings conference call. First of all, some instructions. This call is also available in Portuguese. To access it, press the globe icon on the lower right side of your Zoom screen, then select the Portuguese room.

Please be advised that all participants will be in listen-only mode and that the conference is being recorded. You may submit online questions at any time today using the Q&A box on the webcast. A replay will be available at the company's IR website. With me on today's call are Jean Vito Mei, Inters Global CEO Alexandre Jesus, Brazil CEO, and Santiago Stel, senior Vice President and CFO.

Throughout this conference call, we will be presenting non-IFRS financial information. These are important financial measures for the company, but are not financial measures as defined by the IFRS. Reconciliations to the IFRS financial information are available in our earnings release. Earnings presentation appendix. I would also like to remind everyone that today's discussion might include forward-looking statements which are not guarantees of future performance. Please refer to the forward-looking statements disclosure in the company's earnings release and earnings presentation. Today's round will discuss interest strategy and business overview.

After that, Alessandria and Santiago will take you through our financial and operating results in more detail. We will then open the call for questions. I will now turn the call over to Jean. Jean, please go ahead.

To that we have accomplished yet another quarter of growth while we continue. I want to emphasize during this session, especially during 2025, the boundaries in everything we do.

Chu branding.

We focus on strong connections with foundations to replicate our model across borders and lat expanding the horizons of our products and services.

With a client-centric approach, we designed our platform to make our clients liked as soon as the national payroll platform preparation ensured our systems were ready from day one, allowing us to hit the ground running.

Since its launch, the product has been a tremendous success, served nearly 500,000 clients, and have built a 2 billion HIs portfolio, fully digital and scalable.

In April, we introduced our own social media platform called Forum.

This space fosters engagement where clients, journalists, and specialists can share December. We had 18 million users, and this number is growing daily.

In July, we enhanced my Big Bank, enabling clients to set specific goals for their investments.

This UX improvement made investing easier, embodying the core of our customer centric DNA.

Today, we have 1.5 million active users leveraging this future, driving a strong activation in our investments vertically.

Finally, in December, we rolled out my credit journey to our entire client base.

This new feature recorded 3 billion unique ax access in a few weeks.

By combining financial education with advanced internal modeling process.

Why we have shared 4 examples here. 2025 was a remarkable year of innovation across our platform.

AI solution to help our clients navigate through our super app.

This progress is evident through the brand recognition we received, which I will deep dive on the next page.

Bringing new solutions like the ones I just mentioned keep us closely connected to our clients' needs.

This connection translates into recognition and increased engagement.

During 2025 we were proud to be ranked as the 7th most powerful brand in Brazil.

And the 3rd most mentioned brand on social media in Brazil.

We also achieved another milestone, being ranked as the number one bank brand among Gen Z.

These clients are a key focus for us as we offer products and services tailored to meet their needs.

Last but not least, our clients placed Intel as the number one rated financial app in both Apple Store and Google Play.

These achievements are clear evidence of the trust and appreciation people have for Inter.

They also highlight the power of word of the mouth and member get member approach as an engagement.

During 2025, we hosted for the first time an event dedicated to our investment clients who now total 9 million people.

It was a Saturday filled with incredible content where investment specialists shared their knowledge and insights with over 6,000 clients.

Attending.

We firmly believe that a strong brand is built through daily consistent interactions like this, where our commitment to delivering the best experience is the foundation of everything we do.

Another topic I have been focused on our global expansion.

Reached important milestones as well. Since 2022, we have been focused on building a strong foundation in the US to offer USD accounts and solutions globally.

In 2023, we launched US mortgage designed for Brazilians seeking to buy a second home in the US, a segment underserved by the US banking system.

Then we introduced intersecurities allowing clients to diversify their investments in the US markets.

In 2024 we reached a major milestone by securing our Cayman branch license, bringing efficiency to our international operations.

In 2025 we launched USD credit cards and announced the partnership with Bind to bring our solutions to Argentinian clients.

We are in the final stage of testing and will soon roll out these offerings fully.

While delivering these milestones, we have also been working behind the scenes on obtaining approval for our US bank license.

In January 2026, a few weeks ago, we just achieved this goal.

This will unlock significant costs allowing us to direct our US deposit base, which stands at 320 million, to fund credit operations like mortgage and USD credit cards.

Also, the ability to offer our products and services across geographies.

This is a major step forward transforming our global vision into reality.

To make everything possible, 2025 was marked by the consolidation of our C-level leadership. Over the past few years, we brought in key talent whose leadership continues to make an impact.

In 2025 we brought two new additions to the team Mawar Aus, our new chief legal and compliance officer, and Mahros Arrausz, our new CRO with years of experience in the industry.

In addition, we implemented our new leadership framework called DAC.

Direction, alignment, and commitment. This was done with the support of our board of directors and external advisors of Howard Gutman and Nicola Kaliqui.

This combination positioned us to build a dynamic, ultimately propelling's long-term success.

Now I'd like to pass the mic to Shanji who will walk you through our business highlights.

Thank you very much.

Thank you Joao. Hello everyone. It's always a pleasure to be here and present the achievements of the quarter. We're proud to share another outstanding year of growth and profitability.

Once again we were the fastest growing financial institution in Brazil among those with over 20 million clients.

This reinforces the strengths of our brand and the attractiveness of our platform. Beyond attracting clients, we've seen them deepen their relationship with us. In December, we recorded over 21.5 million daily logins. That's nearly 15,000 per minute, a significant increase compared to last December's 17 million logins per day.

