Dados B3 › Guides › Analyzing a bank
Guide · Sectors
How to analyze a bank on the B3: why ROIC and EBITDA don't work
Most tools throw banks in the same bucket as every other company — and spit out meaningless numbers. A bank has its own chart of accounts: for it, debt is the product, not a lever. Analyzing it with the wrong rulers leads to the wrong conclusions.
Why a bank is different
A bank's statement has no "sales revenue", no "cost of goods", no EBIT. Instead there's financial intermediation income (what it earns lending and investing) minus intermediation expenses (what it pays for funding and provisions). There's no "invested capital" in the industrial sense — raising money is the operation. So:
Doesn't apply to a bank
- ROIC
- EBIT / EBITDA
- EV/EBITDA
- gross / operating margin
- net debt/EBITDA
The right rulers
- ROE — the bank's king metric
- net margin (on intermediation)
- revenue growth
- P/E and P/B
- dividend yield
ROE rules
For a bank, return on equity (ROE) is the heart of the analysis: it measures how much the bank generates on shareholders' capital. Quality Brazilian banks run at 15% to 20%+ ROE. P/B walks hand in hand with ROE — a bank that generates high ROE usually trades above 1× book; a struggling bank, below.
Real numbers from the big banks (2024)
| Bank | ROE | P/E | P/B |
|---|---|---|---|
| Itaú (ITUB3) | 19.5% | 7.1 | 1.32 |
| Banco do Brasil (BBAS3) | ~15% | — | — |
| Bradesco (BBDC3) | 10.3% | — | — |
| BB Seguridade (BBSE3) | ~90% | 8.5 | 7.61 |
BB Seguridade's ~90% ROE isn't an error: a holding insurer with small equity and a very high payout really runs like that — which is why its P/B is 7.6× (the market pays up for the return). Itaú at 1.3× book with a 19.5% ROE is the picture of a large, profitable bank.
What the standard statement doesn't cover
Prudential ratios — Basel, efficiency ratio, non-performing loans, coverage — don't come from the CVM's standard statement. They're separate regulatory data; our scope is what the standard filing delivers auditably. For a full decision on a bank, those ratios complement the multiples.
How Dados B3 handles banks
We classify each company by its real chart of accounts (not the registry sector, which errs), and for banks and intermediation insurers we publish only what makes sense — ROE, margin, growth, P/E, P/B, dividends. ROIC/EBITDA/EV-EBITDA are not published for them: an honest blank instead of a meaningless number.