Inter & Co, Inc. (INTR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone, and welcome to our first Tech Day. Thank you so much for coming for joining us. We understand it's a very busy week here in New York. I'm Rafaela Vitoria, new Head of IR and Economic Research. Although not new to many of you, I hope we have more opportunities to interact further. Well, about our Tech Day. We put together this event to answer many of the questions we frequently get from our investors, such as how do we put out so many products in such a short amount of time? How did we build a complete super app so fast? And a very popular one, how do we keep costs low while we grow at the same time exponentially? So to answer some of these questions and others, we'll have the following agenda: First, our CEO and founder, Joao Vitor, who will talk about the vision and how do we -- what are our goals for technology in the not-so-distant future. Then Guilherme Ximenes, our CTO, will talk about the foundation. Alexandre, our VP of Banking; and Rodrigo Gouveia, CEO of Inter Shop, will talk about some business cases, and finally, Santiago will explore the financial impact of technology in our results. And then we'll have questions and answers here in person and also for those who are watching us online. We will take your questions from our e-mail account [email protected]. So to start with the vision, I'll pass the microphone to Joao.

Rafaela, thank you very much. Thank you, everyone, for being with us today. I see you have a full house. Good to have also people joining us online. First of all, I'd like also to thank Nasdaq for hosting us here. I think that we could not have a better venue than Nasdaq for our Tech Day. We're proud of being listed here since 2022, almost 2 years. So we're excited to start our session today. So if you ask us what is the purpose of this session? We say that at Inter, among our employees, we're so excited every single day with what we achieved, with what we're building, with what we'd build and also what we see ahead. We see that really, technology is helping us to compete in a good way, and we want to share that with you. Of course, that, by the end of this session, we're not going to be expert in Inter technology as we are, but we want to start putting this concept on your heads. So as Rafaela told, first, I'm going to explain how we started using technology at Inter. And it started with vision, a vision that I had in the past, which was we wanted to build from the scratch the first-ever digital retail bank in Brazil. We didn't have that at the time, it was 2015, and I remember, I approached our Board of Directors and ask them for a budget to build it, and they were skeptical, to be honest. But I was able to convince the Board and say, "Let's try. We can make it happen." And why did I decide to do that? I would say that these pictures, they are mean more than -- I think -- okay. These pictures, they mean more than many words. So this is what the bank system looked like back in 2015. Banks were putting billions of reals in their own data centers. They had this -- we call this old IT legacy systems. They had many, many brands, and we figure out that we could do things differently. And then our approach was, look, let's start from the scratch. We have a bank, a white blanket in front of us that's built everything 100% cloud-based. Let's build everything through our micro components. Let's build everything through APIs, and therefore, we can compete on this very fierce market, which is digital retail banking in Brazil. And remember, Guil is going to joining us on this stage later. Guil approach [indiscernible] we can do everything in cloud. I did that in Smiles. I did that at [ GOL Airlines ], and it worked really, really well. So we decided to try it. It worked. But one thing that's important to mention, although we are in a Tech Day in a tech session, I'd like to say that technology alone doesn't work. Technology is a tool. It's a resource, but you need to combine with the right people, with the creative, which is something that we have a lot at Inter. Innovation, we need to have this spirit of innovation. And last but not least, data. We have, as I always mentioned, 100% of our clients using our smartphones, our Super App to interact with us. Therefore, the quality, the volume of data are amazing. So what we've built so far with the combination of technology, innovation with people helping us to improve? You can see here, 2015, that's when I decided to do it. That's when I actually stepped in as a CEO. This is the first the look and feel of our app. If you look at it today, it's -- I mean, it's not good at all, but that's how we started. Then at that time, we had 200,000 clients. And fast forward 2024, this is our Super App, how it looks, with 32 million plus clients and with 7 different verticals operating seamlessly. Also, to get there to bring all these clients and to have this 7 different verticals, we had to launch 124 versions of the app, both on iOS and Android. And also today, I mention about data, we are collecting, processing and using 106x more data than before. So imagine what we can do in terms of offering the right product, having the right service and also engaging cross-selling and monetizing our clients. Now talking about technology as a bedrock for our operations. I'd like to say that using that we can have scalability. So we can launch products, we can serve fast and we can serve millions and millions of clients. Also, we're talking about the speed, we can get the data that's in our data centers. We can process it, offer the right product at the right time for the clients. And also using the technology, the way we used for these past 8 years or so, we were able to have the right focus on both growth and profitability. So with technology, we're able to launch many products, bringing millions of clients without putting profitability at risk. So with these foundations in place, we'd like to say that, we were the first in many things in Brazil. So just to name a few, the first digital retail bank, the first investment platforms with online brokerage, time deposits, fixed income, mutual funds and everything. Also the first integrated insurance platform, serving today more than 2 million clients with more than 24 different products. Also, the first and then Rodrigo is going to mention about that, he's going to come up, the first marketplace embedded in a bank app in the world. Recently, our global account, which I'm very proud of, we put this product up and running 2 years ago, even less. And today, we have more than 3 million clients on this 32 million that we have in Brazil using this product already. And last but not least, Loop, our loyalty program that we have also running not only in Brazil but in U.S. since last week. Now just to make this conversation more interactive. I'd like to ask the audience which product do you think that exemplifies better how we use technology to prepare our business? Can anyone try to guess? No one? Luke? Let's see who else. Checking account. Any other guess? No. Gift Cards. Okay. So I'm going to tell the right product, deposits. When people ask us, why did you achieve this such a great funding capability at Inter. And the answer is technology. Deposits, both time and demand deposits. This is how everything works under the hood. So we have your screen, but behind it, that's how things are working in order to serve all the clients that log ins every second at Inter. So in deposits, we're able to offer deposits from BRL 1 at Inter. With that, we're able to serve millions, not thousands but millions of Brazilians that was -- that were willing to deposit and to save with us. And at the peak, we can have more than 1 million deposits per day with a very, very low cost to serve and therefore, can fund ourselves at ballpark 6% of CDI in Brazil. So this is just a glimpse of what technology ca bring us in terms of engagement, in terms of operations, but also in terms of profitability. With all that said, I'm going to stop here. And now let's move to the most interesting part of the conversation, which is our deep dive on our technology stack. Guil, please come in.