Additionally, we processed 32,000 financial transactions per minute, totalling almost 1 billion transactions during the month of December.

This exceptional level of client engagement highlights how well our platform performs.

With a sustained MPS of 85 points over several years, it also reinforces the value created by the synergy between our seven verticals, delivering a seamless experience for our users.

Throughout the year we delivered a record breaking performance in both Wecom. This is an important achievement given Brazil's mature market where most people are already bankerized.

Our focus on core clients, 4.4 million became active, bringing our overall activation rate to 58% and our total active client base to 25 million.

These results are driven by continuous improvements in our super app, from enhancing the onboarding process and client services to refining communication strategies, targeting, and hyper personalization. We've worked to deliver a seamless and engaging experience for our clients, having significant increases in transaction volumes. In the fourth quarter, our TPV grew 27%, reaching 1.8 trillion reiss in run rate.

Transactions made through peaks totaled around 1.5 trillion reaiss for the year, leading our peak market share to 8.5%. Additionally, our transaction mix continues to evolve, with credit card volume outpacing debit card transactions for many quarters in a row. This shift positively contributes to higher interchange fee income.

Importantly, our TPV levels across cohorts show consistent improvement as newer clients demonstrate increased activity, transacting faster and more frequently than other cohorts.

On credit, before sending a deep dive on specific metrics, I want to highlight 3 main topics.

Portfolio growth, private payroll loans, and credit cards.

First, on our portfolio, we achieved a remarkable 36% annual growth, being diligent with ROE targets and maintaining a balanced ratio of secured and unsecured loans, roughly 2/3 secured, 1/3 unsecured. Second, on private payroll loans.

We, this has been the main highlight of the year, and we keep a positive view on the product. We reached a portfolio of nearly 2 billion reites with around 500,000 clients. This shows the strength of our digital distribution and our ability to scale a new product quickly.

Third, on credit cards, we're making good progress in moving clients from being peer transactors to our interest earning portfolio, a process we call reshaping.

IPs or Intersterling products now represent over 23% of our credit card portfolio up in the market, brought stability to the reshaping process. Nevertheless, there is a lot of space to maintain the evolution we saw in 2025. Sunti will provide more details on our strong loan book performance.

Moving to the next page, we see another quarter of remarkable market share gains delivered.

Our goal of replicating Peak's success in other products is underway, with home equity already ahead of peaks this quarter. The progress is evident. Market share is expanding consistently across across all of our businesses.

I am confident that we will continue strengthening our market position with more products surpassing the growth benchmarks set by peaks.

To finish, I want to highlight that these outstanding results are seamlessly and interconnected to enhance this powerful system, hence client value and compound profitability.

Sets In apart and propel forward. Now I'll hand it over to Sunny, who will guide us through our financial results.

Thank you.

Thank you, Shande and good morning everyone. I'm excited to highlight what has been one of the year's biggest achievements, our long growth.

It grew 36% year on year, with quarterly growth accelerating to 10% or 40% on an annualized basis.

Now breaking it down by segments. First, on the real estate side, mortgages grew 48% year on year while home equity loans grew 35%.

On private payrolls, we reached 2 billion AIs, up from nearly zero at the beginning of the year. It grew 29% with solid risk management and continued progress from the reshaping strategy, driving monetization and profitability.

Overall, our intention has been to deepen trade penetration and as a result, continue increasing monetization.

Here, I'd like to highlight the evolution of our asset quality metrics, which reflects how we are driving the outcome in terms of credit underwriting strategy.

The 15 to 90 day NPL ratio improved 10 basis points as a consequence of the dynamics with the private payroll product in which the earlier cohorts have passed our coverage ratio from 136 to 146% in the 1st 9 months of the year.

Looking specifically at credit cards, MPLs continue to perform well, validating the continued improvements in our underwriting and collection models.

Finally, MPL formation and stage 3 formation were also impacted by the private payroll portfolio, which began appearing in these stages as expected.

Our cost of risk closed the year at 5.3%, reflecting 10 basis points improvement, mainly led by a strong performance of our credit card portfolio.

Moving here to our funding franchise, we deliver another strong quarter of growth, increasing 32% year on year and 7% quarter on quarter, reaching nearly 73 billion heIs and an average balance of 2.1,000 HIs per active client.

This growth throughout the year was driven primarily by time deposits, given the high level of the sli rate, and the ongoing success of my piggy bank account.

Our product that simplifies fixed income investing for clients. On the transactional deposits, we have great quarter increasing 10% and passing the 20 billion HIs mark.

In terms of loans to deposit, this quarter we were able to deploy more capital in the funding growth, thus resulting in an increase in our loans to deposit ratio from 64 to 66%, still having lots of room to put our excess liquidity to work.

Our healthy funding mix continues to translate into a key competitive advantage, our low cost of funding, which remains an industry lead metric among Brazilian banks and fintechs.

This quarter, our cost of funding stood at 65.6% of CDI, an improvement from the 68.2% of the prior quarter.

What's notable is how disadvantage persisted rate remained high. It restoress strength of our country and reinforces our leeds strong performance in 2025 with total gross revenues reaching 15 billion high growth.

This magnitude highlights marking an impressive 45% year on year credit cards, mortgages, and home equity loans, all key segments where we have built significant scale and efficiency.

On the fee side, net fee revenues grew 9% a year and increased monetization of some by changes in accounting rules at the beginning of the year during the year. This growth was moderated fee lines like internship through net interest income by the introduction of the binary monetization across our boards.

