Inter 4Q 2025 Earnings Call - 36% Loan Growth and NIM Expansion Lift ROE to 15%

João Vitor, Executive (likely CEO), Inter: Our new chief 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 Calicchio. This combination of expertise and cultural alignment position us to build a dynamic forward-thinking environment and execution, ultimately propelling Inter’s long-term success. Now, I would like to pass the mic to Santiago, who will walk you through our business highlights. Thank you very much.

Santiago (Xande), Executive (likely CFO), Inter: Thank you, João. 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 strength 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, totaling almost 1 billion transactions during the month of December. This exceptional level of client engagement highlights how well our platform performs.

With a sustained NPS 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 welcoming new clients and activating them. We welcomed 7 million new clients, our best annual performance ever. This is an important achievement, given Brazil’s mature market, where most people are already bankarized. Our focus on quality remains strong. Of these new 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.

These higher activation rates are driving significant increases in transaction volumes. In the fourth quarter, our TPV grew 27%, reaching BRL 1.8 trillion in run rate. Transactions made through Pix totaled around BRL 1.5 trillion for the year, leading our Pix 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 Santi deep dive on specific metrics, I want to highlight three 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 two-thirds secured, one-third 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 BRL 2 billion with around 400,000-500,000 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 pure transactors to our Inter Turning portfolio, a process we call reshaping. IPs or Inter Turning products now represent over 23% of our credit card portfolio, up from 19% last year.

Fourth quarter dynamics of more liquidity in the market brought stability to the reshaping process. Nevertheless, there is a lot of space to maintain the evolution we saw in 2025. Santi 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 Pix’s success in other products is underway, with home equity already ahead of Pix. This quarter, the progress is evident. Market share is expanding consistently across all of our businesses. I am confident that we’ll continue strengthening our market position with more products surpassing the growth benchmark set by Pix. To finish, I want to highlight that these outstanding results are driven by our seven verticals and our ongoing commitment to continuous innovation.

Each vertical plays a crucial role in fueling our growth, working seamlessly and interconnected to enhance client value and compound profitability. This powerful ecosystem is what sets Inter apart and propels us forward. Now, I’ll hand it over to Santi, who will guide us through our financial results. Thank you.

Santi, Financial Executive, Inter: Thank you, Xande, and good morning, everyone. I’m excited to highlight what has been one of the year’s biggest achievements, our loan growth. It grew 36% year-on-year, with quarterly growth accelerating to 10% or 40% on an annualized basis. Now, breaking 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 BRL 2 billion, up from nearly zero at the beginning of the year. And third, on credit cards, we grew 29% with solid risk management and continued progress from the reshaping strategy, driving monetization and profitability. Overall, our intention has been to deepen credit 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 by decreasing from 4.1% to 4.0%, while the 90-day past due loan portfolio increased from 44.5% to 4.7%, mainly as consequence of the dynamics with the private payroll product, in which the earlier cohorts have passed the 90-day mark and now appear in the metric. We anticipate this dynamic by up-fronting provisions, which took our coverage ratio from 136% to 146% in the first nine months of the year. Looking specifically at credit cards, NPLs continue to perform well, validating the continued improvements in our underwriting and collection models.

Finally, NPL formation and Stage Three 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 strong performance of our credit card portfolio. Moving here to our funding franchise, we delivered another strong quarter of growth, increasing 32% year-on-year and 7% quarter-on-quarter, reaching nearly BRL 73 billion and an average balance of 2.1 thousand reais per active client. This growth throughout the year was driven primarily by time deposits, given the high level of the Selic rate and the ongoing success of My Piggy Bank account, our product that simplifies fixed income investing for clients. On the transactional deposits, we had a great quarter, increasing 10% and passing the BRL 20 billion 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%-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-leading 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 this advantage has persisted even with the Selic rate remaining at high record levels for an extended period of time. This resilience showcases the strength of our funding strategy and reinforces our ability to operate efficiently across different macro and monetary conditions.