Hello, everyone. I'm Guilherme Ximenes, CTO at Inter, and I've been at Inter for the past 9 years. Just a quick intro. You guys listening to me? Just a quick intro. I'm an electrical engineer. I graduated at Maua Institute of Technology in Sao Paulo, where I lived there for 20 years. I started -- prior to Inter, I worked at Accenture for 7 years as a management consultant, doing a lot of complex IT projects delivered the production. After that, I moved to GoAir Lines where I helped to build their airline ticketing e-commerce platform and then for 3 years at Smiles, where I had the experience of migrating -- making 2 migrations of cloud -- of workloads to cloud computing and also handling an environment of millions of customers. In 2015, I had a couple of conversations with Ron [indiscernible]. Ron shared his vision around digital banking. And I shared my vision around how modern technology could help support it. And it was an amazing moment for me. I joined Inter, we had only 5,000 customers, 300 people in the company and only 7 at IT. Today, I'm going to share with you his agenda, our digital transformation back in 2018, the financial Super App concept, the powers of proprietary technology, data platform and how it fuels AI models, the scaling beyond Brazil, generative AI cases and beyond the horizon. So as Joao was saying, in 2016, we are seeing a huge growth in our accounts being opened per day. It was a small baseline. We went from 20 accounts per day to 200 and then from 200 to 1,000. It was our systems and pretty much the IT world was a lot of computing restraints, legacy systems, in region and structure. And together with Joao and the Board, we decided to go to the public cloud with AWS as our cloud provider. We engage with Brazilian Central Bank and share with them our road map since there was no regulations back then. And we are going to migrate our noncritical assets by the beginning of 2017. And by the end of 2017, we are going to take all of our core banking system to the cloud. On top of that, we were changing our systems to a microserver-oriented architecture, which transforms big systems into smaller pieces, making it more easy to evolve and to maintain. And also, we were automating all the development life cycle processes, making software delivery to production really fast. And by the beginning of 2018, we were the first bank in Latin America to move all of banking systems to the cloud. Being the first one is not the most important part. The thing is that what else we did 7 years ago. We did the digital transformation 7 years ago. And since then, we have scalable computing, automated processes, which gives us a lot of time to market. With the foundation ready, we are now able to grow our digital business. And then it came the Super App. It's a visionary approach. We combined several parts of our existing environment. So for instance, we're getting our customer credentials, which is his user name, his password, his billing address and delivery address, his forms of payment, and it was a matter just of putting merchandise in front of him, so we could buy products using all of the other features that we had already in place in the banking app, and we integrated everything into a single app. And then we had a big but also great problem. People starting liking us. From 2018 to 2019, we grew our customer base from 1 million clients to 4 million clients. It's a fourfold increase. And we are seeing -- we are getting to 100,000 requests per minute and one big bottleneck, our third-party API Gateway was struggling to handle all of that traffic in -- especially in payday, and during a specific crisis 1 day we were ready to go, and we deployed our first proprietary technology, Inter API Gateway. The results were impressive. We saw the performance jumped from 100,000 requests per minute to more than 2 million, so it's a 20x increase. We saw the costs going 1/10 of the previous cost, so it was really impressive. The ramp-up speed. We went from 15 minutes to 1 second, and the ramp-up speed is really important when you have a spike in your customer demand. So the -- in the orange line, that center is like an electrical engine. It goes really fast when you need the torque. And the other one is like a combustion engine. You need some time to scale all of our servers. And it was super easy to evolve. From 6 months was the market median, we're creating new features in only 15 days. So this is not like 2 or 3x better. It's 100x better. It's like Peter Thiel said in his book from zero to one. It's going from linear to exponential. And that pushed us to build even more proprietary technology. Today, our DevOps pipelines, it's built by our team. We have built the strong authentication, which is the [ i-Safe ] which is the digital token that every transaction that is a financial transaction is authenticated by it. The Inter Shop APIs, when we connect with external e-commerce platforms, some parts of the digital banking core that needs paramount resilience and stability and the PIX and also the PIX that runs at Inter is our own code. And why we do that? It gives us freedom and speed to create and customize. It's tailormade to our needs. It's super fast to evolve. It has ultra-high performance and is cost efficiency. And now with the foundation ready, the Super App in handling millions of transactions, data becomes solid gold. What was coming to us, what is coming to us is not customers? It's data. Our customers, they are in the streets, they are in their homes. They have convenience of being wherever they are. With over 15 million logins per day empowered by 3,500 micro services, we are having hundreds of millions of interactions. So as Joao was saying here, each bulb of this is carrying a patch of data, and that's an example of data. That's the real big data [indiscernible]. We have a lot of data [ variety ] with high volume and ultra velocity and data come in real time. So like everything is happening everywhere all at once. Here's to demonstrate our InterLake. So from 2019 to 2024, we grew incredible 25 petabytes of data. And throughout those years, we have developed more than 3 versions of our InterLake that we call the InterLake framework. And you use a lot of framework to give -- to make it simple to our data engineers so they can build pipelines faster. They can guarantee data quality and make things easier for them. And these different colors here is a different storage technology that we combine the best costs with the best usage of data with [ triple ] speeds. And I'm going to demonstrate our environment live. Can you show the screen here? Okay. So here, we have -- it's right now at this right moment. All the logins by mobile platform, so Android and iOS, and we see that we have 10,000 requests per minute for Android and around 5,000 iOS logins per second. So we've reached like almost 300 log-ins each second right at this moment. So far, today, we have more than 8 million log-ins. The peaks per minute, the online brokerage access per minute. So we can see here that right when the market opens, we have a spike in the access. So our customers is over there buying stocks and selling stocks, the. The investments per minute, peaks per second, our debit card per minute that customers is using in the streets, the credit card, the Inter Shop access per minute. So here we see some spikes. That's Rodrigo's team doing some crazy campaigns to our customers that the customers love, the gift card sales, mobile top-ups, our global debit card purchases, account checking deposit per minute and the app versions that we follow every day. And everything is happening at the same app at the same minute. Coming back here just doing this one. Oh, sorry. And you all know that data is essential for building models. Data fuels AI models. Without data, you can't build AI models. And at Inter, we have around 80 AI models at scale right now in production. We separate them in offensive AI models, which helps us to increase conversion rates to increase cost selling, to increase upselling. And some models that we use here is the next best offer. So we get our customer base, what like -- people like Santiago bought in the previous month. Whenever someone like Santiago gets into our environment, we can offer a product will suit him better and also the like me models. And in the defensive AI side, we have models that are helping us with our collection processes, with the credit underwriting and also fraud prevention process. And as we always like to do, we create an AI framework that is helping our data scientists to get time to insight even faster than we had in the previous -- like in the -- when we started this journey. We used to have 68 days, so our data science to get the data to train their models, to get it ready to deploy the production. We moved to today for 36 days, and in the near future, we want to get that by under 20 days. And also, this framework helps us to have -- to bring quality, scalability and flexibility. So our data science can focus on the problem and not the infrastructure behind it to run their models. In the fraud provision example here, we have more than 30 -- we have around 30 AI touch points in the customer journey using face recognition. We're checking his transaction velocity, his spending profile and also his geolocation. From 2022, we saw an impressive decrease in fraud losses of 68% and also a 52% reduction in loss and theft claims in the year that we grow our customer base by 24%. And now changing gears and coming back to our Super App evolution. We were scaling beyond Brazil with our global account. So we were using the same tech components. We're using the same cloud infrastructure, and we were integrating our back-end systems to create a unique and seamless experience moving money across borders. So in just seconds that -- and it feels like a PIX. In just seconds you can send money from Brazil to U.S. and do your transactions here. [indiscernible] will show or demonstrate later a live demonstration of how it looks like and how it feels. Let me show again another live moment here. So here is the map of Brazil. It's our log-ins for the in the last 5 minutes. So we can see here all from which over Brazil. And people think that we have more customers in Belo, but the reality is we have more in Sao Paulo is the biggest here in Brazil. And it's just the last 5 minutes. It's very nice to see this graph here, but the important part is what we can do with that data, how we can find our customers this is the Guarulhos Airport in Sao Paulo. How we can find our customers right in the spot with the right context? And for instance, this is terminal 3, the international terminal at Sao Paulo. In the last 12 hours, we had these many customers using our app. So we could send them like a push notification, tell them about the global account, we could send them some gift card cash back promotions and so on. Here is an example of the last [ 24 hours ] in the U.S. So for instance, if I zoom in here at Manhattan, we can see that our customers love to go in the Apple store. And I think Rodrigo is working on a special cash back for today, Rodrigo for Apple.