Higher client engagement is growing fast, jumping here to the unit economic side, help a later product.

Especially through private payroll loans, the res dive into our net interest margins. Both are 1.0 and 2.0, which excludes the non-interest resios of credit. We have improved our risk adjusted NI by an average of 15 basis points quarter after quarter.

This particular quarter earnings were positively impacted by two key drivers. First, private payrolls, which was the biggest contributor to its growth.

And second, credit cards, which also performed well as the reshaping strategy continues to show its results.

However, we also faced a few headwinds this quarter, the first one being lower inflation, which impacted our real estate portfolio income, and second, a higher number of business days which increased our funding expenses.

With all these results combined, our expanded at twice the level of the prior quarters, showcasing how consistency in our grade underwriting strategy is paying off by allowing us to extract an increasing amount of value from our balance sheets.

Finally, our assets to equity ratio, which increased from 7, showcases the optimization of our capital structure.

Moving to the expenses side, total expenses rose 0.5% on year on year basis. We have three dynamics playing out. First, on the administrative expenses, it rose 8% quarter on quarter and 19% year on year, reflecting higher transactional volumes as our super app continues to scale.

As our business expands rapidly, we remain focused on renegotiating contracts with major vendors, further reduce transaction costs, and improve efficiency.

Second, on personal expenses, it increased due to seasonal impacts from profit sharing provisions and the annual collective agreement, as well as due to the seniorization of our team.

Despite these increases, causation, which grew 33% quarter on quarter or 85% year on year, driven primarily by one-off impairment related to POS terminals.

When we look at operational leverage, we had another year of progress.

As a result, our efficiency ratio decreased from 48.4% to 45.5%, representing a nearly 300 basis points improvement in the year.

These efficiency gains are a result of our digital approach, process organization, and discipline cost initiatives. And last but not least, I'm truly thrilled about the progress we've made on our journey towards increasing profitability.

As you can see on the page, this year we reached 1.3 billion heads in net income and surpassed a remarkable milestone of 15% ROE in the last quarter.

What stands out even more is the consistency of our performance, which is clearly reflected in the chart. It's an accomplishment that fills us with pride and demonstrate the strength of everything we've worked on with discipline and consistency also in the pursuit of excellence.

With our platform running better than ever before, our virtual cycle growing stronger and larger, we're now Joe Vitor will take the stage for the final remarks.

Thank you all.

I would like to thank the team for the support on this journey and the immense effort they put day in and day out that made these results possible.

I firmly believe our platform is at the best moment ever, which gives me a lot of confidence that 2026 will be another excellent year for Hafa to open the Q&A session.

Thank you very much.

Before opening the Q&A session, I'd like to invite everyone here to join us in New York City for our Investor Day on May 11th. It will be an exciting opportunity to reflect on our incredible journey. Those who can't attend in person, the event will be broadcast live. Hope to see you all there. Now let's.

Our first question comes from the Q&A session.

Results, Joan, good morning, everybody. Advantage, right? This is like by 2027 deepting faster progress.

I haven't seen or I was expecting in this quarter right when we look at efficiency deteriorated. So let me ask you, like, how are you, do you anticipate making any changes on this guidance, on this investor they just announced on May 11th. And what can you do on efficiency to make sure that it starts heading in the right direction because that's the main pushback I get from investors is the slow progress in the efficiency ratio.

Thank you.

Okay, Mario, thank you for the question. I will TRY to answer everything. So first of all, important to mention, we unveiled our 63,030 plan three years ago. It was still a 5 year plan and we're happy that these 1st 3 years were a tremendous success. Just to recap what we just said, moving from 0% a week to 15% today.

From 25 million clients back then to 43 million clients today, the efficiency started at 73%. Today we're at 45%. And also important to mention, since then, Maru, we more than doubled our credit portfolio from 22 billion to 48 billion.

That said, we are convinced here at INTE that the deep banking model, which by the way, we invented 10 years ago, is ready to produce growth, ROE and efficiency according to the goals of this plan. This is very important to highlight.

I also believe that on our 4th year of the plan 2026 will be a great year in the direction of getting closer to this KPI.

Regarding the time, when and how we will get into each of these specific targets, clients, efficient, and ROE, we will go to deep dive and to explore that more on our investor Day in New York, which I take this opportunity here to invite everyone to attend. They are in Aac or digitally.

Connecting to your other question about efficiency, what do we see that could help us on that topic? We mentioned in the, in our earnings, on the presentation on the deck, some efforts in terms of innovation, and in terms of AI.

We do believe that India is very well prepared to get all the benefits from these new things in technology and innovation that are jumping in. We believe that we have all the data, we have all the back end, all the cutting edge technology to help us on the expense side. And last but not least, as Santia always likes to say, our goal is to always grow our expenses. We are still a growth company, just remember, but we will grow our expenses less than there are revenues producing operational lever.

Thank you very much. Bye.

Thanks, Joon. Let me, let me follow-up just on what you said at the end, right? You are a growth company, so let me, and you continue to consume capital.

So let me ask about the strategy of paying dividends, and why I know you paid last year as well, but how do you look at dividend payments and given the capital levels that you have today and right, if you're growing your loan book 36%, your ROE is running at 15%, right, it means that you should continue to consume capital. So can you let us know like what to expect in terms of future dividend payments?

Thank you.

Well, May, that's an excellent question. So just to recap, we have been paying dividends on a 20% ratio for the past 3 years in a row. We believe that this should be the the trend going forward as long as it does not impact the execution plan and the growth of the business.