Jumping into revenues, we delivered strong performance in 2025, with total gross revenues reaching BRL 15 billion, marking an impressive 45% year-on-year growth. This magnitude highlights the scale and momentum of our business as we continue to expand. Net revenues also showed significant results, growing 31% year-on-year and reaching BRL 8.4 billion. The standout driver behind this growth was our credit portfolio, which led to net interest income to increase 41% year-on-year. This acceleration was fueled by strong performance in payroll loans, 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% during the year.

This growth was moderated by changes in accounting rules at the beginning of the year and increased monetization of some fee lines, like Inter Shop, through net interest income by the introduction of the Buy Now, Pay Later product. Jumping here to the unit economic side, higher client engagement is driving faster monetization across our boards, especially through private payroll loans, the reshaping of our credit card portfolio, and the higher transactional volumes. As a result, our net RPAC reached BRL 35.1, our highest level on record. Our mature clients demonstrate even greater potential, generating BRL 91 in net RPAC, further underscoring the opportunity ahead. By combining this strong monetization with our low cost to serve of just BRL 13.8, we achieved our best ever gross margin per active client, reaching BRL 21.2 this quarter. Now, let’s deep dive into our net interest margins.

Both our NIM 1.0 and NIM 2.0, which excludes the non-interest results of credit cards, are consistently showing growth quarter after quarter and achieving new record levels. We have improved our risk-adjusted NIM by an average of 15 basis points quarter after quarter. This particular quarter, our NIMs 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 NIM expanded at twice the level of the prior quarters, showcasing how consistency in our credit underwriting strategy is paying off by allowing us to extract an increasing amount of value from our balance sheet. Finally, our assets to equity ratio, which increased from 7.9 to 9.4, showcases the optimization of our capital structure, which is still highly under-levered. Moving to the expenses side, total expenses rose 25% on a year-over-year basis. On the quarterly comparison, we had three dynamics playing out. First, on the administrative expenses, it rose 8% quarter-over-quarter and 19% year-over-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 to 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, headcount remains stable at around 4,100 employees through 2025. And third, depreciation amortization, which grew 33% quarter-on-quarter or a 5% 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 within the year. These efficiency gains are a result of our digital approach, process optimization, and disciplined 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 BRL 1.3 billion 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, always in the pursuit of excellence. With our platform running better than ever before, and our virtual cycle growing stronger and larger, we’re very excited about the future that’s around the corner. Now, João Vitor will take the stage for the final remarks. Thank you all.

João Vitor, Executive (likely CEO), Inter: I would like to thank the team for the support on this journey and the immense effort they put day in, 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 Inter. Now, I will hand it over to Rafa to open the Q&A session. Thank you very much.

Rafa, Investor Relations, Inter: 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 and share insights into the future we are building together. An RSVP will be sent by email. For those who can’t attend in person, the event will be broadcast live. Hope to see you all there. Now, let’s start the Q&A session. Our first question comes from Mario Pierry. Mario, please go ahead.

Mario Pierry, Analyst: Good morning, everybody. Congrats on the results. João, let me ask you a question, and to take advantage, right, that this is like annual results. This is your second year following the guidance that you gave, the 60/30/30 guidance, when we look at the numbers, right, for the first two years, the ROE is halfway there, 15%. You’re guiding for 30% by 2027. The number of clients also, you are halfway there as well. However, when I look at the efficiency ratio, I haven’t seen or I was expecting faster progress on efficiency. In this quarter, right, when we look, efficiency deteriorated. So let me ask you, like, how are you feeling about your 60/30/30 plan?

Do you, you know, do you anticipate making any changes on this guidance on this Investor Day they just announced on May eleventh? 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.

