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XP Inc. is a Brazilian financial services company that helps people invest their money and provides banking and advisory services.
XP is a Brazilian financial supermarket. It started as a brokerage where ordinary people could go to buy investments, and today it offers a wide range of financial products and services, from investment advice to banking, all under one roof. It mainly serves individual investors in Brazil, a country where big traditional banks have long dominated and charged high fees.
The core of the business is an open platform. Instead of pushing only its own products, XP connects customers to a huge menu of investments from many different providers — funds, bonds, stocks, and more — and earns money through fees and commissions. Independent financial advisors also use XP's platform to serve their own clients. Customers choose XP because it offers more choice, more transparency, and often lower costs than the old-school banks, whose grip on Brazilians' money is loosening as a result. That open model is both XP's strength and its vulnerability. Its biggest competitors are the giant incumbent banks and other upstarts trying to win the same investors. XP has been expanding beyond investing into banking and insurance to keep customers from leaving and to earn money from them in more ways. The company went public on Nasdaq in 2019, giving it a global profile and capital to grow.
Guilherme Benchimol got fired from a brokerage at age 24, so he and Marcelo Maisonnave started their own firm in a tiny 25-square-meter room with 10 used computers. They noticed most people had no idea how to invest in stocks and funds, so they taught them instead of just selling to them. To get going, Benchimol sold his car to fund the business.
XP bought InfoMoney, an investment website, and turned it into the largest one in Latin America, eventually reaching around 8 million visitors a month. Content became a customer magnet: people read, learned, and trusted XP with their money.
Clear, a broker that was the first in Brazil to charge zero fees for trading, became part of XP. That zero-fee model drew in a wave of new investors who might never have opened a brokerage account otherwise.
Brazil's largest bank, Itaú Unibanco, paid $2 billion for nearly half of XP. It was a striking moment: the old banking giant was betting on the young upstart that was pulling customers away from banks like it.
XP went public on the Nasdaq under the name XP Inc., one of the biggest U.S. listings that year and the largest ever for a Brazilian company at the time. The shares priced at $27 and the company was worth $19 billion on day one.
A report from Winkler Group alleged hidden related-party deals, system failure costs and weak internal controls. The stock fell hard, dropping 25.5% in two sessions and then sinking to $15.50, more than 40% below the IPO price. A young public company suddenly had to prove its house was in order.
Benchimol moved up to Executive Chairman and handed the CEO job to Thiago Maffra, the tech chief who had led XP's digital transformation. The founder stepping back while the builder of the digital engine took charge signaled where XP saw its future.
By early 2026 XP held BRL 2.1 trillion in client assets, up 21% from a year earlier, with 4.8 million active clients. It announced a BRL 1 billion buyback plus BRL 500 million in dividends, bringing planned 2026 payouts to about BRL 2.5 billion. And roughly a quarter of individual assets now sit in flat-fee or fee-based models, a quiet shift away from earning money on each trade.
The broader story is a shift in how Brazilians save. For decades, a handful of banks controlled most of the country's money and made easy profits. XP helped blow that door open by giving regular people a cheap, simple way to invest, and it now sits at the center of a much more competitive market. Its future depends on whether it can keep winning customers' trust and their money as rivals fight back.
Saved answer · last researched 23 Oct 2026