Banco Inter

Is Banco Inter safe?

For balances under the FGC limit, yes. Banco Inter S.A. is a fully licensed Brazilian bank, and its deposits are covered by the Fundo Garantidor de Créditos (FGC) up to R$250,000 per person. Its Basel ratio of 14.4% in June 2026 sat about four points above the 10.5% minimum, and cash, Central Bank deposits and securities made up almost half its balance sheet. What holds the score back is its record with customers: two data leaks in 2018 and 2019, and a period in 2025 when it drew more complaints per client than any other large Brazilian bank. We score Banco Inter 67/100, just below Nubank at 68 and above PicPay at 65.

Which Inter company holds your money

Unlike Nubank or PicPay, Inter has no separate payment institution holding idle balances. Account money is a deposit at the bank itself. At 30 June 2026 customers held R$56.7 billion in deposits, of which R$53.5 billion were time deposits such as CDBs, plus R$16.2 billion in real estate and agribusiness credit notes.

The FGC limit counts all covered balances one person holds across a financial conglomerate, not per product. The fund itself was strained after the Central Bank liquidated Banco Master in November 2025. On 10 February 2026 its board approved an emergency plan to rebuild its cash, and on 5 March it called about R$32.5 billion from member banks, five years of contributions paid in advance, due by 25 March. Payouts continued, but it is a reason not to sit right at the limit.

Capital and bad loans

The buffer is adequate rather than generous, and it has thinned: the Basel ratio was 15.7% a year earlier and 23% at the end of 2023, as lending grew faster than capital. Inter&Co keeps a further R$2.3 billion of excess capital at the holding level that it can inject into the bank. The loan book is safer than at most Brazilian app banks. A third is mortgages and home-equity loans, and about 5% of loans were more than 90 days late in June 2026, against 6.9% at Nubank and 9.8% at PicPay. Bad loans have been rising, mostly because of new private payroll loans. Profit is growing, with net income of R$421 million in the second quarter and a 16.3% return on equity, but Brazil's BB sovereign rating caps how highly any Brazilian bank can be rated.

Leaks, complaints and lawsuits

In 2018 data of more than 19,000 Inter account holders leaked. The Federal District prosecutors (MPDFT) sued, and in December 2018 a court approved a settlement under which Inter paid R$1.5 million for collective moral damages. Two months later, Tecnoblog found that a flaw in Inter's business internet banking had let any business-account holder pull the names, tax IDs and emails of 1.45 million customers since September 2017. Inter fixed it the day before publication. We found no major breach since, and Inter's 20-F says only that it has had incidents "in the past".

Complaints are the other weak spot. In the Central Bank's ranking for the third quarter of 2025, Inter had 96 upheld complaints per million clients, the worst of the 15 largest banks and payment firms. By the third quarter of 2026 it had cut that to 18, tenth of 15 and far better than C6 Bank at 52 per million. At the end of 2025 Inter also faced about 24,000 consumer lawsuits claiming R$3.4 billion in total, mostly over payroll products, and nine public civil actions, including one over app outages. It had provisioned R$41.8 million for civil claims. The Central Bank's sanctions database lists only small fines against the bank: R$100,000 in 2017 and R$25,000 each in December 2025 and May 2026.

How to keep money safe at Banco Inter

1. Keep CDBs, LCIs, LCAs and account money at Inter under R$250,000 per person. Spread larger sums across unrelated banking groups.
2. Set a low night-time Pix limit in the app and require biometric confirmation for transfers.
3. Treat any call or message using your name and CPF as a possible scam. Those details have leaked before, so they prove nothing.
4. Treat funds, shares, crypto and the dollar Global Account as separate from your FGC-covered deposits.

How we scored it

Liquidity (74) and deposit protectionDeposit insuranceA government-backed scheme that repays bank customers up to a set limit if their bank fails, such as the FDIC in the US or the FSCS in the UK.More in the glossary (73) are Inter's strongest factors: all account money sits in a licensed bank with FGC cover, and almost half the balance sheet is liquid. Capital (64) is above the minimum but has thinned as lending grew. Digital security (60) is the weakest, because of the 2018 and 2019 leaks, and conduct (64) reflects the 2025 complaint spike and heavy consumer litigation.