Yes.

And also Orlando. It is very nice also to see Orlando. It is the biggest city that we have the most log-ins. Okay, this is very nice. And moving forward here. So what that translates to? It's impressive capability for deep customer insights. We are getting data from our customers from the moment that they open their accounts, their geolocation wherever they use their apps in the day-to-day banking usage, their behavior when they are using the app, the time they spend in each product or vertical, the cards that they use owners or offers, the investment profile and insurance products. We have 500-plus data points together per client on average, and that help us to create an even more personalized experience. We started very small. We started just with 4 clusters, very simple based on their investment profiles. And then combining demographic data, we moved from 4 to more than 80 clusters of customers. With the release of [ dynamic app ] that we did in 2022 and combining that with 80 clusters, we can move now for thousands of combinations. So we have here per context and per client message that we can touch our customers. We can show different products in a cluster base. So for instance, for kids, we can show the gift cards, for another we can show the investments. And we have also the banner, which converts a lot of cross-selling, upselling in a per client basis. And what is just around the corner, and we're very close to make it, it's moved from thousands to 1 personalized app tailor-made for each customer. And now unleashing the power of GenAI, a hot talk of the moment. I think everybody is talking about GenAI like everywhere and all day. And here at the Inter, just 3 months after OpenAI released ChatGPT, we built an enterprise grade level, thinking about security and privacy to empower our employees to use it, to use this technology. We saw great adoption from 25,000 interactions on March 2023 to more than 150,000 last month. And we are seeing a lot of different use cases. We'll build an internal app that helps our employees to build their own app using GenAI. So we have an app that generates image that is used -- is being used for PowerPoint presentations and for our banners in our app. Also, we have one that helps our developers to increase their quality in their coding. We have to ask your AGR questions. We have the legal assistance that is helping our legal department to create -- to revise faster and write better contracts. And also, we have this customer service assistant, that I want to show you this case here. So we have our call center agent. She's talking to our customer. And what we did behind the scenes, we summarized the 2,500 articles that explains our products and our procedures into a shared conversation. So we deployed that for over 100 agents in our call center, in our contact center, and we see great results. We see the average call time reduced 21% from 18 minutes to 14 minutes. And at the same time, the customer satisfaction increased by 15%. And now that's my latest engagement that I'm personally involved is the Inter GenAI platform. We are building that in order to make possible our customers to talk to our app. So we have built -- we are building the memory services that will help recover previous conversation that our customers had with the app. We are building the prompt engineering services that will give context [indiscernible] conversation to avoid hallucination. We are building a data lake integration to reach our data enrich -- and to enrich the response from the larger language models with the customer data. So imagine our customers being able to ask questions to their financial data. Where did I spend my money last month? What is the data insight it could show me with my spending and so on? And our orchestration later that we will optimize the best models for the best outcomes because we know that we're going to see a lot of different models in the market, and we want to be able to use the best from -- for each one. And now looking ahead, the modern apps, it is -- everything is checked on our side. We're shifting now to the Intelligent App and what is the Intelligent App? I'm going to answer that question. Intelligent App is a natural -- has natural language interaction with GenAI. Imagine an app that you can talk to it and you can give comments to it. An app that has even more personalized experience and an app that is continuously driven by data. Imagine if you could use voice command and you are in the kitchen of your home with your family and you just say, "Inter, please pay the kids' trip tomorrow. Inter, please send BRL 100 PIX for Joao Vitor." Imagine if there is no smartphone at all, and you can do banking in your living room. Imagine if we could predict your needs and make the bank invisible, imagine everything together. We are looking beyond the horizon, and the horizon is right next corner. I will call now Alexandre to showcase some innovations that we did in our products using our technology.