Regarding the capital, I'm going to pass the mic to such that we go over how we balance growth, portfolio, dividends and capital at the bank level and at the holding level, to keep running the business. So, if you could jump in.

Thank you. Good morning, Mario. So the capital, just to to reiterate, we have two levels of capital, the bank and the holding. At the bank level, we have 14.4%. And this past year in 2025, we were able to two which are more evolved version of working with our capital structure which is around 4.5% points of CT1 which combined with the local CT1 of 19%. So we are still in the in the phase where we consume capital with that statement Mario, but it is at a lower pace quarter by quarter and we are reaching, we are closer to reaching the capital neutrality. But we want to move the excess capital from the opco to the Holco, given that it's more profitable to have it at the holding level and that was done by design, back in 2022 when when the holding was created, so it's moving as planned.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from Tito Lavato.

Tito, please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. Thanks for the call, a little bit on Mario's question, cause, yeah, I mean, if efficiency is sort of the, one of the key question marks we had also, particularly, I guess, on fee income. I know for the full year you had the interpag consultation, right, but if you look now, on a year to year basis for the quarter, that should be behind, yet fees did not really grow significantly. We do see fee expenses have been a bit of a headwind. Just to understand, why that spike in fee expenses, what should we expect on fee income, from here, when do you think it starts to grow back in line more with loan growth.

Hi.

Hi.

Thanks for the question. This is hn speaking. So on fee, I think that there are a few topics to talk about, right? First is, the fee income ratio itself end of 2024. And it's in a way I see it as a good problem to have. So NII expanded a lot. We had 45% growth in the NII part, and that ended up compressing the nominal numbers in fee income. So what we saw in the fourth quarter was a solid quarter at 5.9 million, and with a few positives, so CS TPV for the year grew at like more than 15%.

The investment business was strong, so we have that 27% growth in AUC, 8.7 million active clients, more than 10 million insurance contracts, so the insurance business also coming good. So these are positive highlights and as headwinds, we did have some. So Intershop was in a way under pressure.

Despite that, we saw a positive number up a lot as an engagement engine for clients to bring primary bank accounts through Intershop. So it's very important for us, and we did see a 3% increase in active clients despite the pressure on the revenue side.

Or meter shock as we as we think about the overall numbers, we saw, so we had a few one-offs related to capital gains in 2024 and 20% points in the number, so that would bring us back to around 213. And if we add back resolution 4.9% on that, we would be back to like a 15% growth, which would be much better. So this would kind of normalize the growth in 2025 to the 15%.

And what we're doing is many initiatives to to engage clients more with the different products. So we're going to go back to like hyper personalization.

We're implementing different solutions to do conversational sales both in-app and off the app thinking app solutions like WhatsApp so that we can sell more fee income-related but with good perspectives here thinking about 2026.

Thank you.

Thanks, Andy. No, very helpful, mate. Just a follow-up there just because if you look at the, just the interloop expenses and expenses from services commissions, right? I mean those were a bit of a headwinds, right? One was up 34%, and up 10% in the quarter. And is that where you're seeing sort of that pressure from the Chinese players from an inter shop? And just how should we think about that growth in fee expenses, from here? Is there room to improve that?

So Tito, a lot of that is, we see it as a good expense. For example, loop is a big engagement power that we're using with our clients. A lot of campaigns to activate and bring primary bank accounts also. In many ways we're using cashback to incentivize the sale of credit.

So this is to say that we do keep an eye on the number on the expenses themselves that are related to fees, but we are optimizing in the end for net income to use the tools that we have to sell more and expecting a better a little bit about what we see there. And specifically on loop, it's something that we are very enthusiastic about because it's one of the main, it is our loyalty program that it's evolving a lot. We're bringing a lot of clients in the base to use it and as they use it they typically use us as their primary banking relationship. So that's our view on that number. So to summarize, we are, we do keep an eye on it.

We'll keep it under control, but we'll keep using it to optimize sales and and growth in the different products.

Okay, no, very helpful. Thanks, Sandy, for the color.

Our next question comes from Yuri Fernandez. Yuri, please go ahead.

Thank you, Haffa, and congrats to all Shandy, Shanti, for the step by step like the improvement of margins, ROE.

I would like to ask a little bit about maybe, the elephant in the room at least from my conversations here with investors regarding provisioning.

They can be volatile, right? And I think there was a usage of coverage this quarter that may have helped your EBT and just to see which products stage 3 for what we did here was to TRY to look by productation is worsening, how you are building provisions for those products and it was not credit cards that usually I would say is the bad guy, he is the villain for, from a little bit of the past quarters.

This quarter was a little bit personal loans. We saw an increase in stage 3 formation for personal loans. Also, you're be a little bit of less provisions for this product. And the same is true for real estate. Real estate also was low. This is not new, but I think you have collaterals there, so I think it's let's say a safer product. So if you can explain.

What happened with the formation of this quarter? Just trying to understand, because I think like a little bit of the question, how you, how should we think about co version? And my answer here has been that you did more in the second quarter and in the 3rd quarter. So just TRY to listen the moving parts here.

Thank you very much.

Good morning, Yuri.

Thank you for the question. This is something. I'll take that one and I'll answer it in more in general terms, touching the points that you touched on.

