Savvy digital banking clients flock to Inter&Co’s super-app
With well over a quarter of the nation’s Brazilian population clustered around Miami and Orlando, it was only a matter of time before Inter&Co would make its move, despite the fierce competition in the digital banking space.
“Brazilians are more comfortable with digital banking than Americans,” says João Vitor Menin, the founder and CEO of Inter&Co who relocated from Brazil to Miami in 2023 to oversee the financial super-app’s Florida launch. (The company chose Brickell Key for its headquarters; Menin opted for Coral Gables for his home.) The Inter&Co experience is wholly integrated, offering banking, investing, mortgages, credit, insurance, shopping, and remittances – and even a food delivery app. “And we just launched a social media platform called Forum, where you can exchange ideas about our products, about our services,” Menin says. “It’s very unique for a bank to have a social platform.”
If other South American nations aren’t as far along in their digital banking habits as Menin’s home country, he predicts that Argentina will be the next to embrace the ecosystem in a meaningful way. When they do, Inter&Co will be ready. Its app is available in Portuguese, English, and Spanish.
“Brazil was the creator of the digital banks,” Menin contends. “The digital bank environment started there – the Central Bank of Brazil really helped to promote innovation. And Miami is the right place, that’s where things are happening. Companies are coming to Miami. We can have a good network here, with cooperation with other big companies that help us in our day-to-day operations, from Mastercard to AWS.” He expects the number of statewide employees to grow from 70 to 100 by yearend. (Inter&Co employs 3,800 globally.)
Inter&Co was founded in 1994, back when the entity was known as Banco Intermedium (the name change came in 2014), and it’s hard to argue with Inter&Co’s subsequent success. It’s one of Brazil’s largest banks, having offered the first 100 percent digital checking account in Latin America, and it counts 34 million clients across the Americas. Inter&Co was listed on the NASDAQ in June 2022, in what can be regarded as a groundbreaking debut. It became a singular sensation, the first Brazilian company to upgrade its primary listing from Brazil to the U.S. (Inter&Co had its Brazilian IPO in 2018.) “We were the first of the pioneers in that kind of transaction,” Menin says.
INTER&CO’S PRESENCE IN THE US
Inter&Co projects it will have four million users in the U.S., which will represent 10 percent of its projected end-of-year global client base. But Menin is just as focused on farming as hunting; with so many services available on the super-app, that means educating existing clients about everything Inter&Co has under one virtual roof.
Meanwhile, its branding footprint keeps growing. Building on the success of its Orlando City soccer club – and the soccer-specific Inter&Co Stadium in downtown Orlando, which contains 49 rainbow-colored seats to honor the victims of the Pulse nightclub mass shooting in 2016 – the neobank will soon announce a naming-rights deal with a site in Miami. “We need to respect and connect with the community,” he says. “We’re not only putting our brand out there, but we’re working hard to support and connect to our neighbors.”
