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Latin America is notorious for a lack of financial access, especially among lower-income groups. Founder David Vélez wanted Nubank to be an “anti-bank,” eliminating barriers such as credit card fees and excessive paperwork. Today, it claims more than 70 million customers across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia; its once-neglected customer base delivered $1.7 billion in revenue to Nubank in 2021.

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Nubank (NU): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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As CEO of Nubank Brazil since January 2024, Livia Chanes leads one of Latin America’s most prominent digital financial platforms. In her previous role as Brazil country manager, she oversaw explosive growth—adding 24 million new customers and launching more than 50 new products. In this session, Chanes, who ranks No. 91 on the 2025 MPW list, will share her strategic insights on the future of financial services in Latin America and beyond, discussing the trends reshaping global finance and their impact on consumers and industry leaders.

Building The Bank of The Future: Notes From Brazil

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And so I wanted to start off with, uh, why does Newbank consider itself a tech company rather than a traditional bank? Well, if you go back to the reason why Newbank was founded, it started more from a kind of a human angle, trying to sort a pain point of customers versus just like trying to figure out how to better optimize financial assets in an industry. Our founder Ray David, he had recently moved to Brazil and he tried to open a bank account and he tells that story that he got stuck in one of the bank branches within the security features that we have in Brazil to enter the branches and then he received a very poor treatment, right, and he had a very hard time just to get his account opened. And then he went back home and started to understand the financials of that industry, and then he realized that the Brazilian banking industry had one of the highest returns financial returns in the world and one of the lowest customer satisfaction levels in the world. So he said, well, you know, I think there is an opportunity to do something better with technology, and that's how new banks started. So it started from from a thesis in which technology can empower people to do things much much much better and and drive new frontiers of efficiency to industry. We started with the financial services because of that story and also because it's a massive profit pool in the region. Uh, but as we think about the way we intend to um continue to evolve our product, we see it more as a consumer, a consumer platform that starts with financial services, which is a very highly engagement, highly engaging um set of journeys within within our customers' lifestyle, but we, we want to go beyond that. And uh and to leverage the very, very strong efficiency levels that we delivered in the financial services industry, the very high levels of the NPS to expand the boundaries of of our product. OK. Um, speaking of new boundaries, New Bank has announced it will pursue a national bank charter in the US. Uh, do you see that new bank's model, which has thrived in Latin America, succeeding in other markets? So our thesis about uh digital banking has always been a global one. When we look at the pain points and uh and the sources of efficiency that the industry, that especially the retail banking industry can deploy across geography, it's true that they are very similar. Of course there are regulatory specifications that are very market specific that are, you know, competition, um, dynamics that are very uh geography specific, but we do believe that there is a common backbone for the thesis that can be deployed across markets. Um, we continue to be focused on our car markets for now which are Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia in which we have already more than 120 million customers, uh, but we're buying the optionality right and we're filing for them. For the regulatory license as you mentioned, uh, because we do believe that in in a certain moment in time we we have the intention to expand beyond Latin America and of course the, the, the US market is a big one so now is the right time. To do this expansion. Correct, I think we're, we're we've learned a lot in terms of how to take our thesis from Brazil to others with Mexico and Colombia also evolved our platform and therefore, uh, we're kind of taking the initial steps to go beyond Latin America, as I mentioned, right, so we don't have a specific date, uh, for any launches. In the US at this point in time, but the license is a first step for us to to buy this optionality and to to be ready to potentially scale an operation here in the future with all the regulatory um uh boundaries and and and foundations that is required to operate a bank in in such a market so we're we're we're taking a step we know these processes typically take long, right? We have some experience with that. Uh, in our Mexico operation and uh that's why we kind of we we