So, first of all, the asset quality of our loan book is performing as planned. And consistent with the great underwriting strategy that we are executing. So when we look at the mix, we look at the growth levels and how it evolved quarter by quarter, the picture that we see on asset quality now is exactly the one that we anticipated. No. Right now, portfolio portfolio, and it's about private payroll, they are the initial cohorts of these products are starting to mature and they passed the 90-day mark. And that explains how they came into the into the MPL, no, increasing and also on the MPL formation formation ratios as well. The performance of the monetization of this product more than compensates this level of delinquencies, so we, we're happy with the ROEs that we're seeing there, but it does take a toll, not when you look at specifically at this credit quality metrics for this product. On credit cards, as you mentioned correctly, the The performance was actually pretty good on the 4th quarter. It typically is good on the 4th quarter with more liquidity in the hands of the clients that have this product and they tend to get a bit more up to date on the 4th quarter, so performance there was pretty good. SMEs, no material change quarter by quarter, this portfolio is mostly invoices counting, so it's quite steady through time.

No materials on mortgages and home equity. You flagged it well. We had, there an increase on stage 3 balances due to a more conservative and integrated view of our clients. Let me explain that what I mean, that until the 3rd quarter, we did keep mortgage loans that were paid on time in their respective stage, not considering great deterioration, events concerning the same client. At different products, but starting in the 4th quarter, if a client has a performing mortgage but has more than 90 days overdue in other credit lines, we also migrated the mortgage portfolio loan to stage 3.

This change was made in a cumulative manner, accounting for the full balance in this single 4th quarter and resulting in an extra 140 million HIs of stage 3 balance on this real estate portfolio.

This is a catch-up that we did in accordance of having the best practices in place and in line with a series of initiatives that we are implementing with our new CRO that has been helping us in this front. If we have adjusted this stage three formation factor from the mortgages, the formation would have been 1.65%, which is flat versus the prior quarter.

Now going to into 2026 to answer your question on how should we see cost of risk.

Continue evolving with a mix, a great mix in the one that we had in 2025, which is something that we will see because we TRY to cap on the opportunities as they come along, but the way we're seeing it shouldn't be too different in 5.

Would be operating with a cost of risk which is which should be between 5.5% and 6% depending on how the things play out. There is a general expectation that asset quality in the industry as a whole would have a bit of a pressure that would take us maybe closer to 6%. If that doesn't play out in a lot of intensity, it could be closer to 5.5%. And again, as we always say, the goal that we have is to maximize the risk adjusted need, not to minimize the delinquency levels, and to do that by offering products that are healthy for the clients too, and with that, we don't need to turn the clients very far in time. We have a product that adds value to the economy and to them and to us as well, given that the ROE of these products is very accredited. I hope I answered a bit longer.

It was a very good Santa.

Thank you very much, and I think like I would just repeat and make sure I got it all right. So the 5.526, I think it's in line with expectations. I think the company has been saying, that those numbers in the past. Regarding the quarter per se, there was a one-time impact on real estate portfolio. Without this impact, on this adjustment of risk models, your stage 3 would be mostly stable on a quarter for quarter, and it should help with the formation. On a general view, you are not concerned about asset quality. 50 to 90 days links are improving. And basically risk adjusted margin that I think it's a good metric. They should also behave well. Is this a good summary, Santi? Am I missing something here?

Excellent, spot on.

Thank you, Yuri. No.

Thank you, Santi.

Our next question comes from Pedro Leducci. Leducy, please go ahead.

Thank you so much for for taking the question and congratulations on the year's achievements everybody and and on private payroll, if I may dig deeper into it now, 1.9 billion, also very good number.

And the first part of the question is if you can help us understand where this growth is coming from, how it's been changing since the beginning in terms of channel kind of takes effect, essentially this origination pace to continue or change in 2026. And then the second part also related to private payroll, I think there's a comment about like a high single-digit 10% NPL ratio to the press earlier. If this is more of the levels that you're seeing in one queue or was it in 4Q, which harvards are this and if it's aligned and if you're making any adjustments there. Thank.

You.

Hi Leuc, thank you for the question. This is Sean speaking.

So when we look at the private payroll loans, I think they, it was a new product that we had that the market had. We're obviously very happy with our execution in 2025. We posi we're positioned to be one of the winners for sure in the market. So as you mentioned, around 2 billion in credit portfolio, 500,000 clients. Average ticket about 4,000 in the ballpark of 4,000. Interest rates are relatively stable since the beginning at 3.7% on average, and usually on average clients taking the credit to pay in 20 installments.

Market share, we're at about 5%. We do see room to increase on that, but this share is very aligned with our strategy. We want to, and we've been saying this since the beginning. We want to see the product mature. We are getting maturity in the product. We know that there are many steps that Data Prev, who kind of controls the product, still needs to implement. So we want to see this development to increase our originations.

So this is the the overall view.

The product, just a couple points to add.

Has been bringing a lot of clients that we already had in the base that were inactive. They're back to active. The RAC that we see on these clients, is about 3 times the average RPAC of the company, so very positive as well. And it's also bringing cross-selling, right? So the cross selling index that we measure is 20% higher on these products from looking at the channels. It is evolving, so for now we are operating the two channels. One is the CTPS app, which is the government app where clients can look for the different options and take the one they prefer and sales through our own app. In the beginning we saw a lot of volume coming from CTPS, less volume coming from the app.

Right now we're at about 50/50. And we believe we're going to keep gaining share against CTPS. So the channel that belongs to Inter is going to become more and more, the preferred channel for clients, especially when people start to do refinancing, the refinancing process and other movements, and we're also adding in probably in the first quarter, the conversational channels also. So we're going to be selling.