Thank you, Guilherme, and thanks, everyone, for being with us to listen about Inter technology. And I'm Alexandre Riccio, Senior Vice President of Banking. And I'll be on stage with Rodrigo de Gouveia from Inter Shop. He's going to join me in a few minutes. And today, we're going to talk about a few business cases in which technology has really been able to enable us to grow fast, to bring products to market fast and to deliver ultimately the results that we've been delivering to our clients. Specifically, I'm going to talk about credit underwriting, PIX. Rodrigo will take care of shopping, and then I'll go through the global account project. And before I start, I'll go back to this cluster with all these dots that are API calls. And it's just so amazing to think of everything that's happening here behind the scenes with what we've been able to develop and with what digital banking became. So Inter is doing right now more than 500 million financial transactions a month, and we're talking real like either transfers, payments investment, that's more than BRL 500 million. And imagine if all this had to be done in branches. In reality, this revolution that we're leaving is really about a huge market transformation that wouldn't be viable if people had to go to branches to execute all these things. But for this complexity, we leave it for Guil and our IT team they can do it all. On the business side, a lot of what we focus is about bringing to customers the best UX and the best products so that they can keep engaging with us and we keep delivering to them the best experience as possible. Talking about our credit underwriting approach. Reality is that from 2018 until 2020, we didn't have a lot of credit appetite for unsecured lending, and we didn't grow a lot. So by the end of 2019, we only had BRL 800 million in credit card portfolio. And we need the technology for 2 different purposes. One was to do rapid product evolution. The second one was to build the infrastructure that would allow us to do all the modeling and programming that would take us to the next level. And IT was there, and it worked super well. So early in 2020, we're able to launch our processor, our card processor. So we internalized this process, and this enabled us for much faster product evolution as we had our own front end and our own back end and could connect and make the decisions and prioritize everything that would go on. This was really good. We were able to establish a product pipeline that was ready to engage customers. So we did things like cash back, which we launched in 2020, and we were pioneer for credit cards in Brazil on that. We launched our product called [indiscernible] which is a collateralized line of credit for credit cards. That was in 2021 when we started to scale that repricing. And finally, in 2023, as our credit appetite increased and we see how much we can drive and control delinquency levels as the portfolio grows, we launched 4 unsecured products, new ones. So Buy Now Pay Later. Rodrigo is going to talk about it linked to our Inter Shop. We launched Overdraft and 3 products that are linked to the credit card limits. So cash financing, bill pay financing and PIX financing, all these in 2023. And these 5 are products that we're really focusing on growing now in 2024. All in all, we came from this portfolio that was smaller than BRL 1 billion in the end of 2019, and we reached BRL 10 billion just recently on credit cards, so tremendous growth, and we'll keep on going as we move forward. Yes. So within everything that we've -- why we come back -- oh, we're back or maybe we're not. Yes. Yes, we're back. So when we look into modeling, what we really needed to get from IT was all the infrastructure, right? So our data lake has to be connected to the data marts. Our ability to bring in data from third parties and fit into the lake to be able to use it. And we had all that available, we had that fast, and we're able to produce all the models that we needed to produce to do a credit cycle. This is not necessarily happening in sequence. It's happening all the time to all the customers. And what we have now is all the pieces that make for very good credit underwriting. So going from income estimation, going to like an onboarding model that has been evolving a lot through the years. Also, we're probably in like dozens of versions of that and also like behavior -- that's behavior scoring and all this together made for all that growth at very NPL levels as we grew the portfolio. Moving to your PIX. Yes. So moving to PIX, it's super exciting to be in this market. So it's one of the like the fastest-growing instant payment systems in the world. So it's great to have 8% market share on PIX, and it's especially nice to see how this whole thing developed. So this is a product where everybody started together. So both incumbents and new entrants have the same go-to-market, and we're able to quickly get a good share on this market, and we've been steadily growing this share. And despite the fact that this -- the overall volume of data and the overall number of transactions has also been growing a lot, and also despite the fact that we have a lot of people participating in the PIX market. The PIX transactions, it's nice to mention that this goes way beyond like a peer-to-peer instant payment system. So you have that, and that's big. So we have like QR code payments, people can link their e-mail or social security numbers, which in Brazil, it's our CPF, not as private as it is in the U.S. They can also link their phone numbers to a specific account and have that money flowing into that direction. PIX goes beyond that. A lot of programmable payments and a lot of very good things that are transforming the Brazilian payments market. To give everybody a sense on numbers and how this has been scaling, we see here in the left on April 5, we had 487 PIX transactions in a second. Last -- actually, a few days ago, we just bet 500. So this keeps on growing. Number of clients that use this in a single day, that a year ago used to be about 3 million is already at about 5 million. So again, daily people doing PIXs, also very, a growth that's much higher than the growth in the customer base that was between 20% and 25% last year. And also, as we look in the right side, we see a 72% year-on-year growth in the number of transactions, 44% growth in volume of transactions. The nice thing is this mismatch signals that average ticket is going down, keep us stopping -- It's killing cash at the end of the day. People are using more and more PIX to do their day-to-day transactions. This -- every one of this growth consistently higher than the growth in the number of customers, so meaning more engagement, more data, more cross-sell opportunities and everything that we have to do, all driven by PIX. And why are we having so much success in PIX? And one of the reasons is we are the benchmark of the industry. Every month, the Central Bank release this IQS, which is a service quality index that adds up 3 factors. So complaints, availability and timeouts. Inter was able to sustain a Grade A, which is the best one for 25 consecutive months. That's better than any other player in the industry if we take the high-volume players. So this is one of the big reasons. And how did we do that? It was all about the IT strategy. In reality, we learned. And what we learned through the years was that we always underestimated growth, so within Inter. I remember back in 2014, Joao Vitor and I thought we would have 100,000 customers by 2020. Obviously, we're completely off. Then in 2016, we had a core banking system that was MVP core banking system, and we had to move and the project that Guilherme talked about moving to cloud was part of this core banking system project. And we bought a system that would hold 500,000 customers. Again, by the day we did the go-live of the Guilherme's project, we were already at 400,000. So again, a new bottleneck. So as we started the setup for PIX, we said, okay, we need something that's scalable. We need something that can scale horizontally using cloud to as much as like -- to have like an unrestricted capacity to grow. That was the goal. We did that. So we have our own code for the PIX system and the results that we have with the Grade A is like harvesting everything that we prepared with this code and solution that's ours. But that does go alone, even with a very good code, so you still have problems. So we need to have like real-time monitoring and a reaction process in case we have problems, and we've been very good on reacting fast, fixing things and getting the system up and going when we have any type of downtime which, by the way, downtime is one of the metrics used by the central bank to give the grades on PIX. And so this is it on PIX. And Rodrigo, can we use PIX on Inter Shop?

Yes, yes, yes. Yes, we can. We can use PIX, we can just Buy Now Pay Later, and we can use several other types of payments, which is quite interesting. And also, Guilherme, to your point, thank you very much for being our tech stack. We're able nowadays to transact -- have 1 transaction per second being done Inter Shop nowadays. So this is quite an amazing achievement for all of us, and congratulations. And my name is Rodrigo Gouveia. I lead the marketplace and large program, which is called Loop, which was recently launched. And I want to share with you a little bit more why our technology has become what we've been seeing here and especially for Inter Shop. And this is quite interesting to say that our technology enabled us to become the first ever e-commerce platform to be integrating to a bank, right? And more than that, we want to also share with you why this technology is adding value to our business, why this technology is driving efficiency and why this technology is also generating new revenues. So come with me on this. program. The first part really, I want to share is how we're adding -- unlocking new value to the ecosystem of financial Super App. And here's an interesting piece that Guilherme was mentioning before is that different than all other players in the market, they have their own e-commerce and they have their own ways of trying to build a financial ecosystem. We came the other way around. We are actually bringing -- coming from a financial ecosystem actually bringing e-commerce and other different products in place towards our ecosystem. And the way that was done is imagine if you -- before been an Inter client, you had your e-commerce app, you had your travel app, you have maybe your mobile operator app, and we're actually bringing all together in one cloud experience without having to log in and create credentials and any new payments into different apps, but actually, it's only one. And the great thing is when we put together the layer of the financial layer, which is actually bringing the digital account and all the credentials, we're actually leveraging and keeping all these pieces that is pretty much painful for all of us when we thinking about as a consumer sense. We're all starting credit. So we're empowering our clients to really be able to make a purchase, a final purchase. That's pretty much safe and also in a great environment. And why not cross-selling with different products. So if we're selling travel, if we're selling a cellphone, why not sell travel insurance or cell phone insurance, right? And last but not least, add that to our engagement, we're trying to, of course, build more and more and more engagement through Inter Shop, and bringing principality back as a first off into our clients. So we believe that this is a great sense to add and unlock lots of value. And this is quite unique. A lot of people ask me, well, can this be copied? I say, yes, you can maybe sometimes copy some part of technology. But if you can talk -- if we can think further, we cannot copy people, as João was saying, which is very important and also the strategy and the way we're building this into our financial app. So we're very excited what's coming next. The second part that I want to share with you is the efficiency part. And I believe this was one of the things when I started Inter 5 years ago that we were discussing is that what we call the Closed Loop On-Us processing, which is a great technology stack that was built. We're able to process everything internally. So what I mean by that is that we don't need a third-party acquiring machine or acquiring service or a card processing service. We build everything from scratch inside of our own app. And that means that we are one, saving money to the company. We're not adding that, but we're also creating a better experience to our clients, meaning that we're providing convenience place where it's a one-stop shop where they can find different products and services throughout our app. They have -- they're transacting in a safe environment because you're logging to a bank, which makes sense. And so there's no risk of putting any credit card information or having a risk of not being -- having a transaction being accepted, right? And it's also frictionless because it's -- the experience is pretty much a 1-click, 2-click shop, which makes everything much, much more feasible. Let me just go here. And the third part, which is generating new revenues and this is an important piece, and this we're really betting on this consequence here. So this is a comparison here when we launched our On-Us payments, which are our end-to-end solution for e-commerce in 2020. And at that time, in the second quarter of 2020, as our -- one of the pandemic moments when it got started March. We were pretty much driving about the On-Us transactions about -- with about GMV of 37%. And Off-Us 63%. Off-Us, you should bear here in terms of information is when you're driving leads outside of our app if you were transacting in the actual store. So we're pretty much a media outlet generation, right? And when we look now from the last results that we've shared in our Q1 of '24, we're 83% of On-Us transactions. So that means that, one, we're getting higher take rates from the vendors, from the sellers because we're generating -- we're given a sale, not a lead or a prospect. And we're also helping our inside ecosystem or financial ecosystem, how to drive more and more and more combinations, right? And to tie into that, I wanted to share something we were talking about the Buy Now Pay Later. We're really trying to build here with Inter Shop a consumer finance mindset perspective across the board. And we believe that Buy Now Pay Later is one of the recent launched opportunities that we have here, but it is something that we want to make sure that is going to happen. So here is an example that Rodrigo with BRL 4,500 of unsecured credit to be spent only inside of Inter Shop. This is very interesting. And then I have a selection of options that is already linked into the [Foreign Language]. That's the name that we call in Portuguese. And you can go through the entire experience, it's the same experience as you're buying an H1 solution. Anybody can make installments from 12, 24 or 36 time, right? So this is something that we believe is aggregating more time. And at the same time, we're gaining more interest from companies, not only retailers, by the way, we're doing a very strong movement to drive direct-to-consumer that we call while we're bringing industries and as well as brands, such as Samsung, Electrolux, Whirlpool, Nespresso that are directly connected to us that they see a very, very aggregate value to combine the delivery. And last but not least, I want to share a little bit about AI. It's been a constant discussion and it's something that we know it's picking up all this name, but for us, it's been something that we've been working on for quite a bit. So I want to share 2 examples here. One is when we are using the propensity models to create specific targeting products, so find the best solver to the right client at the right moment. How can we make sure that we can do that? And once we learn those data behaviors, we are transforming that on the right side to target better our clients. What does that mean? That means that if there's a probability of spending for any of us as a client that is actually not shopping at Inter Shop or that shop every now and then, it's not a constant frequent user. And what's the probability of buying, right? So if I have money to spend what's my probability of buying and finding people that look like they will be buying that, so we also, of course, want to be on the top right side, the first piece here. So for this testing, we've seen 40% average ticket increase and 2x conversion rates. And this is just the beginning. We're testing different clusters. But this is a great example of how we're actually applying putting to practice, everything that's being done. And the last part here that I wanted to share before I pass back to Alexandre is how we're bringing GenAI into reality. This is a beta demonstration, so it's not live yet, but it's quite interesting because when we start seeing the operations -- sorry here I go, so this is more like [indiscernible] people like programming, so you're not seeing the final interaction, which is quite interesting. So let's say I'm looking, I'm searching for a watch, and I'm getting responses, from our InterGPT. And every time there's an option to click on the link to purchase. So there's a black watch, but let's say maybe a I want to get a different type of watch. I want to get a silver watch. So is that an option silver and that will deliver an answer. It will give the brand, who is the vendor, what's the price and what's the cash back behind it. And cool, I want to take this, and that will take checkout flow as if you're checking out on our end-to-end and you give the final transaction to get a push notification and the purchase there, boom, done. So this is something that is quite interesting. We're calling the SHOP CONCIERGE at this point. So that's something we're working on with the Guilherme's team to bring to reality soon. But Alexandre, tell me one thing. Is Inter Shop, ready to work in the U.S.?