João Vitor, Executive (likely CEO), Inter: Okay, Mario, thank you for the question. I will try to answer everything. So first of all, important to mention, we unveiled our 630/30 plan 3 years ago. It was a, and still a 5-year plan, and we’re happy that these first 3 years were a tremendous success. Just to recap what you just said, moving from 0% ROE 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, Mario, we more than doubled our credit portfolio from BRL 22 billion to BRL 48 billion. That said, we are convinced here at Inter that the digital 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 fourth year of the plan, 2026, will be a great year in the direction of getting closer to these KPIs. We’re very committed to that. Regarding the time, when and how we will get into each of these specific targets, clients, efficiency 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, there in NASDAQ or digitally. Connecting to your other question about efficiency, what do we see that could help us on that topic? We mentioned in our earnings on the presentation, the deck, some efforts in terms of technology, in terms of innovation, and in terms of AI.

We do believe that Inter is very well prepared, Mario, to get all the benefit 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 Santi always like 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 our revenues, producing operational lever. Thank you very much, Mario.

Mario Pierry, Analyst: Thanks, João. 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.

João Vitor, Executive (likely CEO), Inter: Mario, that’s an excellent question. So just to recap, we have been paying dividends on a 20% payout ratio for the past three years in a row. We believe that this should be 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 Santi, that will cover how we balance growth, portfolio, dividends, and capital at the bank level and at the holding level to keep running the business. Santi, please, if you could jump in.

Santi, Financial Executive, Inter: Thank you, João. Good morning, Mario. So on 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 optimize that capital structure through the issuance of Tier 1s and Tier 2s, which are a more evolved version of working with our capital structure. On top of that, we have around BRL 2 billion of excess capital at the holding level, which is around 4.5 percentage points of CET1, which, combined with the local CET1 that we have at the bank, that gets us a CET1 of roughly 19%. So we are still in the phase where we consume capital.

We agree with that statement, Mario, but it is at a lower pace quarter by quarter, and we are reaching. We’re closer to reaching the capital neutrality. But we want to move the excess capital from the OpCo to the Holdco, given that it’s more profitable to have it at the holding level, and that was done by design, you know, back in 2022 when the holding was created. So it’s moving as planned. Thank you.

Mario Pierry, Analyst: ... Thank you!

Rafa, Investor Relations, Inter: Our next question comes from Tito Labarta. Tito, please go ahead.

Tito Labarta, Analyst: Hi, good morning. Thanks for the call and taking my question. Maybe following up a little bit on Mario’s question, ’cause, yeah, I mean, if I think efficiency is sort of the the is 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 consolidation, right? But if we look now, you know, on a year-over-year basis for the quarter, that should be behind, you know, yet fees did not really grow significantly. We do see fee expenses have been a bit of a headwind. Just to understand, you know, why sort of that spike in fee expenses? What should we expect on fee income, from here? You know, when do you think it starts to grow back in line more with loan growth?

You know, why we’re still seeing some headwinds there? Thank you.

Santiago (Xande), Executive (likely CFO), Inter: Hi. Thanks for the question. This is Andy speaking. So on fee, I think there, there are a few topics to talk about, right? First is the fee income ratio itself finished at 25% last year. So that’s a compression comparing to the 30% 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 a little bit the fee income ratio. As we move to the nominal numbers in fee income, so what we saw in the fourth quarter was a solid quarter at BRL 579 million, and with a few positives.

So cards TPV for the year grew at, like, more than 15%. The investments business was strong, so we have a 27% growth in the UC, 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, given all the everything that the Chinese players are doing in the Brazilian market, so that was a pressure. Although, despite that, we saw a positive number in terms of active clients. We see Intershop 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 in the...

despite the pressure on the revenue side on Intershop. As we think about the overall numbers, we saw last year a growth of about 9% in the nominal total fee income revenue. If we take a few one-offs that we had, so we had a few one-offs related to capital gains in 2024 and 2025, that would add about three percentage points in the number, so that would bring us back to around close to 13. And if we add back Resolution 4966 from the central bank, the changes that we had to implement on that, we would be back to, like, a 15% growth, which would be much better. So this would like kind of normalize the growth in 2025 to the 15%.

What we’re doing is many, many initiatives to reengage clients more with the different products. We’re gonna go back to, like, hyper-personalization. We’re implementing different solutions to do conversational sales, both in-app and out-of-the-app, and thinking app solutions like WhatsApp, so that we can sell more fee income-related products and reestablish growth. We see good perspectives here, thinking about 2026. Thank you.

