Fundo Garantidor de Créditos (FGC) protects up to R$250,000 per depositor per institution, with a R$1M aggregate cap across all FGC-member institutions over a 4-year window. Cover applies to full credit institutions (bancos múltiplos, comerciais, etc.) only. Brazilian fintechs licensed as IPMP (Instituições de Pagamento) are NOT FGC members — customer funds are segregated but not insured.
Primary source: https://www.fgc.org.br/
A real BACEN-licensed credit institution
Nubank is not a US-style fintech sitting on top of a partner bank. Nu Pagamentos S.A. is authorised and supervised by Banco Central do Brasil; Nu Financeira S.A. — Sociedade de Crédito, Financiamento e Investimento (CMN-authorised) handles the lending and deposit-taking. Both entities are searchable in BACEN's "Buscar instituição supervisionada" public register, and Nu submits regulatory filings on the same supervisory cadence as any other Brazilian credit institution in its size class.
Nu Pagamentos vs Nu Financeira: the structure
The split matters because the two entities sit under different parts of Brazil's financial-system rulebook. Nu Pagamentos operates the day-to-day payments and the conta digital (the headline product most users see); Nu Financeira issues the credit card book, the personal loans, and the deposit-bearing products. For FGC eligibility the rule is product-level, not group-level — your CDB at Nu sits inside FGC cover; an idle balance in the conta de pagamento is technically a payment-account balance, with safeguarding rules that differ from a CDB. Operationally it functions like a deposit, but the FGC mechanic is product-specific.
FGC protection scope and aggregation
The Fundo Garantidor de Créditos covers eligible deposit products at FGC-member institutions up to R$250,000 per depositor per institution, with a R$1,000,000 aggregate ceiling across all FGC-member institutions over a rolling four-year window. The four-year cap is the part most readers miss — if you have been compensated by FGC for a previous bank failure, the cap counts down for four years from that event before resetting. See the FGC explainer for the product-eligibility table.
Listed-company transparency
Nu Holdings Ltd. (the Cayman-domiciled parent) IPO'd on the New York Stock Exchange in December 2021 under the ticker NU. That means quarterly 10-Q-equivalent filings (20-F annually for the foreign private issuer regime), audited financials, and an analyst-facing earnings call every three months. For a depositor, listed-company status is a transparency signal independent of the FGC backstop — the financial picture of the institution is observable, not just inferred from regulator disclosures.
Verdict
Nubank is safe in the FGC sense — a properly licensed BACEN-supervised credit-institution group with public-company disclosure on top. The structural caveats are bounded: the conta-de-pagamento balance vs CDB distinction is worth knowing if you care about the precise mechanism of cover, and the R$1M four-year aggregate cap is the non-obvious limit. For balances at or below R$250k in FGC-eligible products, the protection is equivalent to any other major Brazilian bank.
IPMP (Instituições de Pagamento) customer funds are segregated from the institution's own balance sheet but are NOT FGC-protected. Verify the licence class with Banco Central do Brasil before assuming deposit cover. Crypto and investing products are regulated separately by CVM.