Yes, Rodrigo, we're ready to do it in the U.S. But before I get into Inter Shop in the U.S., I'm going to talk about the global account project. So a little more 2 years ago, we saw that we had 2 market opportunities that we could address. So one was having look at everything that Guilherme was showing on worldwide log-ins. We thought we could have like an account, a transaction account in the U.S. that will go beyond just the debit card. And that was a market opportunity. A second one is the trend of Brazilian's diversifying investments into dollars. And we thought that was also unique. And the hypothesis we had was that we should be able to use a lot of what we have built in Brazil before to come to the U.S. much faster than what it took us to grow in Brazil. And the reality is that 2 years later, we have every business vertical that we had in Brazil already running in the United States. We still obviously need to do fine-tuning and bring some more features to the U.S., but the product is already complete. And we have more than 3 million clients. So a lot of cross-selling going on with Brazilian customers that use the global account. These clients have 3x more engagement in terms of number of products, but also generate a lot more ARPAC. So the product is a success, and the reason why we're able to do this is because of the way we program and all the modularity that we have. So having the regulation to back everything that we can do in IT and having all the modularity and be able to replicate what we've done has been key to -- for us to deliver all this time-to-market that we've seen here in the U.S. And as we were seeing and as I will demonstrate, Inter Shop is already part of it. So with many, many different components. So for instance, people can buy gift cards and save money, that's when we say we're deflationary to the market because you can come to the U.S. and you can go to Disney and save 5%. You can go to Apple, save 10% depending on the campaign. You can buy Starbucks Coffee for less also using our gift cards and also use other features. As an example, if you travel, we have more than 60 countries where you can buy a SIM card like eSIM and get connection through our end-to-end connection in Inter Shop. And before we get into the financials with Santiago, I'll do a quick demo and show some of these features and may be pay for him so that he comes over here. Yes. So I already logged in just in the interest of time. As I mentioned, we now have -- since last year, we have overdraft. That's why my account can now be negative, and the first thing I'll do is just do a quick withdrawal. So I'll click on Investir here, where reaching our investment side. And to withdraw, I push this button right here. I can get a few different options of products that are -- that have daily possibility of withdrawing. I'm going to go ahead and withdraw BRL 1,000. This will cover my overdraft that I had here. So now I have money. The second piece is Guilherme mentioned we can transfer online to our Global account. So I pushed Global up here. Another way of getting cash would be to go to Loop. So Rodrigo talked about our loyalty program and a very, recent innovation was to see Loop almost as a currency, right? I can exchange this currency to cash in reais. I can exchange this currency to dollars in the U.S. or I can buy with it, but I'll just do dollars. So I'm going to charge and pushing in Portuguese Carregar. I want to charge my global account by pushing here. And I'll buy, say, $50. So here, I have all the conditions like IOF, which is Brazilian tax, what's the spread that I pay. And I should be able to get here pretty quick dollar -- additional dollars into my account. So this is just about done. If I look into the transfers, I already got the $50. Before I transfer money to Santi, I'll also show the gift card example. I can just come here, gift card. This is available both in Brazil and in the U.S. as what Rodrigo was saying. So I could be doing it in Brazil to like to pay less for Uber, for example. Lots of different options. And I'll just go ahead and buy Starbucks as I may want some coffee after done. So $10 here. I'll push Confirmar in the bottom, check the boxes. And we should have here gift card pretty soon. And this is like many times we do this right in front of the ticket. When I'm paying at Starbucks. I'll do this, it's always there for us. And now I have $10 Starbucks scan it in their counter, and I'm done. I just saved 5% on something that I would spend anyway. Finally, I'll transfer Santi some money. We will pay him by the hour to talk to us. And I'll do a transfer. So we have many different types of transfers available in the U.S., so it could do a wire, could do an ACH or Interpay, which is within our ecosystem and Santi does have an account with us in the U.S. He doesn't have one in Brazil as he doesn't have a CPF, which is a requirement. And I will just go through my beneficiaries right here. Then Santi all the way in the bottom and I'll pay him $10. So let's see. That's all you're going to get for 20 minutes. So transfer is done. So Santiago has his money and now he can come to the stage to talk about finances.

