Cristina Junqueira has made past appearances on Fortune‘s Most Powerful Women lists (especially when we had a separate international version) for her role as a cofounder of Nubank, the Brazilian fintech startup that is the world’s largest digital bank. Her 3% stake in Nubank made her one of the world’s youngest female self-made billionaires.
The last time I spoke with her a few years ago, she was calling from Brazil. Last month, she was at her desk at her new home in Miami. “At least couple times a month there are dolphins swimming in the water in front of my house,” she says of her new home. She made the move from São Paulo last year with her husband and four young kids with the goal of building Nubank in the U.S., its first market outside Latin America. (Her cofounder David Vélez is the company’s CEO.)
Right now, Nubank has more than 120 million customers; the vast majority are in Brazil with a fast-growing business in Mexico and Colombia; customers are drawn to Nubank for its ease of use and low fees. Last month, Nubank won preliminary approval for a national bank license in the U.S. It expects to launch within 18 months.
Nubank’s first opportunity in the U.S., Junqueira says, is to serve customers who have either immigrated from Latin America or travel back and forth frequently—a market it estimates is anywhere from 800,000 to 5 million customers. Longer-term, Junqueira isn’t thinking of Nubank as a “Latino brand” in the U.S. “We want to build for the average American, whoever that is,” she says.
After cofounding Nubank, Junqueira was the force behind the company’s brand-building. Her new gig in the U.S. takes her back to the “0-1” phase of startup life. “The biggest thing in the U.S. will be building the brand—cutting through the noise and connecting with customers, building that emotional connection. That’s something that I was the one leading for a very long time,” she says. “I was the one that really led the effort of building this brand in Brazil that is the most valuable brand in Brazil today, the most loved brand in Brazil today, one of the most valuable brands in Latin America.”
To get started on Nubank’s U.S. brand presence, Nubank signed on as an official brand partner for Mercedes’ F1 team last month. Junqueira chose F1 because it’s “truly a global sport” that helps reach new U.S. audiences and Nubank’s existing customer base.
Junqueira didn’t have to uproot her life to keep building Nubank’s next major market, 13 years after cofounding the company and five years after its IPO. “I seek impact,” she says. “I’ve been called crazy for much less.”
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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