A warning to everyone about choosing a bank

The $380MM partial figure of unaccounted money relates to missing state pension funds placed in this bank buy the Paraguayan government, Apparently it's capital reserves fell below 50% of the level required by law in Paraguay, whatever sum that is, but I am sure there is more to it to it than that, as there always is it seems........heh. In addition some $800MM of public health money is also at risk. Data with actual dollar amounts is hard to come by at this moment FWIW from all the investigative sources I have available for reviewing the latest news.

As a reference the last internet bank failure here in Brasil was WILL BANK which collapsed in January of this year, and was liquidated. Will Bank started in 2017 and was positioned to service class C and D clientele in the Northeast. It ran afoul of liquidity and payment commitments with it's Mastercard affiliation, and was placed into insolvency by the BCB. 10 million customers suffered as a result. Amongst it's most famous brand ambassadors were Vinny Jr, the soccer player and Luciano Huck, the TV presenter.

There is no word if they returned the commercial sponsorship money they were paid to shill for this company as a result of the bankruptcy........heh.

The best and most accurately cited and detailed report on Ueno bank's collapse is found on You Tube.

Go to the channel called 3DUNFOLDED and search Paraguay's Ueno Bank Collapse........the video is 17 minutes and it's in English.

@hagece8690 Nubank  has 110 million customers in Brazil (140 million  in Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia)  and a market capitalization of more than US$70 billion, which makes it the second largest bank by market cap in Latin America. (Only Itaú is bigger.) It is not a brick-and-mortar bank. Oddly, you don’t mention Nubank in your rant. In 25 years of living in Brasil I’ve endured the horrible service of several traditional banks, and for the past few years have been a happy Nubank customer. I have reasonably complex financial requirements and am well versed in finance, including investing. You cannot paint all fintech banks with the same brush.

I'm not saying any particular bank by name is better than another. That's not the point of the thread.

I'm saying you need your risk management spread out and not to have all your eggs in one basket, particularily if it's a fintech. In the US for example some 70% of fintech startups don't make it 5 years, and there have been some 150+ documented failures of "the next greatest thing".......fintechs......in the last 5 years just in America alone.

Ueno was the largest bank in Paraguay. Did it help ? The list of fintech failures not just in the US, but in the world, continues to expand.

People will do whatever they want, but, if they spread the risk around they're less likely to be crying on the 600 PM  news.

I've had B+M banking relationships here 19 years and have zero service complaints whatsoever in that time.

@hagece8690 On-line banks in Brazil, such as Nubank, sell investment products of other financial institutions (LCAs and LCIs, for example) as well as the usual assortment government treasury bonds, etc. So you can invest up to R$250,000 per institution when you make exterior investments through a single fintech and still be fully covered by the FGC in case of problems. So the possibility exists to diversify, yet still hold your investments with one institution. Yes, you can also diversify by having accounts at a number of institutions, but a secure investment plan doesn’t demand that. If you just want your funds to sit in a bank account and have more than R$250,000, spreading it among more than one bank is a good idea. As for the dangers of fintechs in Brasil, do your homework. Nu Holdings, the parent of NuBank, is extremely profitable with solid earnings growth. It was founded 13 years ago, not yesterday. Its profit in the most recent three-month period was more than US$ 1 billion,   and its shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange. With a market cap of US$70 billion, this company is no Banco Master or Will Bank . As for singling out fintechs in favour of brick-and-mortar institutions, perhaps you’ve forgotten about the savings & loan crisis in the U.S. in the 1980s and 1990s. Those were brick-and-mortar financial institutions. Brazil also has a long history of failed brick-and-mortar financial institutions. So your statement that “Internet banks are to be treated with caution” might well apply to ALL banks in this country. And your blanket statement that internet banks “are fine to move money around for a trip or to keep a working balance in THAT YOU CAN AFFORD TO LOSE, but FFS people, that's where it stops” is nonsense.