PINE3F

What it is

The Pinheiro family’s banking roots go back to 1939, when they founded Banco Central do Nordeste in Ceará; in 1997, brothers Noberto and Nelson Nogueira Pinheiro relaunched the business as Banco Pine in São Paulo. It became the first mid-sized Brazilian bank to list on the B3, going public in 2007.

Today Pine specialises in two lending niches: credit for mid-sized companies, and personal credit where repayments are deducted directly from the borrower’s payslip or benefit — making default almost impossible. On the corporate side it runs working capital loans, trade finance, guarantees, and capital-markets advisory; on the retail side it offers payroll-deductible cards and FGTS-linked products.

Who owns it

The controlling shareholder is PINE Participações S.A., the Pinheiro family holding company. Noberto Nogueira Pinheiro, who founded the bank in 1997, is currently Chairman of the Board of Directors.

The exact ownership percentage is not disclosed in publicly available sources, but the family’s voting control via PINE3 ordinary shares is well established.

In a notable recent move, the founding shareholders of Brazilian fintech BYX Capital — through which Pine runs its payroll-lending operation — hired advisers to acquire the 33% stake that Banco Pine held in the company, consolidating BYX’s ownership structure as the business scales.

Who runs it

Norberto Zaiet Jr. serves as Chief Executive Officer and Mauro Cerchiai Sanchez as Chief Financial Officer and Investor Relations Officer.

The day-to-day executive committee also includes Noberto Pinheiro Jr. and Rodrigo Pinheiro — keeping the founding family actively involved in running the bank.

A new Retail Officer joined Pine in 2025 to lead the commercial strategy and implementation of private payroll-deductible loans, a hire that signals how seriously management is treating the new product line.

The money, in plain words

Pine earned BRL 443.6 million (~USD 86 million) in net profit for full-year 2025, a 72% jump on 2024; in the final quarter alone it made BRL 183.5 million (~USD 35.6 million), up 173% year on year. For every real its shareholders have invested, it is now earning back roughly 33 cents a year — a return on equity of 33.4% for 2025, according to company filings, against the 24.4% recorded in the EODHD structured data; both figures are well above the Brazilian banking average.

The total loan book reached BRL 17.7 billion (~USD 3.44 billion) by end-2025, 24% larger than a year earlier. Credit ratings agencies S&P Global (brA+, stable outlook) and Moody’s (A, positive outlook) both affirm the bank’s investment-grade standing.

What it is doing now

Launched in April 2025, Pine’s private-sector payroll loan product — where repayments are deducted directly from workers’ wages — grew from zero to BRL 4.1 billion (~USD 796 million) in less than a year and now represents about 20% of the entire loan book. The bank can now reach 48 million formally employed private-sector workers, plus 40 million social-security beneficiaries and 13 million public servants — a vastly larger addressable market than its previous corporate-only focus.

Management is also exploring a follow-on share offering on the B3 to improve share liquidity and strengthen capital, though executives have said any deal would be small and only modestly dilutive.

What to watch

• Loan losses are creeping up — bad loans overdue more than 90 days rose from 1.0% to 1.3% of the book over the first three quarters of 2025 — a natural consequence of rapid growth that bears watching as the payroll book matures.
• The new private payroll product adds growth but also brings regulatory and competitive complexity, as larger banks move into the same space.
• Pine’s shares rose roughly 200% during 2025; a follow-on offering that improves liquidity could attract institutional investors but would also test whether earnings momentum can justify the richer valuation.
• The 50/50 split between wholesale corporate lending and collateralised retail credit has driven four consecutive quarters of record earnings in 2025; sustaining that balance as one side grows faster than the other is the central management task.

This is news, not investment advice.