Brazil Itaú digital bank triples customer base and attracts 10 million customers

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The numbers come as Itaú launches an Iti media campaign, expands its credit operations and begins to prepare the platform to generate greater engagement, which may range from content to e-commerce.

Itaú is stepping up to make Iti, launched in November 2019, a digital wallet, a full-fledged online bank and show it didn’t passively watch rivals’ momentum during the Covid-19 pandemic. PicPay, the country’s largest digital wallet, surpassed 55 million users in September, while Nubank reached 41 million customers by the end of the first half.

“We are totally in the game,” said Iti director João Araújo, who took over the business in March 2020, at a time when social isolation prompted the rapid migration of operations to the digital environment.

Araújo stated that Iti’s expansion comes within a strategy designed to grow the business in a sustained way, which he said is evidenced by the volume of resources transacted by the platform up by 7 times over 2020, while the average number of transactions per client doubled.

“We didn’t want to grow for the sake of growing, but rather to deepen the business,” added Araújo, a Portuguese-born executive who has been with the Itaú group for 9 years.

Banking app downloads in the country fell in September for the first time since 2015, and experts felt that new investments in the sector should focus on businesses that are starting to signal that they will be profitable.

In this respect, Iti is well positioned, because it performs better in fraud security, credit and customer service, factors that will determine the winners in the medium and long term, according to Araújo.

“To keep our indicators high, we interview dozens of customers every day,” says the executive, adding that Iti’s credit offer is targeted within the brand’s purpose of “helping Brazilians prosper.”

The logic of the campaign is supported by Iti’s client base, 90% of which are in classes C, D, E, and 60% of them are up to 30 years old.

With this target, Iti is also Itaú Unibanco’s main focus to expand business in the North and Northeast, regions where the bank has little penetration, having concentrated its efforts on expanding in the Central-South region of Brazil, where it has made most of its acquisitions in recent decades. “In fact, the North and Northeast are the regions where Iti’s penetration has been the greatest,” Araújo said.

According to the executive, so far there has not been a high rate of “cannibalization,” i.e., it is not taking many customers away from the owner itself, since 80% of the digital bank’s customers have never had a previous relationship with Itaú.

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