Tito Labarta, Analyst: Thanks, Andy. No, very helpful. Maybe just a follow-up there, just ’cause if we look at the, I guess the Inter Loop expenses and expenses from services commissions, right? I mean, those were a bit of a headwinds, right? One was up 34% in the quarter, and the expenses from services and commissions up 10% in the quarter. And is that where you’re seeing sort of that pressure from, 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?

Santiago (Xande), Executive (likely CFO), Inter: So, Tito, a lot of that is related to it. 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 bottom line in the end of the equation. So that’s a little bit about what we see there.

And, specifically on Loop, is something that we are very enthusiastic about because it’s one of the main... it is our, 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 became users as their primary banking relationship. So, that, that’s our view on that number. So to summarize, we are, we do keep an eye on it.

Tito Labarta, Analyst2: ... We’ll keep it under control, but we’ll keep using it to optimize sales and growth in the different products.

Tito Labarta, Analyst: Okay. No, very helpful. Thanks, Sandy, for the call.

Rafa, Investor Relations, Inter: Our next question comes from Yuri Fernandes. Yuri, please go ahead.

Tito Labarta, Analyst1: Thank you, Rafa, and congrats, João, Chandy, Santi, for the step-by-step, like the improvement on 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. And I know provisions versus bad loans formation, Stage Three or NPL, they can be volatile, right? And I think there was a usage of coverage this quarter that may have helped your EBT. And what we did here was to try to look by product, just to see which products Stage Three formation 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, is the villain from a little bit of the past quarters.

This quarter was a little bit personal loans. We saw an increase in Stage Three formation for personal loans. Also, you’re building 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 a safer product. So if you can explain what happened with the formation this quarter, how should we see the cost of risk? How should we think about coverage? Just trying to understand, you know, because I think, like, a little bit of the pushback is that you did less provisions versus formation, and my answer here has been that you did more in the second quarter and the third quarter.

So just trying to understand the moving parts here. Thank you very much.

Santi, Financial Executive, Inter: Good morning, Yuri. Thank you for the question. This is Santi. I’ll take that one, and I’ll answer it more on 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 credit underwriting strategy that we are executing. So when we look at the mix, we look at the growth levels and how it evolves quarter by quarter. The picture that we see on asset quality now is exactly the one that we anticipated. Now, going portfolio by portfolio, and we start by 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 NPL now increasing, and also on the NPL formation, Stage Three formation ratios as well. The performance or the monetization of this product more than compensates this level of delinquency, so we’re happy with the ROEs that we’re seeing there. But it does take a toll, you know, when you look at specifically at these credit quality metrics for this product. On credit cards, as you mentioned correctly, the performance was actually pretty good on the fourth quarter.

It typically is good on the fourth 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 fourth quarter. So performance there was pretty good. SMEs, no material change quarter by quarter. You know, this portfolio is mostly invoice discounting, so it’s quite steady through time. No material change. On mortgages and home equity, you flagged it well. We had there an increase on stage three balances due to a more conservative and integrated view of our clients. Let me explain that, what I mean. That until the third quarter, we did keep mortgage loans that were paid on time in their respective stage, not considering credit deterioration, events concerning the same client and different products.

Starting in the fourth 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 three. This change was made in a cumulative manner, accounting for the full balance during this single fourth quarter, and resulting in an extra BRL 140 million of stage three 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 would 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 into 2026, to answer your question on how should we see cost of risk, we continue evolving with a credit mix in line with the one that we had in 2025, which is something that we will see because we try to capitalize on the opportunities as they come along. But the way we’re seeing it, it shouldn’t be too different in terms of credit mix in 2026 versus what it was in 2025. We’ll be operating with a cost of risk, which should be between 5.5% and 6%, depending on how the things play out. There is a general expectations 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...

With a lot of intensity, we could be closer to the 5.5%. And again, as we always say, the goal that we have is to maximize the risk-adjusted NIM, 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 churn the clients very fast over 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 accretive.