decided to move forward with that step. What are some of the global trends that are shaping growth and banking, um, in the tech sector? Right, so, um, I think there are, I, I would highlight 3 at least 3 big trends. The first one I think is the emergency and the consolidation of real-time payments. If we think about the role that this, uh, this, this type of technology and product has played in the market like Brazil, uh, it, it, it has been completely transformational, and we are seeing the same level of, of, of impact and the same trend to be deployed across different markets in which we operate and even markets we do not operate. So the Brazilian central bank released Pigs, right? PIs is the name of the real time, um, payment, uh, system in Brazil. I think if I'm not mistaken, I think in late 2020 and the amount of adoption and the innovation that just came through this this new rail that is much more efficient and much more secure to customers to transact has been massive. The replacement of cash, uh, the increased visibility about transactionality across parties in general, uh, the ability to include new people into the financial system. And allow them to have access to credit because their transactions are just much more visible to the system than it was before just to name a few of the and the removal of taxes right and and fees in general that historically have been extremely high, uh in in under the countries under development. Um, so we, we do see a lot of that. We try to shape this new regulatory trends in every market that we go as, as an example, for example, in Brazil today, 1 of every 4, fixed transactions go through new bank, so it's, it's a massive impact right if you think about the amount of the. Brazilian economy money that is flowing through Rios is just very impressive, and we're taking the same step. For example, as we launched Bre in Colombia and as the regulatory framework also also moves into that direction in Mexico, which are economies that in general have a much higher cash participation in Brazil. Uh, and therefore we expect the impact to be even larger than what we, what we aspire, what we observed in, in our first market. The second trend, of course I couldn't go without speaking about AI, and we're gonna talk a little bit more about that, but new bank emerged with this new business model in the era in which the mobile interface, the app-based interface become. Uh, super important and what's so in terms of relevance, um. Uh, in our customers' lives, and now we're seeing that AI can change the interface, also change the way that every all the kind of the processes and the domains, the core domains in banking can be managed credit fraud management, transactionality just to set some examples and, and, uh, and also in other domains that are more um industry kind of more generalizable across the industries like marketing, CAs and etc. So we're, we're investing a lot in in both understanding which kinds of partnerships we can do, but also in deploying in our own our own internal AI capabilities, uh, to be deployed across all these domains. What are customers looking for when it comes to AI? What, what, um, pain points do they have that AI could possibly ease or, or tell us a little bit about that. I honestly think that customers don't care if it's AI enabled or not. I don't think they do. I think customers just want to have the best experience possible and the highest level of personalization possible in every interaction that they have, so we see AI more as an additional tool that we add into our tool kit to deploy improved experiences, new levels of. Efficiency and uh and also to give access to some of the products and experiences that were not scalable before AI versus making it uh a first and foremost customer value proposition because I think people just want to get their their problem solved and so it's less important to them how but more in terms of it's what matters to them the most is the quality of of the interface and the experiences they share. So a process that has uh that uses AI that makes it more user friendly is the interface part. I think it's, it's a lot of things, right? I think the interface is one piece. I think they are kind of if we if we shift from a graphic interface to more conversational interface we need through text or voice, there are some experiences that are gonna get that get substantially better, some other experiences that are gonna get worse. So it's again it's a new, uh, it's a new tool in the toolkit. But I would not say that this is the only thing that would change the game if we think about predictive AI and the applications that we are already seeing in credit management, in collections, in fraud management, in cross selling and life cycle management. There are even in kind of asset portfolio optimization. Those are real applications. That we historically have have done through machine learning models, but now with the new techniques that AI allows us, we take it to the next level and finally I think there's the whole agenda on generative AI that can be applied on customer uhcus. Customer experience customer service, uh, marketing, right, we're doing a bunch of our marketing assets