Nubank Parent Company Considers Moving Legal Domicile to Britain

Nubank’s parent company is reportedly considering moving its legal domicile to Britain before beginning a planned global expansion.

Nu Holdings is currently domiciled in the Cayman Islands, Reuters reported Monday (Jan. 20).

“We are actively thinking what are some of the jurisdictions that make sense for us to consider, as we think about the next 10 years of global expansion,” Nu Holdings CEO David Velez said in the report.

The company’s Nubank is Latin America’s most valuable lender, one of the world’s largest digital challenger banks, and has more than 100 million customers in Brazil, Mexico and Colombia, according to the report.

Nubank is considering expanding to the United States, with Velez saying the country may become a more attractive market for the company as President Donald Trump has shown an interest in promoting digital assets like cryptocurrency and in streamlining banking regulations.

While Nu Holdings is interested in a European domicile from which to manage the group and recruit talent, Nubank does not consider the region a priority due to its regulatory and competitive environment, per the report. The company opened offices in Berlin in 2017 and now has about 40 employees there.

Nubank is considering expanding to emerging markets that are similar to Brazil and Mexico, and it expects to do so in the next 18 to 24 months, according to the report.

Velez’s comments confirm a November report by Bloomberg that said Nu Holdings was considering moving its legal domicile to the U.K. That report cited unnamed sources.

That report said that the company was working with the British government to move its legal domicile to the U.K. but would keep its corporate headquarters in Brazil.

It was also reported in November that Nubank was one of the digital banks leading Brazilian banks’ profitability improvements during the first half of 2024.

The country’s digital banks saw their annual return on equity (ROE) rise from 11.45% at the end of December 2023 to 19.1% at the end of June, outpacing the banking system as a whole.

Brazil’s central bank attributed the digital banks’ gains to “positive effects of operational leverage through the monetization of customer bases by some institutions and lower pressure from provisioning expenses.”