Santiago (Xande), Executive (likely CFO), Inter: ... I hope I answered it. Was it a bit longer?

Tito Labarta, Analyst1: It was a very good, Santi. Thank you very much. And I think, like, I would just repeat and make sure I got it all right. So-

Santiago (Xande), Executive (likely CFO), Inter: Mm-hmm

Tito Labarta, Analyst1: ... the 5.5-6, I think it’s in line with expectations. I think the company has been saying 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 Three would be mostly stable on a quarter-over-quarter, and it should help on the formation. On a general view, you are not concerned about asset quality. 50-90 days, the delinquencies 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?

Santiago (Xande), Executive (likely CFO), Inter: Excellent. Spot on. Thank you, Yuri.

Tito Labarta, Analyst1: No, thank you, Santi.

Rafa, Investor Relations, Inter: Our next question comes from Pedro Leduc. Leduc, please go ahead.

Pedro Leduc, Analyst: Thank you so much for taking the question, and congratulations on the year’s achievements, everybody. And on private payroll, if I may dig deeper into it now, BRL 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 tickets, rate ranges, if you expect, essentially, this origination pace to continue or change in 2026? And then the second part, also related to private payroll, I think there was a comment about, like, a high single digit, 10% NPL ratio to address earlier. If this is more the levels that you’re seeing in 1Q, or was it in 4Q?

Which harvests are this, and if it’s aligned, and then if you’re making any adjustments there? Thank you.

Santiago (Xande), Executive (likely CFO), Inter: Hi, Leduc. Thank you for the question. This is John 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, very happy with our execution in 2025. We’re positioned to be one of the winners for sure in the market. So as you mentioned, around BRL 2 billion in credit portfolio, 500,000 clients, average ticket about BRL 4,000, in the ballpark of BRL 4,000. Interest rates are relatively stable since the beginning, at 3.7% on average, and usually on average, clients taking the credit in for to pay in 20 installments. Market share, we’re at about 5%.

We do see room to increase on that, but this year 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, many steps that Dataprev, who kind of controls the product, still needs to implement. So, we wanna see this development to increase our originations. So this is 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 RPAC that we see on these clients is about three 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 gonna keep gaining share against CTPS. So the channel that belongs to Inter is gonna become more and more the preferred channel for clients, especially when people start to do refinancing—the refinancing process and other movements.

We’re also adding in, probably in the first quarter, the conversational channels also. So we’re gonna be selling private payroll loans through WhatsApp and other conversational channels, including our own, our own conversational environment inside the app. That’s, that’s on, 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 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 6%, 7%, 8%? By seeing all the introduction of all the collection solutions that are in the original design of the product.

So it’s gonna be very important to see this development in the upcoming month. And I see—and if that happens, not only we’re gonna see the reduction—like, the reduction in the NPLs, but we’re also gonna see an increase in the volumes underwritten by the market. We’re gonna see reduction in rates. So it’s gonna be... I’d say that it’s already a good product, but it can be a much better one.

Santi, Financial Executive, Inter: ... for the Brazilians. Very complete. Thank you, Shanyu.

Rafa, Investor Relations, Inter: Our next question comes from Gustavo Schroden. Gustavo, please go ahead.

Gustavo Schroden, Analyst: Hello. Good afternoon, everybody. Congrats on the recent achievements, I mean, the last three years. So my question is regarding some expectations for 2026. Santi already anticipated in terms of a cost of risk, something around 5.5%-6%. If you could give us any color regarding a loan growth, net interest margin, and efficiency ratio performance in for 2026. I mean, should we continue seeing this loan growth around 30-35%? A net interest margin still has room to expand in 2026, and if there is, what should I expect in terms of efficiency ratio improvement in 2026? Thank you.

Santi, Financial Executive, Inter: Hi, 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 2026, looking at 2025, there are a few things that we’re particularly proud of. One is loan growth. We have been saying to the market that we were solving for 25-30, and we closed 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 NIM expansion or risk-adjusted NIM expansion, with a very good performance throughout the year, and particularly in this fourth quarter.