and our AI developed right versus, uh, you know, if you look back in 12 years behind, we would be doing a lot of manual work through the marketing agencies now everything is much more automated, uh, so you know I think it's not just the interface there's much more that we can do. The interface is one of them. Like voice banking is something that we are experimenting with. We're launching like real time payments through WhatsApp. WhatsApp is the primary chat platform in in Brazil, and we're doing about um uh a huge amount of transactions already just using. Voice that is of course AI enabled just just to name one of the interface specific examples. What's an example of voice payment using AI? So if you go, we have um either in our app or in our on our WhatsApp channel you can go and say, OK, can you send $50 to Cheryl right now? Of course. Can you confirm if it's uh Cheryl Strata? Yes, that's it. OK, you authenticate and then the money flows through, then Cheryl gets the receipt. Instead of having to type the transaction open the app, it's embedded in the conversation. How do you determine what AI agents are best used at Newbank? So I think we talk a lot about AI, but the truth is that we're seeing that the technology is too maturing in terms of the applications. So we have at least two big lanes in which we're experimenting with agents. One is more on the internal productivity that, uh, you know, how the agents can help. Our employees to be more productive, the engineers to code better and debug uh faster or to run analysis or to write reports and all these kinds of applications. And then I think the two core applications that we see for agent take uh AI more on the customer facing and. Our own customer service, uh, and of course kind of, uh, deflecting it and and serving the more uh the the the the most the most simple kind of contact reasons for our customers and also in marketing. To just be able to for example provide a brief for a campaign or to um synthesize findings from multiple different researches that we have done uh or to synthesize all the the listening that we get from our CX and social media channels and translated into customer insights. Uh, so those are just some of the examples that we see, but again, what we're trying to do is to deploy the technology in multiple different use cases and see where it matures faster, right? And then we scale because the truth is for certain applications it's much more effective and precise versus other applications. This is. Going to change fast. That's why we keep our options open and we try to have this 1000 flowers trying to bloom at the same time so we don't, we don't lose the timing of the of the transformation. But you have agility. We do, we do, we do, and we make, of course some of our experience fail too, and it's fine, right? I think it's part of the of trying to stay ahead is also incorporating the fact that you're going to have some level of inefficiency and fail in the short term. I wanted to talk a little bit more about customers, um. That's the heart of your business. Um, before I become CEO last year during your tenure as Brazil County manager, New Bake added 24 million customers and introduced more than 50 new products. How do you stay on top of what the customer wants it's really hard, right? I usually say that when we reach a certain level of scale, it's very easy to connect with the numbers and to disconnect with the people, uh, so I think it's, it's, it's a lot about humiliating. And staying grounded with the reality of the facts. So what I try to do is to really stay close to the customers and live real life, right? Of course the life of a CEO is very different from the average Brazilian customer that I have, but I try to stay connected to the people the the the more that I can and also have my teams leave the reality of customers the more that they can, uh, that that's, that's not easy, but I think it's a, it's a constant exercise of humility and connection that we have to do. Because again to empower hundreds of millions of people in Latin America, uh, it requires a level of humility and detachment from your own reality as an executive that is not small, and this is a constant exercise that we all try to do to put ourselves in the shoes of the customers within their kind of lenses of how they see life, not how we see life, to try to to provide the best solutions to them. Thank you. uh, in our last, uh, minute, do you have any career advice that you'd like to offer since we are NPW? All right, uh, this is a big question given the audience, but I, I think given that we are in a women leadership forum, I thought the best tip I could offer is is also kind of a personal reflection. I think all of us have, um. Strengths and weaknesses, it's part of any human being's kind of identity, and I think we get disproportionately more judged as women. So for us it's super important to find places in context, context in which our strengths are celebrated and not tolerated so that we can really unleash our maximum potential as leaders. Olivia, it was a pleasure speaking to you. Thanks again for traveling all the way from Brazil. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you.