Private payroll loans through WhatsApp and other conversational channels including our own conversational environment inside the app. That's on that and thinking about delinquency what we're seeing and we've discussed this several times in the earnings call since we started the product.

We planned initially for a for a delinquency that should go up to about 15%. We don't see that. We see a lower delinquency than that, but we do see delinquency converging to higher than 10%.

How do we bring it back to 67, 8% by seeing all the introduction of all the collection solutions that are in the original design of the product? So it's going to be very important to see this development in the upcoming months, and I see and if that happens, not. Only we're going to see the reduction like the reduction in the in the NPLs, but we're also going to see an increase in the volumes underwritten by the market. We're going to see reduction in rates, so it's going to be, I'd say that it's already a good product, but it can be a much better one for the Brazilians.

Very complete.

Thank you, Shenny.

Our next question comes from Gustavo Schroding. Gustavo, please go ahead.

Hello, good afternoon, everybody. Congrats on the recent achievements, I mean the last, three years.

So my question is regarding, some expectations for 2026. San already anticipated in terms of a cost of risk, something around 5.5 to 6%.

If you could give us, any caller regarding a low on growth, net interest margin, and efficiency ratio performance in for 2026, mm, I mean, should we, continue, seeing this, loan growth around the 30, 35%, a net interest margin still has room to expand in 2006, and if that is, what should they expect in terms of efficiency ratio, improvement in 2026.

Thank you.

Gustavo, so.

First, I'll say that we don't give guidance, we don't provide guidance, so that's Important to be on the record. What I can talk is about general trends. So first, before going to 26, looking at 25, there are a few things that we are particularly proud of.

One is long growth. We have been saying to the market that we were sold for 25 to 30 and we close at 36.

This was a consequence of chasing the opportunities that came along and we did that with a lot of enthusiasm and the results were pretty good and the other one would be the expansion or risk adjusted NI expansion with a very good performance throughout the year and particularly in this fourth quarter.

And the consequence of those two together is they create penetration of our clients went up from 1.7,000 heads on average to 1.9,000 heads on average, and that is very important for our p and monetization of the clients. So that, that's how we are finishing 26, 25.

426.

In terms of long growth, we still think that 25 to 30 is a reasonable target for us to be chasing and the base is bigger and private payroll, which was something that that came from zero, is not present. We're going to be starting with the balance close to 2 billion and we hope to be on the high end of the range of that 25 to 30% and and hopefully even beyond as we did in 25, but we will see as we go along. In terms of N expansion, the fact that we Continue to reprice the back book of the portfolio and that we are on the margin allocating more credit towards private payroll and credit cards that could have a further expansion on on the NIEs trends that we have been seeing, so we continue to see risk adjusted moving in the same direction which is in line with what you all mentioned for 2026. In his opening remarks, and then on efficiency, this is a core goal for us, a point to highlight is that in 25, when you see the delta of growth in revenues versus the delta of growth in expenses, we have close to 10% points. When you take out interpack from 2024, remember that we integrated interpack in the middle of 2024. Therefore, the annual comparison, we need to clean up a bit. The numbers to make it fair and and with that clean up, we have 10% points of additional growth in net revenues overgrowth in expenses, therefore resulting in the operational leverage improvement. We see that playing out again in 26.

We will see what the level of of top-line growth is, but we should have a similar delta in terms of growth and revenues versus growth and expenses and therefore continue improving our efficiency ratio in line with what we have before. There are several efficiencies in AI that are still early stage and those could could give us some upside and those are present in In CX customer experience, in fraud, in credit underwriting, and in coding, so approximately 80% of the AI improvements that we've had so far on on cost, but a lot more there is to come, and we're a bit earlier in the cycle with the revenue increase as a consequence of AI, but we have several initiatives that are getting us very exciting. One is hyper personalization of pricing, which is a very tailored pricing for on a per-client basis, hyperpolarization of the app, which we mentioned in our tech day back in 2024. Now it's a lot more evolved, and the taskbar, which is a different way to communicate with our clients and increases the cross-selling of our clients. So, a lot going on in terms of optimizing AI in the spirit of having more operational leverage.

But the trend, as Joe mentioned at the beginning, is a continuation of the new expansion, a continuation of the improvement in efficiency, and therefore the ROE continue to move in the same direction.

Great, Santi. Great, it's a super helpful, and if I may just to follow-up on the Duke's question regarding private payroll loan, it is more on the competition front, right, because, although we recognize that it is, I mean, there is a lot of room to grow in the segment, it's a large market or addressable market here, but, we've seen at the same time, I mean, I would say most of the banks, that we talk to. List and then not listed, they are, I mean, super aggressive in this segment, right? So, maybe exclude one or two, but most of them they are aggressive. So my question here is, what is the competitive advantage of Inter? How to compete in this segment, and, I mean, how to, let's say keep growing at the same pace without, any, let's say impacts on prices or, delinquency ratio.

Thank you.

Gustave Jean Victor here, I'll take this one. So first of all, about the competitive advantage that you mentioned.

We have always been saying that thing that we have, first of all, a lot of clients, digital clients. Therefore, our distribution channel is always an edge. Also, we have the best funding costs in the, also a very important advan competitive advantage and last but not least, on that front, the private parole. We are not cannibalizing all the revenues or the portfolios that we have. So, again, this is also an opportunity for Intel.

