Nubank and Itaú Unibanco Top New Evident AI Index Ranking of Latin American Banks

A new ranking of the largest banks in Latin America shows just how far ahead Brazilian institutions have pulled in applying artificial intelligence at scale. According to Rio Times Online, Evident Insights — an independent research firm — published its 2026 Evident AI Index for Banks, ranking the 20 largest banks in the region across more than 60 indicators. Nubank took the top spot, with Itau Unibanco close behind in second place.

Whether your business serves customers in Houston, Cypress, Sao Paulo, or Bogota, this ranking matters beyond banking. It is a clear signal of where AI adoption in Latin America is heading fastest, and which companies are setting the pace that competitors, vendors, and customers will eventually measure themselves against.

How Evident Insights Built the Ranking

Rio Times Online reports that the 2026 Evident AI Index for Banks evaluated the 20 largest banking institutions in Latin America across four pillars: talent, innovation, leadership, and transparency, using more than 60 individual indicators. That breadth is what separates this ranking from a simple survey of AI announcements — it is built to capture whether a bank has the people, the products, the executive attention, and the public disclosure practices to back up its AI story.

The result, according to Rio Times Online, put four banks at the top of the list: Nubank in first place, Itau Unibanco in second, Banco Bradesco in third, and Banco do Brasil in fourth. Every one of those four institutions is Brazilian — a detail that on its own says a great deal about where the region's AI leadership currently sits.

Nubank's AI-Native Approach

According to Rio Times Online, Nubank's position at the top of the index is anchored in the sheer reach of its AI usage. The bank serves more than 100 million customers across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, and Rio Times Online reports that nearly 100% of its employees use AI tools daily as part of how the company operates.

That level of internal AI adoption is not just about efficiency dashboards. Rio Times Online also points to Nubank's proprietary NuFormer model, which the bank uses to power real-time credit decisions — a core function for any digital bank whose growth depends on approving or declining loans and credit lines at scale, in seconds, for a customer base spread across three countries.

Itau Unibanco's 500+ AI Use Cases

Rio Times Online reports that Itau Unibanco, which placed second in the index, has deployed more than 500 internal AI use cases. Several of those are customer-facing rather than back-office only: Pix payment initiation through WhatsApp, personalized investment recommendations built directly into the bank's app, and fraud detection that runs in the background of card transactions.

Rio Times Online also reports that Itau Unibanco uses AI for small-business loan pre-approvals with automated data verification — a use case that speaks directly to speed and access for smaller commercial customers, not just to convenience for retail banking clients. Five hundred distinct AI use cases inside one institution is a scale that few companies in any industry, in any region, can currently claim.

Most of the Region Has Not Caught Up

The gap between the leaders and the rest of the market is wide. Rio Times Online reports that more than 70% of Latin American financial entities already invest in AI in some form, but only 8% of the large regional banks assessed have advanced generative AI running in production. Fifty-eight percent, according to the same reporting, have not started generative AI projects at all.

Investing in AI and operationalizing AI at the scale of Nubank or Itau Unibanco are two very different things. Rio Times Online's reporting also notes that Brazilian banks make up 35% of the ranked top 20 institutions, yet account for 49% of all reported AI use cases across the region over the past two years — nearly half the region's documented AI activity concentrated in roughly a third of its largest banks.

What This Means for Your Business

Here is the pattern worth watching if you run a business anywhere in the US or Latin America: the gap this ranking documents inside banking — a handful of leaders with hundreds of AI use cases in production, and a majority still at zero — is the same gap forming across every industry, including local and mid-market businesses. The companies pulling ahead are not necessarily bigger. They are the ones that made AI part of how customers find and interact with them, not just an internal efficiency project.

That is exactly the gap our AI Search Optimization (AEO) service is built to close for businesses that are not a 100-million-customer bank. When a potential customer asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews who the best provider of your service is, the AI answers with a name — and right now, for most businesses, it is not theirs. You can see the full breakdown of this service on our services page. Our AEO service structures your site with the schema, answer-ready content, and authoritative citations that AI systems need to name your business with confidence.

The banks at the top of this ranking did not wait for AI adoption to become mandatory. Neither should the businesses competing to be the name an AI recommends.
- Diego Medina F, Founder of MerchandisePROS

The first step is knowing where your business stands today. Our free audit evaluates the signals that determine whether AI can find and cite your business, gives you a 0-to-100 score, and a prioritized plan of what to fix first.

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