Hello everyone, I'm Raquel Balarim, director of Invest News. We are here today for another episode of Perspectivas, the videocast that features as a special guest the former president of the Central Bank, Roberto Campos Neto. Roberto is vice-chairman and global head of public policy at Nubank and also the institution's chief economist. Once a month he makes time for us to open a space in his schedule to chat with us. Roberto, thank you once again.
Thank you very much, Raquel. Thank you all. If you don't want to miss any episode of Perspectivas, don't forget to activate notifications. And if you're not following the channel yet, take the opportunity to subscribe.
Roberto, today we're going to talk about credit, which is central to an economy, both for companies, for working capital, for investment, and also for individuals, for acquiring goods, to balance accounts, right? And I wanted to start with a piece of news that's very fresh, which is that in February, credit portability via Open Finance begins. That's right.
In principle, with personal credit, credit portability already existed.
So I wanted you to explain to us what changes, why via Open Finance, what's different?
Well, Raquel, what changes? Important question. Well, first it was announced that credit portability via Open Finance will start now in February. Open Finance is very important because it will give us more agility, let's say, in product migration. Open Finance went through several periods. Many people complained: 'Gosh, Open Finance isn't moving as fast as Pix, Open Finance takes too long.' Open Finance depends a lot on data quality, right? So it had a period where you needed to have homogeneous data, and then a subsequent period where you start to have migration with sets of data. We reached 30 billion, right, API calls, that is, calls to migrate data from one side to the other, data portability in a month. So now we start to see, let's say, the second stage, once the data has already been migrated, which is when you start migrating products. So credit is very important, it will be cheaper, it will be more digital, it will be a more instantaneous migration. What will also happen many times, which is very difficult, sometimes the person doesn't have, let's say, the instinct to compare prices. What will happen in Open Finance is that you will be able to have a credit and by giving access to another bank, the other bank will see, will verify that you have a credit at another bank at a price X, and will be able to make you a lower credit offer, right, which is what we call leads, right, which is you provoking the consumer to make a migration to have an advantage. So, I think it has a very great importance. I think it's just the beginning. We also have the advantage of the timeframe, right, that we are doing a three-day timeframe and it is a very secure mechanism, a consent mechanism. So, Open Finance will greatly speed up and accelerate credit migration. There will be other effects too, like eventually securitization, the digitalization part, the divisibility part, but we can talk about that later.
But you mentioned that an institution will know the value of the credit, the interest rate, for example, charged on the other credit. Does this have the potential to increase competition between financial institutions? Do you imagine that this will happen, will happen in a short timeframe?
Studies show that the spread tends to fall, right? So the products where we already have migration happening, what we tend to see is a drop in spread. The IMF did a recent study on Fintech, and we think that this study, when you put a Fintech environment and the open finance environment, it tends to be even more potentiated. So we think there will be more visibility, more divisibility, more migration and lower spreads.
And what comes next? Because there is a timeframe for the modalities to enter. Why is there such a long timeframe? Why does it come gradually? It starts with personal credit and then there's a...
A cadence. Yes, I think it's important, right, for the Central Bank to have everything, right, well organized on the Open Finance platform, because we have the migration in such a way that banks are prepared to offer the product with quality. Because one of the things that happens in Open Finance is when a person goes there, does an Open Finance operation and doesn't feel that that operation had quality or thought there wasn't transparency in the operation, the person abandons, let's say, the comparability process. After all, Open Finance achieves an objective that is extremely important, which is to have portability and comparability, that is, comparability and portability in real time, which is like having a large marketplace of products, where people can enter and can look at all the prices of all the products, right? And being provoked or not, because sometimes the person can do the research, they will be able to migrate to better products. Sometimes not just the price, sometimes the product is more tailored, sometimes it's a product that she wanted and had at one bank and didn't have at the other. So you will have, let's say, more tailored products as well.
I wanted to pull the conversation a little bit here to the macro now and I have my cheat sheet here. We closed 2025 with a growth of the credit portfolio granted by the financial system, that is, by financial institutions, a growth of 10.2%, 10.2%. The latest survey by Febraban also indicates for 2026 another projected growth of 8.2%. I wanted to understand why even with such a high interest rate of 15%, we continue to see, Brazil continues to record these successive increases, this expansion of credit and even to understand a little bit if this shouldn't be decelerating a bit more.
Look, a very good question. I think a first thing that is important, right, to mention to people is that credit in Brazil is very segmented. So, sometimes we take a total financial system credit growth number and the number itself doesn't tell the whole story. We have several stories happening at the same time, even when we look at segmentation. So, for example, when we look at individuals, we have very high growth. We will even grow more, the projection is to grow from 12.6 to 13.4, right? When we look, for example, at legal entities, we had a big drop in credit, it went from 9.5 to 2.3, right, when we look at the corporate part. When we look within individuals, the segmentation also has a very different segmentation, depending on the income bracket. But in fact, the economy, right, in the last two years has had growth above expectations. We have low unemployment, right? We had some additional reasons, let's say. We have a cyclical recovery that has been coming since the pandemic, which, right, was, let's say, settling in. We have a fiscal impulse, which many people have been talking about the fiscal theme. We have now even one that will enter this year and that people haven't even felt yet, which is the zeroing of income tax up to R$5,000. Many people don't know exactly what that means, but they will start to feel it when they receive a slightly higher salary. So there will be, let's say, a marginal disposition to spend a little more. We also have the theme of directed credit which has risen a little, it hasn't risen much, but it has risen a little. So, when we look at it in a general way, credit seems healthy. When we take household indebtedness and compare, we see that there is a small discrepancy between household indebtedness and the disposition to take credit. So, usually when we have higher household indebtedness, we have a lower disposition to take credit. At some point this corrects. In recent times we saw that this is not a great decoupling, but it decoupled a little, right? So there are additional factors that are making people feel secure, let's say, to take more credit. And again, we are talking about the average, but when we do segmented analysis, it's a very different story.
You spoke about the issue of individuals, right, and even bringing a little zoom in on this point, on credit to families, ah, it was greater than in companies and we have the data there that today almost 50% of families have debts with the financial system, according to Central Bank data. When you go to the data from the National Confederation of Commerce, which is a different methodology, which includes, for example, the installment book, which is paid in stores, etc., this indebtedness in December hit 79%, which was the highest for a month of December in the entire historical series, right? These indebtedness data, are they data that should worry us?
Yes, I think, yes, I think the data are worrying, yes. We have quite high indebtedness, as you, as you mentioned, the CNC numbers, 80% is quite high when we look at a historical average. When we take indebtedness and the cost of rolling over debt, that is, the combination and try to project what the available income will be in the future, we also start to see a picture that is a little more worrying. On the other hand, banks have very solid balance sheets. We have had, let's say, good employment numbers. We have had, right, an economic recovery that has surprised over time. So, I think it worries a little some elements when we do credit segmentation. On the other hand, we have a financial system that is solid, an economy that, right, has shown, has shown growth and resilience above expectations. And it's not just Brazil. One of the points now that we discussed in Davos, right? I even wrote an article in the newspaper, exactly about this, which is we have a conclusion that economies were more resilient than we imagined, given all the geopolitical problem, all, let's say, the trade problem, of tariffs. So, we have in fact more resilient economies and Brazil is also, let's say, on that boat.
