Earlier this week, I met up with the cofounders at Nubank investor Sequoia’s office in Manhattan. They were preparing for a big announcement: their U.S. launch was imminent (and sooner than many expected). Yesterday at an event in Miami at the newly-renamed Nu Stadium, the company announced it will soon offer a whole suite of products: higher-yield deposit accounts, credit cards, and cross-border payments between 35 countries. “We thought this would be a differentiating factor,” Junqueira told me of the vast portfolio. It’s now competing with international firms like Revolut, which is also trying to enter the U.S. market. Nubank has applied for a U.S. banking license but has not received final approval yet; instead, it’s partnering with Lead Bank, which helps foreign fintechs offer products in the U.S. “We have to deal with it,” Junqueira says of the challenges of the U.S. regulatory environment. “It is what it is.”

It’s positioning its U.S. launch as one part of a broader “multi-decade” journey to become a truly global bank. “We’re taking a step to prove our hypothesis beyond Latin America,” Vélez says. And it says that even a very small share of the U.S. banking market would be “transformative” for its business. Ten million customers in the U.S. would double the size of Nubank’s business; each American customer equals about four in Brazil (where it has more than 100 million), Junqueira determined.

In Brazil, the company gained its foothold by targeting customers who were unbanked. In the U.S., fewer are unbanked, but the founders argue that many are under-banked, without access to credit or some investment products. More than access, though, the big opportunity they see in the U.S. is competing on cost, offering banking without fees.

Nubank will work to win Hispanic customers who are familiar with the brand and may be looking for banking products that make it easy to send money between countries. Junqueira is focused on building a brand, however, that appeals to any customer. “That segment doesn’t necessarily want to bank with the Hispanic bank,” she says. “They want to bank with the best bank.”

Vélez closely studied the reasons other foreign fintechs that tried to win the U.S. market failed. They made the jump too early, when they weren’t profitable in their home markets yet. They tried to do just credit, or just savings, rather than both. But the most important way companies fell short was by sending an exec who was “too junior” to figure out the market. “It requires significant senior-level impact,” he realized. “Sending a cofounder to tackle one of the most important markets was critical.”

Junqueira expects she’ll stay for at least a few more years. “I want to see the U.S. business thrive,” she says.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

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PARTING WORDS

"Instead of getting paid a lot of money, I said, I don’t want the money. I want the control... I want the power."

— Cindy Crawford, via Forbes