October 5, 2026
Aro Completely Dismantled Its Own Lending Operation Before Growing
Aro cut its in-house lending to take its AI agent out of a conflict of interest. The user base grew 26 times in eight months after the cut.
Aro started out lending money directly to customers, under a third party's banking license. It was a short phase, long enough for the team to learn, in co-founder Yuri Mannes' words, "the pains of credit." That experience led the company to dismantle its own operation early, once it noticed a structural problem: the AI agent that recommended the best credit offer was also selling Aro's own credit.
Pedro Milanez, Nubank's first employee, founded the fintech alongside Yuri Mannes to solve the opposite problem of credit marketplaces. "You put in your data and it shows you 20 offers, but few are actually approved. There is still a lot of friction and information asymmetry," Mannes describes. Aro's agent follows the customer through to the end of the contracting process, "like a bank manager, a real financial partner." "We did a carve-out because we understood we had a small conflict of interest," Mannes explains. Carve-out is the M&A term for isolating a piece of the business and separating it from the rest of the company.
Aro dismantled its own lending operation early, when the company didn't yet have the numbers that now support the recommendation model. Growth came after the cut: without originating credit, working only as a layer between the customer and more than 40 integrated lenders, the base multiplied 26 times in eight months, passing half a million sign-ups. The decision to take the agent out of the conflict of interest came before the result, not the other way around.
Aro could do the carve-out without breaking revenue because the model had charged only the lender from the start. Cutting the in-house operation took the conflict out of the equation without taking out the money.