Cristina Junqueira discusses her company’s potential growth.

Nubank CEO: ‘There’s so much opportunity’ for fintech in Latin America

Nubank CEO on fintech in Latin America


Nubank CEO: ‘There’s so much opportunity’ for fintech in Latin America


you mentioned latin America, you are operating in a few countries. Now, obviously you're native brazil, but also in Colombia and Mexico. Are you setting your sights on any other countries in the area soon? There's so much opportunity in the region. We like to say that the combination of great population, horrible customer experience or a lot of customer pain in very big spreads or you know, high fees is unmatched ng when you look worldwide, like there's no place that is better suited uh, in terms of having a great opportunity for fintech companies to tackle. Um, having said that we have replaced pretty awful with Mexico and Colombia, we would love to go to other countries. But for now, like when we look into 2021 2022 there's still a lot of room for us to really scale operation Mexico and Colombia has just begun. Although we're seeing a lot of early traction customers are very excited about finally having an alternative in those countries to, um, but we got to make sure that we're well positioned to deliver on their expectations before we venture into another country.

Hello everyone, thanks for coming. Hello. Thanks for having me. Thanks for comming Christina. Yeah my pleasure. And I hear your husband, and your daughter are also in the auadience too. Right there [ LAUGH ] Hi. The cutest little girl in the audience that's my daugher. Yeah. [ LAUGH ] Your welcme. So You also have an interesting story. And I want to get to your family life, which is super interesting, but you were just telling me that the way that you founded the company, you didn't actually know your cofounder founders from college or anything like that, how did you get involved in Nubank? What attracted you to the opportunity? I guess, to make a very long story short, I worked for one of the incumbent banks, the largest incumbent bank in Brazil for five Five years. And I was just done making rich people richer. I saw no purpose in what I was doing. I was trying to make a lot of changes to make consumers lives better and failing miserably at it. And at some point, i was like, you know what? I'm done. Any consigning with the time that my partner the David, who's our CEO, he was. You know, kicking off the business, he had this vision, he had this thesis around financial services, but he didn't know the industry. So he was looking for partners, you know, to get it off the ground. And I was just in the right place at the right time. So it was really like one of those serendipity moments, you know. That we ran into each other. I had the excuse that he needed, who had the vision of something that he really wanted to be part of. So it kinda worked out. Yeah, you've also been fundraising a new bank lately, you now have, the company now has an evaluation of more than $ 10 billion. And I think you're the only company in the world with more than $ 10 billion evaluation with a female founder. It's pretty impressive. What was the fund raising process like I mean what was it like going into those meetings, seeking funding. Tell us a little bit about that. Sure it's been a journey we've raised over seven rounds of funding at this stage. Almost a billion dollars in funding at this stage And it had different flavors as the company evolved, but the rental that you know was really challenging for me was our first one or series A, which I raised when I was pregnant with Ellis with my first daughter So I actually flew to California from Brazil, seven months pregnant, to pitch to this multiple rooms full of VC investors. You can imagine, the type of reaction that I got, the nicest ones were things like I've never seen a pregnant woman pitch. It was pretty nice actually, closed around that You know, very close to the day she was born my partner took the you know, the papers for me to sign at the hospital [ LAUGH ] so it was pretty intense Yeah, did you feel i mean they've never seen a pregnant woman pitch and we know y'all know the statistics about how few venture dollars women actually receive, how did you overcome that or did you feel like you had to Yeah, for sure. We just had to, but I was very lucky because my partner, the visa, our CEO, he came from the venture capital industry. So he knew a lot about how investors, think about companies how, what type of things they assess, what type of things they value. So, that kind of helped us tailor pitch and of course for me to do my part on that for sure. So that we could get the better odds, but it kind of worked out. I gotta say we were lucky. And of course based on merit we were able to pick the investors that we wanted to have with us that were more aligned with our long term vision every step of the way. So yeah, happy to hear. Did you have a comeback ready or anything what when they would comment on your pregnancy? I know you're pregnant. Now. Again, congratulations Thank you. But is there some something you've gotten used to saying to kind of Get people over that hurdle of. yes, you're a female founder and you will you're a mother too. It was weird because that time I was just trying to make sure people wouldn't notice [ LAUGH ] I was pregnant, which was hard because I got pretty big that she was a big baby. [ LAUGH ] So, I just wanted them to feel that it didn't matter, that I was in, this was my company, it