The consequence of those two together is the credit penetration of our clients went up from 1,700 AAS on average to 1,900 AAS on average, and that’s very important for our pattern decision of the client. So that’s how we’re finishing 2025. For 2026, in terms of loan growth, we still think that 25-30 is a reasonable target for us to be chasing. The base is bigger, and private payroll, which was something that came from zero, is not present. We’re gonna be starting with a balance close to BRL 2 billion. We hope to be on the high end of the range of that 25%-30%, and hopefully even beyond as we did in 2025. But we would see as we go along.

In terms of NIM expansion, the fact that we continue to reprice the back book of the portfolio, and that we’re on the margin allocating more credit towards private payroll and credit cards, that could have a further expansion on the NIM’s trends that we have been seeing. So we continue to see risk-adjusted NIM moving in the same direction, which is in line with what João 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 2025, when you see the delta of growth in revenues versus the delta of growth in expenses, we had close to 10 percentage points.

When you take out Interbank from 2024, remember that we integrated Interbank in the middle of 2024; therefore, the annual comparison, we need to clean up a bit the numbers to make it fair, and with that cleanup, we have 10 percentage points of additional growth in net revenues over growth in expenses, therefore resulting in the operational leverage improvement. We see that playing out again in 2026. We’ll see what the level of top-line growth is, but we should have a similar delta in terms of growth in revenues versus growth in expenses, and therefore, continue improving our efficiency ratio in line with what we had before.

There are several efficiencies in AI that are still early stage, and those could give us some upside, and those are present 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 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 excited. One is hyper-personalization of pricing, which is a very tailored pricing for on a per-client basis. Hyper-personalization of the app, which we mentioned in our investor day in our tech day back in 2024, now it’s a lot more evolved.

The task bar, which is a different way to communicate with our clients and increases the cross-selling of our clients. A lot going on in terms of optimizing AI in the spirit of having more operational leverage. But the trend, as João mentioned at the beginning, is a continuation of the NIM expansion, a continuation of the improvement in efficiency, and therefore, there we continue to move in the same direction.

Gustavo Schroden, Analyst: Great, Santi. Great. It’s 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 this 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, least and then not least, 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?

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.

João Vitor, Executive (likely CEO), Inter: ... Gustavo, João Vitor here, I’ll take this one. So, first of all, about the competitive advantage that you mentioned, we have always been saying that, that Inter, 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 industry, also a very important competitive advantage. And last but not least, on that front, the private payroll, we’re not cannibalizing other revenues or the portfolios that we have. So again, this is also an opportunity for Inter. Talking about the pace of growth and how aggressive it’s going to be throughout 2026 and 2027, you all know, for ones that follow Inter for a while, we have this, this, this scope.

We always want to grow fast, but we want to see how collateralized our portfolio is, how the delinquency will play out. As Santiago mentioned, we want to see all the improvements from Dataprev to make sure that we have the collateral of the future flow of payroll of these specific clients. So we are proceeding with caution. I always like to enter into a new segment, to a new market, to a new loan portfolio, and I believe that is the right approach. That said, because of the first part of the question, our competitive advantage, we have been able to produce a BRL 2 billion portfolio in one semester of 2025.

That’s how I see our ambitions and our comfort and our expectations and excitement with this product. Last thing, just to recap everyone and to emphasize, we do love what we call the Inter by design concept. So that bring the best price, the best collateral, so it’s a win-win situation. It’s good for the client, it’s good for our balance sheet, it’s good for the economy, it’s good for the regulator. So we do put private payroll on that specific, on this very nice niche as we speak, okay? So that’s how we see the product going forward. Very excited with it.

Gustavo Schroden, Analyst: All right. Great. Great, John, and congrats again.

Rafa, Investor Relations, Inter: Our next question comes from Neha Agarwala. Neha, please go ahead.

Neha Agarwala, Analyst: 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, we’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 most 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 will 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.