Talking about the pace of growth and how aggress is going to be throughout 2026 and 2020, you all know for ones that follow winter for a while, we have this always want to grow fast, but we want to see how collateral, how collateralized our portfolio is, how the delinquency will play out as Shen Shenjy mentioned, we want to see all the improvements from Datarevi to make sure that we have the collateral of the future flow of payroll of this specific clients. So we are proceeding with caution, how it's like to enter into a new segment, to a new market, to a new loan portfolio. And I believe that is the right approach. And that said, because of the first part of the question, our competitive advantages, we have been able to produce a 2 billion portfolio in one semester of 2025. That's how I see the our ambitions and our comfort and our expectations and excitement with this product. And last thing just to recap everyone and to and to, to emphasize.

We do love what we call the by design concepts so that brings the best price, the best collateral, so it is a win-win situation. It is good for the client, it is good for our balance sheet, it is good for for for for the economy, it is good for the regulators, so we do put private payroll on that specific on this very nice niche as we speak. Okay. So that is how we see the product going forward. Very excited with it.

All right, great, John, and congrats again.

Our next question comes from Niha Agarwala. Niha, please go ahead.

Hi, congratulations on the steady progress. Just a few questions. Sorry, but I would like to go back, to the private payroll question and ask it maybe slightly differently. In the last six months, you've seen strong growth in your portfolio. But now, since the beginning of this year, end of last year, we're seeing the other incumbent banks, being more interested and active in this portfolio. Has that impacted, say, your January originations, at all in terms of the amount of origination or the rates? And the takers of this portfolio are mostly your own clients. So is the growth coming from, mostly from cross selling, or are you going, more to the open market, and acquiring customers using this product? If you can give us a breakdown, that would be helpful for us to understand how much, how long, and at what rate can this growth be sustained, and then I'll ask my next question.

Hi.

This is speaking.

Thank you for the question. So we're seeing, so we keep seeing interest. So the year began, it's a good year. Clients are learning how to use this product is for sure going to be in the culture of the Brazilians that work in the private businesses.

So you know that public employees already had one. Private employees did not have one. Now they have, and it is the lowest cost option.

For whoever needs credit, so the beginning of the year we see volumes growing, so very good beginning of the year, and as we mentioned already, we're going to keep our appetite.

And it's going to evolve as we see improvements coming from Darev. Thinking about the distribution channel, where it's coming from, what types of clients we do everything, but it's a very nice mix. Why do we see a mix? First, say about if we divide it into 3 parts, we see about 1/3 coming from active clients where we're cross selling and selling them.

The private payroll loans, then we have another 3 that we are taking inactive clients and activating them through private payroll loans, and then we have another roughly 1/3 of the base of originations that are new clients, so they come through IT and most of them open an account and become active clients not only. In the private payroll, but also in other products. So it's, it, it's great. It's a great mix and we see it as a healthy one also because our channel's working, our clients are engaged, so it's important to see that happening.

We can re-engage clients. Also important, you see that happening a lot of times people may think, oh, you have a lot of clients, around 60% of the total clients. What do you do with the other 40%? These types of things, so selling payroll loans is one of them. And.

We can talk about what would be the impact of lower rates and how would the numbers, but just if lower rates would help you boost growth in any particular lending segment. Towards the second half of this year and, any impact on margins from that. And last question is more for Joao about the global expansion.

You talked about the license being approved. Could you give us a bit more details, on, what license is this?

How should we see this global expansion manifesting on the P&L? Which lines would we see the impact, especially that some of your other peers also looking to go into the US market, how do you see competition evolving? How is your strategy different from the others? Any color on that would be helpful.

Thank you so much.

Nija high Sandal answer the one on rate sensitivity and pass it to Joo to cover the one on global part. So on ALM an interest rate sensitivity, our goal has been to decrease volatility of the P&L. So we manage ALM with the intention of decreasing volatility and letting the name evolve as we deploy capital in the portfolios that as we have been doing. So we know what we don't want to be good at or we don't have expertise. And taking directional bets on interest rates is something that we prefer not to do, so we TRY to keep the volatility to the minimum. In the short-term, a reduction in the interest rate would be positive for us because we have more liabilities that are short attached to CDI than what we have on the asset side. So in the 1st 6 to 9 months, we will have a positive impact. But then that would catch up given that the loans get get repriced and also we have a long growth of 25 to 30, hopefully even more than that and all of the new loans would be originated at the new level of interest rates which would be lower than the current one. So that effect, that initial positive effect would then be compensated. With some compression thereafter and therefore we will be converging to the new rate. So, all in, we think we are neutral to interest rate sensitivity by design, we have hedged the longer portfolios to get to this neutrality, so what what is long in terms of inflation and fix rates, we make our gaps or risk factors. And therefore we can continue seeing the evolution that we have on the names, more of a consequence of how we deploy capital than from the macro movements on interest rates. I'll pass it to you for the second one.

Yeah, so John speaking here regarding the branch that was approved a few weeks ago. First of all, we're very happy and proud of that. We have been working for more than a year on that, for more than one year on that license. As you ask, it's a branch license approved both by the Fed, Federal Reserve and the OFR, the Florida, A banking regulator here in the state of Florida. With that in place, we will no longer rely on a bank as a service approach to offer checking account, investment account here in the US. With that in place, I would say that we open the room for us to grow.

I like to say from the inside out in the US for 2 or 2.5 years with the remittance, investments, checking account, debit cards, credit cards, commerce, loyalty, and with the branch in place you can really also mortgage, I forgot the real estate products. We can really offer these 5 different products, different verticals to millions of clients in different geographies. So for Brazilians, for Argentinians that we are launching, also for Americans and other geographies. So it's really an important milestone on our global ex global expansion front, and I do expect a lot more.