was my life's project. And I was willing to do whatever it took to get it off the ground, and to do what my customers needed me to do, or my shareholders needed me to do. So Yeah, the stage. My point was to get them distracted with the business. [ LAUGH ] Well yeah it seems like you've been able to do that pretty successfully. New Bank is now the largest digital banking startup in the world. I'm curious, the US, Europe also have a lot of digital banks It's, kind of, a hot trend right now. But, you have more than 12 million customers. You've taken off much faster. Yeah. Than many of those. What do you think has made the difference. Why the, be able to, take off so much quicker? I think it's a combination [ UNKNOWN ] of several factors. When you look into Latin America, the incomes are so bad. As bad as they are. I mean, I know banks are loved anywhere but they're specially hated there. You have no idea. If you Google, I hate banks in Brazil, in Portuguese, you're gonna get Pages of pages of pages ->> [ LAUGH ] of people people spilling their hate all over the internet for the banks. So people have been accustomed to that case of abuse of being overcharged, of having horrible products, and a horrible experience and pain. Some of the highest interest rates in the world. Some of the highest fees in the In the world, so I guess what we saw was a lot of pain, just consumer pain in people that were ready for an alternative. I used to tell my partners that you know, they better watch out because we're going to have to spend a ton of money marketing because people hate banks, etc. And what happened was by the time we got the first customers. People are actually asking us, begging us please, to let their friends and family be our customers, you know, so they were firing customers to us for free. So most of our growth like over 80 % of our growth so far has been strictly organic. Just people reaching out to us wanting to be our customers finally ready for an alternative that wasn't incumbents. So I guess a combination of, really bad experience large markets, of course. So when you think about Brazil alone is 210 million people 60 million of them unbanked. So of course a huge opportunity but also a lot of pain. Yeah. I'm gonna come to the audience for questions in just a minute, so get your questions ready, raise your hands and they'll come to you with a paddle. But Christina, so far you've been just in Latin America. You've started to expand from Brazil into Argentina and Mexico. Do you think your model could work in North America or maybe beyond the Americas too? Listen, I think everywhere in the world, the banking industry is being disrupted, right like are seeing challenges everywhere. For us, like from our perspective is just a matter of sequencing and prioritizing. When we look at Latin America we see much more pain as I've mentioned, as bad as they could be in Canada or the US or in Europe. They're not as expensive like spreads are under high or fees aren't super high. So we do see more opportunity in Latin America, but it's not like the model would work. You've mentioned a lot of startups are, having great impact in Europe? A lot of new banks are rising here in North America as well. I think the point is, they just don't have that much fat to go into, to compete also on price. That's my feeling. But I think, consumers are ready for A digital alternative for to do everything from their mobile phones and not ever have to go to a branch in their lives anymore all over the world. That's not going away. Yeah, and you offer a 6 % savings rate. Which I think in the US, 3 % is unheard of. Is that something that could potentially affect? I mean, in the US we actually have the Fed is lowering rates. Is that something that could be affected by monetary policy around the world? Or in Brazil that's actually sustainable? Well, it has been affected. When we started the business, the risk free rate, which is what we were offered, was 15 %. Rates have significantly gone down just because of improvements on the macroeconomic fundamentals there. So, there is a trend of lowering interest rates but I think our point is just to capture efficiencies and pass that on to customers whether that's in higher yields or lower interest rates or lower fees. Yeah, question over here, please, and tell us who you are. Hi. Hi. Marcia Moffett with Blackrock. One thing, so I was just looking on your website while you were speaking. I mean, I was glad to see you had a non- Portuguese version of the site since we don't speak Portuguese. [ LAUGH ] We're very international. One thing I'm always curious about with small companies, so you start off with a vision, you're in a particular niche. How do you stay true to your roots and what you want to accomplish as you grow and become bigger. Because right now you're the disruptor. And you have that The challenges of a disruptor but you also have the opportunities as a disruptor. So as you go forward and maybe it's too early in your company's life to be thinking this way, but how are you going to how are you going to stay true to your values and what you're seeking to accomplish as a company? Listen, that's a great question and something that we will obsess over. You know what my founders and I We've always like one of our values. We have five core values in the company and one of them is like, stay hungry and challenge the status quo. What we don't want is people resting on their laurels and just believing, we're done. We got this big valuation