Santiago (Xande), Executive (likely CFO), Inter: Hi, Neha, this is Chandy 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 it. This product is for sure gonna be in the culture of the Brazilians, of the Brazilians that work in the private, in 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 gonna keep our appetite, and it’s gonna evolve as we see improvements coming from Dataprev.

Thinking about the distribution channel, where it’s coming from, what types of clients, we do see a mix of everything, but it’s a very nice mix. Why do we see a mix? First, if we divide it into three parts, we see about one third coming from active clients, where we’re cross-selling and selling them the private payroll loans. Then we have another third that we are taking inactive clients and activating them through private payroll loans. And then we have another, roughly one third of the base of originations, that are new clients. So they come to Inter, and most of them open an account and become an active client, not only in the private payroll, but also in other products. So it’s great.

It’s a great mix, and we see it as a healthy one also because because our channel’s working, our clients are engaged, so it’s important to see that happening. We can re-engage clients, also important to see that happening. A lot of times people may think, "Oh, you have a lot of clients, and the activation, 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 have private payrolls as a new way, as a new CAC, as a new way of bringing clients in, which is great. So, did I cover everything?

Neha Agarwala, Analyst: Yes. Yes, you did, and it was very clear. Thank you so much, Abhijayante. Now, my next question is on, if you can briefly talk about, what would be the impact of lower rates, and how could this impact different loan segments that you have? Not numbers, but just trend-wise, 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 João 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 PNL?

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.

Santi, Financial Executive, Inter: Neha, hi. Santi here. I’ll answer the one on rate sensitivity and pass it to João to cover the one on global part. So on ALM and interest rate sensitivity, our goal has been to decrease volatility of the PNL. So we manage ALM with the intention of decreasing volatility and letting the NIM evolve as we deploy capital in the portfolios as we have been doing. So this is something that we know what we’re very good at, and 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 first six to nine months, we will have a positive impact. But then that would catch up, given that the loans get repriced. And also we have a loan growth of 25-30, hopefully even more than that, and all of the new loans will be originated at the new level of interest rates, which would be lower than the current one. So that effect would... That initial positive effect would then be compensated by some compression thereafter, and therefore, we would be converging to a new rate. So all in, all in, we think we are neutral to interest rate sensitivity.

By design, we have hedged the longer portfolios to get to this neutrality. Now, so what, what is long in terms of inflation and fixed rates, we would make our gaps or our risk factors neutral, and therefore, we can continue seeing the evolution that we have on the NIMs, more of a consequence of how we deploy capital than from the macro movements on interest rates. I’ll pass it to João for the second one.

João Vitor, Executive (likely CEO), Inter: Neha, João 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 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, investments account here in the U.S. With that in place, Neha, I would say that we open the room for us to grow, I like to say, from the inside out.

We have been building our, our platform, our ecosystem in the U.S. for 2 or 2.5 years, so with the remittance, investments, checking account, debit cards, credit cards, commerce, loyalty. And with the branch in place, we can really... Also, mortgage, I forgot the real estate products. We can really offer these, 5, 6 different products, different verticals, to millions of clients, in different geographies. So for Brazilians, for Argentinians that we’re launching, also for Americans and other, other geographies. So it’s really an important milestone on our global expansion front. And I do expect a lot more volumes, fees coming from our global expansion front going forward.

Very happy with that, and I’m sure that Inter, as a very innovative platform, will be able to deliver these many different features and products to millions of clients across the globe. Thank you very much for the question on that matter, yeah.

Neha Agarwala, Analyst: Thank you so much, João. That was very clear. Just to clarify, the focus and the user base that you have right now is mostly focused on the Latinos, like the Brazilians, Argentinians that you mentioned. There probably may be some Americans, but that’s not the key focus segment, at least as of now?