I need to work on my reputation with Xandre. Fortunately, he doesn't decide my bonus yet. Thank you, everyone, for being here today. We know it's one of the busiest weeks in the years. So we want to make it a bit busier, but we really respectful of your time, and we'll try to be done by 4:45. So going to financials, I would try to tie up what was said with the financial performance. Let me go in the right direction. So this slide, we call it the Boca de jagerei or the crocodile's mouth. It's our favorite slide in the financial department at least at Inter. It shows the beauty of the operating leverage of our business model. So basically, what we have been able to do so far has been to keep expenses quite flat since the fourth quarter of 2021 and increase our revenues to almost twice. And this is net revenue net of cost of funding. So the goal we have from a financial perspective is to maximize the distance between these 2 lines. We were doing that on working on both lines on the expenses and on the revenues. As you always reminds me, we have a limit on how much we can improve on the cost side because the costs cannot go to 0. Eventually, we have to pay salaries and expenses, but the revenues can increase to a much higher level than we have. So we're working on those, being mindful that the net revenues will be at the end of the day what will drive the majority of the operating leverage going forward. So when we see on the expenses side and also will be the line that remained flat, the first observation that I would make is that we were able, in 2023, to keep expenses almost flat, 2% up, very, very smooth despite the big growth in revenues. And if we look at the SG&A that we reported in the fourth -- in the first quarter of this year, last Thursday, it's exactly the same number. It's not a typo. It's exactly the same number that we reported in the fourth quarter of last year. So we remain committed to have expenses under control. And for that, we are doing a strong job on multiple fronts. On the one hand, we have 1/3 of our expenses on personnel and 2/3 on everything else, which is administrative expenses. I'll do another click on each of them. So starting on personnel expenses. 3x is the net revenue per employee at Inter for the past 3 years. So what we see here is that each employee produced on average BRL 475,000 in revenue per year in 2020 and now it's producing 3x. So before 3 Santiagos produced what 1 Santiago produces now. Actually, I don't produce any revenue. So the guys that do produce revenue need to produce more than 3x as much to compensate for the ones that I just caused like myself. And when we look at the structure of the headcount, 30% of the employees back in 2020 were from IT, and now we have almost 45%. So we were -- we increased almost by 50% how many employees we have on the tech side and this is fostering a culture of innovation. It's incrementing our capabilities to innovate and embrace new technologies as we grow along. When we look at the 3 biggest hiring groups or workforce pools of talent at Inter, tech is obviously the largest one followed by client services and operations. The only one that is growing in terms of headcount is technology. The other groups as they embrace with new tools like GenAI driven in the case of client services, we saw a Copilot demo presented by Guil. Operations, et cetera, they are mostly reducing employees on a nominal basis with the exception of technology, as I mentioned. Then the other 2/3 is administrative expense. It's a BRL 1.6 billion check in the last year. Here, I want to focus on 40% of that BRL 1.6 billion which are the top 6 providers that we have Inter. So the top 6 vendors in Inter represent 40% of the 2/3, which are administrative expenses. And what we see here, these are Mastercard, cloud computing, ATM withdrawals, contact center, printing and shipping of cards and advertising. All of them, with the exception of printing and shipping have had notable improvements in performance during the last few years. So if we see on cards, cost per TPV, 16% improvement; cloud computing, 40% on a per active client basis, ATM, this also has to do with the success of PIX as PIX improves the -- we're digitizing those payments. In the case of contact centers, lots of new tools being implemented. Here, the issue on the printing and shipping is at the cost of the chips as a result of the COVID and supply chain finance, geopolitics, et cetera, has increased notably particularly in 2022. Now it has stabilized. We think that these costs will tend to disappear through time as people are integrating their cards into the phones and the cards in the future should probably not exist, right? And then on advertising, Google and Facebook as we -- as our brand power increases further, and the power of word of mouth and referrals continues to become stronger, we're able to optimize our spending in terms of marketing. So that was expenses. Now moving to revenues. So on revenues, we had BRL 4.8 billion of net revenue in the year, BRL 8.1 billion in gross basis. And of the net number, 1/3 was fees 2/3 is NII. We always say that our fee base is one of the largest in the industry. When we see who are the top 6 revenue lines, and then I want to deep dive on how technology is helping us driving them. We have cards, personal. This is FGTS and considering narrow payroll loans together. We have banking, which is credit cards as well on the fee side, Inter Shop, real estate and insurance. In all of them, we have had productivity improvements in the last 2 years. So let me explain a bit deeper. On credit card, per client, as Alexandre mentioned, we are using AI to optimize engagement and monetization of our clients. We had a huge increment in terms of the revenue. FGTS this number actually is not meaningful because we were almost not doing FGTS back then, but FGTS is actually our most digital credit product. It was bond digitally. It was interesting because we were starting offering FGTS almost in parallel with the competition. And there, we have an outsized market share. And the ROE of FGTS is remarkably high. We're originating a 1.8% per month. And last quarter, we were able to have a record origination, we mentioned this in the call, of BRL 500 million when the average of originations of FGTS per quarter last year was BRL 300 million. So we went BRL 300 million to BRL 500 million and it's gaining more participation in the credit card. Home equity is another product where digitalization is taking place and is moving very well with an ROE above 20%. Then on the fee side, banking revenues increasing 8%. Rodrigo mentioned on Inter Shop. The reality is that Inter Shop take rates were also very lower in COVID, where we're trying to drive volume, then we started monetizing and increasing the net take rate up. And insurance revenues also increasing very meaningfully. All of these graphs are '21 to '23 comparison. So to wrap it up, this is our second most favorite slide after the Boca de jagerei slide, which has our 60-30-30 goals. And how are we tracking relative to that? We -- as you mentioned -- I mentioned already, we announced the first quarter results. This is not by accident. The line where we are ahead of the plan by significantly, we're obviously almost half weigh the plan in a 5-year plan with 1 year and 1 quarter only. We already improved significantly. This is the result of 2 things. One is just the model itself, the digital banking model is scalable and that's showing the results as we go along, but also the implementation of all of these tools and capabilities that we've been covering today and how they're playing in the efficiency. And then on ROE, we touched 9.7%, almost 10%. We think we are in a -- in a path where we are inertia to continue improving this number meaningfully. The million-dollar question that we don't know the answer to is how fast we can get to 30%. We think that our conviction towards that number in terms of efficiency is much higher now than when we announced it back then in the Investor Day in January of 2023. So I'll pause here. We can do a 5-minute break or bio break like they say, and then we come back for Q&A try to wrap it up by 4:45. Thank you. [Break]

Okay. I'll start with the first question we received online. Gui, do you think you are expanding your tech advantage compared to incumbents or they might narrow the difference now that they are catching up with their IT investments?

