Digital financial services company Inter&Co continues its advance in the U.S. market with an office in Miami and a partnership with Brightline. Inter&Co is known for a multifunctional financial super app and is hiring dozens of people for its U.S. headquarters in Brickell Key. It has also acquired naming rights to the Major League Soccer venue in Orlando, now called Inter&Co Stadium.
Inter& Co is publicly traded on NASDAQ under the symbol INTR and is part of Nasdaq’s Global Market Select Index. Shares on Oct. 21 were trading at $6.55 and have a 52-week range of $4.12-$7.84.
The company had second-quarter revenue of about $421 million U.S., up 24 percent from the year-ago quarter. Net income of $39 million U.S. up 324% from the same quarter in 2023. (Figures converted from Brazilian reals based on the company’s 2nd quarter financial results.)
The loan portfolio grew by 35 percent and deposits grew by 34 percent.
Inter&Co Global CEO João Vitor Menin has been visiting Miami since he was a child and recently moved there. He is excited to bring the company’s innovative approach to the states.
An Oct. 21 panel discussion at Brightline’s MiamiCentral included Dr. Paula Hopkins, senior VP of Strategic Partnerships and Funding with Miami-Dade’s Beacon Council and Andre Dias Cardoso, head of Global Investments at Inter&Co.
Hopkins said that Brightline and Inter&Co fit in with rapid growth in the technology and innovation scene in Miami-Dade County, which is helping fuel economic growth. Inter&Co will help address underserved communities.
Dias Cardoso talked about how Inter&Co is breaking down barriers for Latino investors. The company embraces an educational component in English, Portuguese and Spanish to teach about saving, investing and the impact of economic issues, such as inflation.
Inter&Co’s research on Floridians’ investing habits found they like to invest in stocks, which fits well with its app.
One interesting aspect of the discussion is how Latin Americans are very mobile centric, which has helped fuel adoption of Inter&Co’s financial super app.
In an interview, Vitor Menin said both Brightline and Inter&Co reflect convenience, innovation, good quality, good service and a good value proposition for the consumer, which made for a good partnership. As a child, he remembers the long drives from Miami to Orlando, so he appreciates the ease of Brightline’s service between the two cities.
Brightline passengers are already being exposed to Inter&Co marketing and benefits with prominent signage at MiamiCentral. Menin expects the relaxing nature of traveling on Brightline and its great WiFi connectivity will lead consumers to download the app, which is in the iOS and Android stores.
Here are a couple of other key topics from the interview with Vitor Menin, which has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Tell me a little bit about your background, how you got in the company and how you became interested in expanding into the United States.
First of all, I am an engineer. I’m 42 years old. I have three kids. I moved to the United States 18 months ago. I was born and raised in Brazil, where Inter&Co is still headquartered in Belo Horizonte. We have over 3,000 employees working from our building over there.
I joined Inter&Co in 2004. I was in my family’s home building business, but I decided to pivot to the banking business. Inter&Co was founded in 1994 by my father. So, the business was there already when I graduated, but it was a very, very small business and also very, very small compared to the home building business. I decided to go there because I was in love with finance and banking.
From 2004 until 2015, I was just improving my knowledge and growing inside the company. At the end of 2015, I became the CEO and that’s when I decided to change the course of the business from local commercial business banking to become a national digital retail bank franchise.
We have to date over 33 million clients. We were able to IPO the company in the exchange in Brazil, but then we changed it to NASDAQ back in 2022. We started offering retail products, but then we also added new services such as commerce, so you can buy your phones and your TVs on the super app. We decided that we could take this business to the U.S. given the number of Latinos that either live or travel here. We started with the U.S. but always looking to more places that makes sense for our customers and business.
What sort of strategy do you have in mind?
We bought a company called Usend in early 2022 that was the largest remittance company for Brazilians in the United States. We bought it to expand our remittance business. But down the road we realized that while we can serve our clients in the remittance business, we also can offer them an account. Why not? They’re already using us to do their remittance back to their home country. Then, we started to implement new features, new products, the digital account and later on we implemented from scratch our broker dealer where today we can offer investments and clients can buy stocks and mutual funds. We also bought a small company for mortgage lending.
With our shopping capabilities, you can buy goods and gift cards with discounts. I would say that in another year or so we are going to have this same concept of the super app that we have in Brazil today also here in the U.S.