João Vitor, Executive (likely CEO), Inter: Yeah. As I mentioned, with that in place, with the branch and with all the products, all the foundation that we have built, we can serve millions of clients, international clients, with all this full stack of products. But also at the end of the day, we can also serve Americans that live and have business here in U.S. So it’s not one client, one segment or the other. It’s just a matter of we believe that the pain point that we saw with this super app approach in a U.S. dollar-dominated, denominated account, we can serve more of immigrants and Latinos and Latin America clients than U.S.-based clients. But again, the U.S. base, they will also be able to use our platform.

They are able to use our platform as we speak today. Okay, so this is the target, and the type of clientele, I think that we’ll be serving at first, okay?

Speaker 7: We have time for one more question. Our last question comes from Marcelo Mizrahi. Marcelo, please go ahead. Marcelo, your mic is open.

Marcelo Mizrahi, Analyst: Hello, hello, hello. Are you all listening me?

Speaker 7: Yes, please go ahead.

Marcelo Mizrahi, Analyst: Okay, great. Thank you. I have two questions. So first is, regarding the investments outside Brazil, how these investments is already impacting the expenses? I mean, how many points could be better in terms of efficiency without that? Or another way to ask that is, where are Inter now in terms of the offer of products? So the account in U.S. is already open, and it’s possible to the clients to use. How ready is this account, this product to start to believe revenues in U.S.? First question. And the other question is regarding the growth of the portfolio. I mean, so you guys were adjusting the models in credit card, 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’s possible to see an acceleration of the growth of the credit card, which was last year 29% of growth, higher than 2024. Just to understand the strategy looking forward. Thank you.

João Vitor, Executive (likely CEO), Inter: Marcelo, thank you. João Vitor speaking. I’m gonna cover the first one, the first part from, from the international expansion, then Xandy will cover the credit card business. So as, as I, I mentioned before, Marcelo, we have been working for the past 2, 2.5 years to implement in our platform the remittance product, the checking account product, the broker-dealer, the investment products through the broker-dealer, the mortgage and home equity product to our mortgage lending, our commerce solution through our Inter Shop U.S., 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 U.S., 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 other countries, not only in U.S., Brazil, and Argentina, without deploying a bank license, without deploying capital over there. So it’s just doing the soliciting of these clients that are there and wants to have this U.S.-based account for investments, transactions, and payments, and so on.

Regarding the expenses that we had to implement this foundation in the U.S. and how much it does impact our efficiency, of course, it does impact, because we are growing, we are innovating, and that’s how Inter 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 last 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’s just a matter of how much you want to spend in CAC, in acquisition of clients, compared to how much these clients will be generating revenue for us. So it’s expenses that will grow accordingly to the volume of revenue that will bring from this, these clients going forward, okay? And now Xandy will talk about the credit card business.

Santiago (Xande), Executive (likely CFO), Inter: Thank you, João, and thank you, Marcelo, 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 Inter Turning portfolio. What we saw in 2025 was a very good evolution, so we see the, let’s say, a first year of the mission accomplished. So the Inter Turning portfolio grew by 4 percentage 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 have, when they had 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 good number there, a good evolution there. And as we move forward to 2026, we wanna see continuity. So we want to continue this process. It decelerated in the fourth quarter 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 were launched through 2025, so we start the year with the products launched and getting mature. So that’s... These are key reasons to believe that we’re gonna have a better year. And finally, from a growth perspective, we were not yet increasing the risk appetite. We’re still executing at the same risk appetite, but improving modeling, improving the onboarding models, improving the behavior models that we use, and also through the My Credit Journey that João talked earlier. So these three, let’s call these three strategy, so onboarding new clients, improving approvals on behavior clients, and My Credit Journey is our strategy. So the appetite is defined, and it’s all gonna be a matter of good execution through the year.

A lot of growth strategies, a lot of conversational sales, as I talked earlier about other products, that’s gonna be the strategy. We should see good growth from the credit card portfolio in 2026. And to your point, 2025 was better than 2024. We should see 2026 in line with 2025 or better. Thank you.

Rafa, Investor Relations, Inter: This concludes our earnings conference call. I’ll pass it to João for his final remarks.

João Vitor, Executive (likely CEO), Inter: Thank you, Rafa. 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. I’d also 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.