Volumes fees coming from our global expansion front go forward.

I am very happy with that and I am sure that I as a very innovative platform you will be able to deliver this many different features and products to millions of clients across the globe.

Thank you very much for the question on that matter, yeah.

Thank you so much, Joe. That was very clear. Just to clarify, the focus and the user base that you have right now, to focus on the that you mentioned, there probably may be some, Americans, but that's not the key focus segment, at least as of now.

Basically the branch and with all the products all the foundation that we have built, as I mentioned that we can serve, media clients, national clients, and we've also at the end of the day we can also serve all the boost of of products, live in in in US based clients but again our form they are able to use our platform as we speak today. So this is the target and then, at first, okay.

We have time for one more question. Our last question comes from Marcelo Misrai. Marcelo, please go ahead.

Marcelo, your mic is open.

Allo allo.

Are you listening me?

Yes, please go ahead. Okay, great, thank you. My, I have two questions. So first is, regarding the investments outside Brazil. How these investments are already, impacting the expenses? I mean, if you, how many points could be better in terms of efficiency without that or another way to ask that is.

Where are in now in terms of the offer of products? So the account in US is already open and it's possible to the clients to use. How, ready is this account, this product to start to to believe, revenues in US first question and the other question.

Is, regarding the growth of the portfolio. I mean, so you guys were adjusting the models in credit cards, so we were seeing, recently an acceleration in credit card, just to understand how comfortable you guys are now to the pace of the growth of the credit card, especially so we were seeing better numbers recently. So if it is possible to see an acceleration of the growth of the credit card, which is, was this year, last year was 29% of growth, higher than 2024. So just to understand the strategy looking forward.

Thank you.

Marcel, thank you Jean Peter speaking. I am going to cover the first one, the first part from on the international expansion and Shan Ji will cover the credit card business. So, as I mentioned before, Marcel, we have been working for the past 2. 5 years to implement in our platform, the remittance product, the checking account product, the broker dealer, the investment product through the broker dealer, the mortgage and home equity product to our mortgage lending.

Our commerce solution through our Intech Shop US and our loyalty program here.

That said, we are almost ready to offer everything that we offer for Brazilians there with our super app here in US for Americans, for Latinos, and also the most important.

We are ready to start offering this full solution, this comprehensive banking financial solution to millions of clients in different geographies. Important to mention that with our super on board and so it's easy for people in different countries to embrace and to open an account and start using our products, we can really grow fast in in other countries, not only in US, Brazil, and Argentina, without deploying a bank license, without deploying cap over there, so it's just doing the soliciting of these clients that are there and wants to have this US based account for investments, transactions and payments, and so on.

Regarding the expenses that we have to implement this foundation in the US and how much it does impact our efficiency, of course, it does impact because we're growing, we are innovating and that's how Itech likes to think. We always want to be cautious on the returns that we have, but we also want to keep building the future of the business and this is exactly what we did. With our global expansion in this past 2. 5 years. Most of it we have already, we had already gone through that, so the expenses are almost there. We don't have a lot to build a lot more to build. Now on, it is just a matter of how much you want to spend CAC acquisition to the volume of revenue that you will be bring, that you will bring from this, these clients going forward, okay?

And nowshine you will talk about the credit card business.

Thank you Joo and thank you Marcelo for the for the question. So when we think about credit cards, the strategy.

We decided to execute, make it a profitable and maybe a very profitable business is the reshaping. So it's all about improving the risk reward equation, right? And to improve the risk reward equation, part of it is increase the interest earning portfolio. What we saw in 2025 was a was a very good evolution. So we see that let's say, A 1st year of the mission accomplished, so the Inter earning portfolio grew by 4% points in 12 months and increased with that a lot, the interest income from the product by about 35%.

One thing we expected to see was that as we helped clients serve the debt when they when they have when they have problems through installments, we expected to see better delinquency, and we did see that. So our delinquency levels for credit cards alone was about 10% better than what we expected internally. So it was a it was a good number there, a good evolution there, and as we move forward to 2026. We want to see continuity, so we want to continue this process.

It decelerated in the 4th quarter for because we have a lot of liquidity in the system, so it's natural for us that that happened, and the year started well, and 2026 has everything to be better than 2025. Why is that? So the key reason is that most of the products we had to launch to make it happen. We're launched through 2025, so we start the year with the products launched and getting mature. So that's, that these are key reasons to believe that we're going to have a better year. From, and finally from a group not yet the site, but improving modeling, improving the on board, increasing the risk appetite models, improving the The behavior models that we use and also through the MyCredit journey that you talked earlier. So this 3, let's call this 3 strategy, so onboarding new clients, improved approvals on behavior clients, and MyCredit journey is our strategy. So the appetite is defined and it's all going to be a matter of good execution through the year. A lot of growth strategy. A lot of conversational sales as I talked earlier about other products. That's going to be the strategy. We should see good growth from the credit card portfolio in 2026 and 25 was better than before. We'll see 26.

Concludes our earnings conference call. I'll pass it to Ran for his final remarks.

Thank you, Hafa. I'd like to thank all the employees at Inter working hard, harder every single day to help us to achieve our goals, to improve our platform, to improve our business. Also I'd like to thank all the shareholders that have been supporting us for a while on this amazing journey.

Thank you very much and hope to see you all in our Investor Day in New York City.

Thank you. Bye bye.