Yes. I think yes, we are expanding half because as I was stating there, we did the digital transformation 7 years ago. So we already passed that phase of getting word of mouth about what we're going to do with our servers. So we did that a long time ago. So right now, we are working already in technology that generates value to the business. We're not like spending time doing server migration or for technology. So that's why I believe that we are increasing the gap. As technology creates the next technology that creates the next technology so that's what I believe in.

Okay. Questions from the audience?

This is Mario Pierry from Bank of America. My question is related to the employees that you show related to IT, right, close to 45% of your employees. Can you talk about your ability to attract talent and to retain talent? Where are you attracting these people from? And how do you continue to grow?

Mario. So I'm going to cover [indiscernible]. Look, I would say that we have been able, not only through the pandemic, but now -- actually before the pandemic to get excitement and involvement from our clients on the IT department. And the reason for that, 2 things. First, this type of employees, these type of guys, they want to be in a company that's evolving that are building things that are using the top technology available. So if you ask one IT guy in Brazil, do you want to be a part of a company that was the first one to be 100% cloud-based, was the first one to have the proprietary service for PIX or so, a company that launched 194 versions of our app, I don't know, 5, 6 years. These type of things are the one that attracts these employees. And the second thing, which is hard to explain. We need to live to understand. It's our culture of promoting innovation, our culture of putting our team with the ability to try things to make sure that if they miss no problem, we'll fix, but they're going to try. We're pushing them to try. We like to say that we put a guard rail, where they cannot go above -- beyond that, so which is to treat the clients to do the right things. But beside of that, you should try, you should innovate, you should do things different. And when you combine these 2 culture of things is very, I would say, quite easy in spite of the competition. to attract and to attain clients in the technology department. And last thing, we were able to ask our tech team to return to the office, and we didn't lose our personnel.

Pedro Leduc, Itaú BBA. So much data. So much evolution, agility, client knowledge. And we're seeing you -- and the presentation was very good and how you link it to business and extracting more value on the cross-selling and monetization. And I'll ask about personal loans or consumer loans more in general because that's also the gold of the credit NII nowadays. Credit card is tougher. Payroll is tough. Personal loans is maybe the juice. And that's maybe where all of this data and technology, et cetera, could be most valuable and maximize as a return to you. And you're moving now with PIX credit, amongst other, you're doing overdraft. Why not get your bigger thoughts on how this could maybe help you unlock value here in the personal loan field, if I may?

Good, Pedro. I'm going to start here, and then Xandre will cover the rest. So first of all, we are more confident on, let's say, personal loans. For those who know me for a while, you know that we always try to be cautious with unsecured lend. But on the other hand, when you can bring not only the data but also the technology to help us in a sense to collateralize that, we get more excitement. So for instance, what Rodrigo showed here on the Buy Now Pay Later, it's pretty much using technology to get more take rate, and the take rate kinds of becoming collateralization for the type of underwriting. And by being more efficient, you can reduce the cost associated with a traditional credit card transaction, and then your risk-reward equation improves. And with a better risk-reward equation, we can be more aggressive on the underwrite. So the answer is yes, we're getting more confident because more data, better modeling and the technology together with engineering, we can build the products in a better way. So that's what we have been saying, consumer finance 2.0 that's where we believe things are going to play out.

Yes. And look, we are like excited with the growth prospects that we've seen so far. From an execution perspective, we're focusing on in 2 different things. One is about the user experience, makes a big difference, like the fine-tuning and the tweaking that we do inside the app and the time to offer the product like especially PIX on PIX financing, for instance, it makes a lot of difference. And we're doing that, and that has been the primary driver of the growth that we've been seeing. We're almost doubling the portfolio in these early stages when it's so small. And the second part is about flexibilizing on the credit policies. So we started, as we have discussed in the past, from the top of the pyramid in every one of the products with the exception of the Buy Now Pay Later, which is a little bit of a different dynamic. We have like a good part of the base with access to the product already. So all the other ones, we're starting from the top of the pyramid and making it more accessible to the clients. And so for example, today, people cannot use their entire credit limit for PIX financing, for instance. And we're moving and pushing towards enabling them to use their entire credit limit, and things like that are going to be drivers of growth. And finally, getting to the market itself. We have a lot of incentives that should increase also adoption of these types of products. So a lot -- many retailers, I'm sure all the Brazilians here have seen they are incentivizing payments with PIX in their websites. They give like 5% discounts and things like that, which makes it easier for customers to pay using PIX financing or PIX credit and they can pay with 1 installment. And in turn, they're just pushing their payment to be done along with the credit card at a cost that's going to be lower than the cost they're going to pay with 5% discount for PIX. So again, we're excited, and we'll keep pushing it throughout the year.

I'm going from here, guys. I know all of you are already but João, congrats for your vision and Xandre, congrats for putting together the presentation for all of us. I have a quick question maybe to you, Xandre. In terms of regulation, how do you think that our new rules or standards can impact the strategy of Inter being deployed here in U.S.?

Okay. So the U.S. has been known throughout the years to be more and less flexible according to market timing. And you never know when they're going to tighten rules. And one thing that's interesting about our approach in the U.S. is to have it to be adherent to regulation. So we have license same as B license, which is money service business in 42 different states and in the process of getting the license for the states where we don't have a license yet. Also, when we think of investments, we already have a broker-dealer and a few other licenses that we need, so the idea is that the business is here to stay, and we're going to have all the regulatory framework that's needed to keep it alive, both to serve again Brazilians, which are the bulk of the customers, now Brazilians that live in Brazil but invest and have an account in the U.S. but also to serve customers in the U.S. João, do you want to fill in?

I think you have covered Xandre already. I would say that what we are building here is asset-light strategy. So we don't want to park our equity -- our capital here in U.S., so using more services such as remittance, the debit cards, the investments. So we're producing more on top of the volume that transacts in our global county. So the approach is more like a transactional platform and not, I would say, a banking platform where we need to put funding and equity and capital. So that's the approach for the U.S. And having said that, we don't need to have a full bank license in place. So it makes our lives way easier.

Jorge Kuri from Morgan Stanley. I wanted to ask about personalization using technology. I think I read over the last 2 days, there's 270 million digital bank accounts in Brazil by now plus hundreds of millions of brick-and-mortar accounts. So everyone in Brazil has a bank account. And competing for clients based on having a full suite of products, it's sort of like the whole way of banking, just we're factoring for products, here's the product, see what sticks. But technology really allows you to do that personalization. I'm going to sell you the product that I know you need, I know you want. And so then it becomes like a share of wallet. What are the product that I can sell to individual A versus B versus C versus D. And if that individual already has a product with the bank next door, then how do I get that share of wallet? So the question for you is, how do you measure that potential share of wallet and identify the products that you need to sell to your client base using technology, if you can give us some examples? And then how do you -- after measuring it, how do you really close the gap, again, using technology to really get that sale of that product that's ultimately what drives the business?