and we're now in four countries. And, you know, we have over 2, 000 employees, so we're good and we can behave, just like they can come in town. So, It's something it's a culture push that we make every day like through our leadership, through our actions through the way that we make decisions to make sure that people stay hungry. We've borrowed some things from Amazon like that they want concepts like we keep repeating that so that people can understand. Though it's always the beginning. There's so much opportunity, even as you know we're serving now close to 15 million customers which is you know huge but we're like well there's another hundred you know, in Latin America alone that we could get to. So when you take things into perspective, you can, depending on how you frame it, you can always see yourself as a beginner you know and have the beginner's mindset, that challenging. That's what we're trying to do. That's the plan, to conquer Latin America first and then potentially see about other markets. Listen, we see a lot of opportunity in Latin America. When you multiply the size of the population versus the spread versus the customer [ UNKNOWN ], this is the biggest opportunity in the world, even Asia when you compare them So for sure it's more interesting here, but it's always a problem about privatization, you know ?. Yeah, were there any other questions ?. Here I've got more if you guys don't over there. Yeah, please tell us who you are. Hello. My name is Nadia Tada. I was wondering what's the biggest challenge you're facing right now ?. It's always people, always people. Listen, we have over 2, 000 employees as I've mentioned. We have a fairly diverse team. One of our core values is also we build strong, diverse teams. We have over 40 % of women at our bank, which is amazing. If you think about financial services and technologies it's unheard of. We also have over 30 % of our staff identifies as LGBT, which is also unheard of. So we do have a lot of diversity but still like to grow at the pace that we wanted to we would need a lot more people. We are our biggest bottleneck is in capitalism regulation is in consumers isn't it just people who just being able to grow the team at the high bar that we have in terms of talent across the regions that we want to serve. So for sure like that has always been and will continue to be the biggest challenge. That's why diversity so important Yeah i wanted to ask you speaking of technology one of the biggest trends in fintech over the past few years has been blockchain technology and cryptocurrency. Is that something that you've looked at or that you have interest you might be interested in using in your business I think for now like we're curiously Watching what's going to happen with crypto because the blockchain itself as a technology has so much potential, but as far as the use cases go, we haven't seen something that has truly solved a need even when you think about Bitcoin has been used mostly for speculation as well as some [ BLANK_AUDIO ] Shady businesses. So we're kind of cautiously watching the the use cases and applications, even when there's something that really, is meaningful for our consumer. Sure, we could get into that too. But right now you feel it doesn't it doesn't add a lot of efficiencies. It's about the consumer. I don't see a real problem that consumers have that that technology will solve yet. What are the biggest consumer problems that you're trying to solve? So for us it has been about sure high spreads and high fees for sure but also horrible customer service. And we have an amazing team that we called expers that offer the best experience when people need service and they reach out to us across all our channels. Our NPS is close to 90 which is amazing. Like if you think about big tech companies The benchmark worldwide is 60 to 70. Like when you get to 90 just people just really love us so we're solving for just offering them the experience that they deserve. You know in treating them as humans and you know just figuring out finances so that they don't have to worry about that and not be held hostages of you know the incumbents anymore. Just. Grab back the control of their financial lives. Yeah, just less than a minute left. Do you have any final thoughts about what banks can learn from you? Or what message should banks and other fintechs take away in terms of where finance is going? I always tell people, it's about solving customer pain and real problems, right? In my business, often innovation Is mistaken Bye You know we're working on this dream that will make payments or this bracelet or this like new shiny thing. And I tell people like how many customers are losing their sleep tonight because they don't have a ring that makes payments like zero tell you like zero people are losing their sleep tonight. [ LAUGH ] But many of them are losing their sleep because tomorrow they're gonna have to go to a branch to figure out like some fee that they were overcharged for, They have no business being deducted out of their account. So those things matter, the pain matters. So just focus on that solve those problems. Great. Well, we're so glad you could join us here. Thank you so much. Thank you .>> [ APPLAUSE ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Nubank Wants to Break Up Big Banks in Latin America

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Co-founder Cristina Junqueira explains why she’s betting on Fintech.


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