So thanks, Jorge. And that's really a very good question. And it's one where we've been using a lot of technology and a lot of information to capitalize on. So the first part, when we think about share of wallet, we use many, many different souces. Some related to open banking, some related to older solutions such as the Brazilian Central Bank information on credit, and we're able to measure the share of wallet. For instance, on credit cards, we can also do the same thing on, for instance, payroll loans. And then we'll come up with like action items, very specific ones to engage customers and with things like missions where we may pay loop points and things like that to bring some of their volume to Inter. And it's interesting that we've been doing a lot of that in credit cards, which is a product where we have the objective of being more transactional than credit, and that's exactly what's happening. After we started engaging on the share of wallet projects, we grew volume and we grew with more transactors. This was very positive. And before I pass to João, we've also been doing a lot of customizations in the app, so we look at many different areas that can be customizable by customer to give a more contextualized experience, right? It's a lot nicer to log in and see everything that relates to me than to log in and see a lot of standardized solutions that applies to everyone. So we've really been tailoring the app to be personalized to each individual. And that, we believe, is going to facilitate and going to be the next step on differentiating us even more from the other players and bringing like principal relationships to Inter.

Thank you, Xandre. So Jorge, just to finalize, you can see the slides here and did touch that previously. I know if you can see, but before we had 4 clusters. You are top clients, big clients, medium, small clients. That was maybe only 2 years ago, not 5, 6 years ago. Today, we have thousands of models, not models of front ends in their app. And then you ask, but all the competitors can do that. We just mentioned that people have other products, not necessarily because not 99% but 100% of our clients interact with the app. So if you had only 50% of our clients interact with the app and the remaining 50% interact with the brands, we're 2x, I would say, more efficient than the other competitors. So this is very important. We have 100% of the interaction through the app. Therefore, we can use these different types of clusters. And also, what we call the hyper personalization. And the last thing that you mentioned and I want to emphasize. When you see other digital players, sometimes, they are more like a niche player. At Inter, we took the other way around. Our approach was different. First, we build our ecosystem. So we can serve the client when they are young, when they're older. If they are saving, if they are getting a loan. If they want to buy a product, or if they want to bank, so having the 7 verticals combined and also 100% using our bank through the app and now has data to customize. We believe that we can be I'd say, the best player in the market to cross-sell more, therefore has better revenue and therefore, having better revenue we can be more efficient because we're going to have the same staff to serve the clients producing more revenue. So this is the ultimate goal, having the app hyper personalization, more products, more revenue, same cost, good NPS and time you tell if we have the tools in place to differentiate ourselves among this fierce competition that are taking place today in the Brazil digital banking system.

During the presentation, we discussed a lot about the individual side of the business, but not about the [indiscernible] like the small businesses and business side of the business. If you could exploit a little bit, but also touch on the opportunity that you see with [indiscernible] and how Inter can be ahead of the competition to deploy technology to bypass the distribution barrier on receivables, which is a big asset on your balance sheet?

Okay, Carlos, thanks for the question. I would say that Jorge was mentioned about a lot of competition on the individual account. On the business account, it's the other way around. I would say that it's still a blue ocean. We still see some of the banks charging BRL 10 for a PIX transaction, believe it or not. We still see that the UX and UI are not good for you to open the accounts, use the account. And we have been, I would say, quite successful with our [indiscernible] account. We launched it maybe, I don't know, 3 years ago, 4 years ago. And at the time, we're catching up with the UX why you have there because the personal quant was way better, we were able to catch up. So today that both apps are very good. Actually on the back end, we have the same app so we don't need to duplicate our efforts for launching products. And also just to mention another thing that can help on this segment in Brazil, by having a bank license, it's important to differentiate ourselves on the business account, maybe not on the personal account but on the business accounts. So how we're going to bring collections, some types of lending that you cannot do by [indiscernible]. So it also helps. And again, as we mentioned, a lot of tools are coming to the market. This is something that not only the Central Bank, but Brazil is improving a lot. And the good news is we're there. And so this new technology, these new features are coming in, we're there, have the app, have the clients. And by the way, April was our best month ever in terms of new business account onboard in it. So we're very, very excited with what we have ahead in terms of monetizing our platform through business accounts as well.

And on the [indiscernible], big opportunity, but cautious approach from the regulators and the market participants given the confusion that was made when they did the card centralized platform there a few years ago. But again, big opportunity given the flow that we already have at Inter and having, being able to lock in those receivables at the Inter becomes an enormous opportunity for monetization.

This is Neha Agarwala from HSBC. So I have 2 quick questions. First is I think UX is one of the key things in terms of adoption and creating principality for the product. When you look at competitors out there, when you like something that they are doing and you see Inter is lagging. How easy or difficult do you find it for yourself to replicate something? If you can illustrate it with any example, any hurdle you faced and how you have solved that problem or replicated something at Inter? First item. And second is on open banking. You mentioned that for the tech to work, a lot of data is required. It's easy to work with the data that you have gathered, it's all in the format that you can process very easily. How easy or difficult do you find it for yourself to get data from the market? Or with open banking as you get data from other players, how easy or difficult for you -- would it be to process the data, put it in your models and use that to leverage the new data that might be available and differentiate your underwriting or improve your underwriting?

Yes, I'll start. So the first one, I'll just tell about a quick case. So when we launched PIX, it was -- I'd like to say that it was big financing. I'd like to say that it was a little bit hidden from the clients. And why was that? You'd get to the PIX page, and it would be standard with the option of debit. You know that we had PIX financing, you had to push on this button. It would open a new screen, and there you would have the option to find like debit or credit. And then you'd have the number of installments. As we observe the market, there were 2 participants that would put an exclusive page where the customers would be forced to make the selection between debit and credit. And we may -- so having seen that we improved our experience and now the customers see either debit or credit right away in front of them, and that facilitates the adoption of the product for people that just see that, and it was an important driver of growth. And getting to the second question, today, it's relatively easy. So -- and it's been an important driver of improvements in our models. And so when I said, for example, mainly in the onboarding models, we rely a lot on external data and data that's provided by customers when they do the onboarding. And in the last 18 to 24 months, we're able to bring more than 15 different new sources of data, put everything in our lake and do upgrades in the AI models that we use and increase the accuracy of it, which is super nice to see. So it's almost like you changed glasses, you were like trying to see better and you're moving up and down to understand better. You put new glasses and you say, "Oh, this client, I thought was good. It's not that good. This client I thought was not good, but he's actually good." That's what happens when you bring new data to your models.

And I'll finish with one last question we received online. With the faster-than-expected efficiency improvement, is it likely that you might revise the 30% efficiency goal?

No. No. So the -- we mentioned this in the earnings call. We are the first ones to be surprised on the efficiency ratio improvement, were expected to be running around 60% efficiency ratio by now. We did expect to have a bit lower cost of risk in our original model. So cost of risk is a bit higher because the delinquency cycle, I think, in Brazil being a bit longer than what we expected. And on the cost side, we were ahead of the plan. So that has to do with 2 things. One, as I mentioned in my remarks before, the beauty of the digital banking model as you grow and you scale, we have our operational level that is playing out very well. And on the other hand, is this AI and new tools that we're incorporating that are allowing us to triple the revenue per employee and continue to improve. We will see how we go along. We do think that, that number may reach faster than by 2027. We also see competition doing a very good job on that ratio as well. So it's not just us. Evidently, there is an improvement taking place with the technology, and we are leading in that sense, considering the size that we have. So we're happy with that performance, and we will keep a very tight lesion on continuing to have cost control. Thank you, everyone.

So you're all invited to stay and do some networking and refreshments will be served. Thank you so much.