Cristina Junqueira, Co-Founder of Nubank, on conquering Latin America and taking on the US

Nubank co-founder Cristina Junqueira joins the podcast to discuss one of fintech’s most remarkable success stories, from a Brazilian startup that had customers begging to get off the waitlist to a publicly traded company serving 127 million customers and reaching 60% of Brazilian adults.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Cristina shares the origin story of how three founders from different countries came together to fight complexity in financial services, the challenges of conducting simultaneous IPOs in New York and Sao Paulo to give their customers access, and lessons from expanding into Mexico and Colombia. Most notably, she reveals why Nubank chose the massive US market as their fourth country, detailing their de novo bank charter application with the OCC and her relocation to Miami to lead the charge. Cristina also discusses Nubank’s approach to digital assets, their partnership with OpenAI, and why she believes there’s far more ahead for the company than behind it.

In this podcast you will learn:

• How Cristina’s time at Brazil’s largest bank prepared her for Nubank.
• How she met David Velez, the CEO and co-founder.
• What she saw was missing in the Brazilian market.
• When they realized that they were on to something special with Nubank.
• What they had to change when they expanded into Brazil.
• How consumers use credit cards different from Brazil to Mexico and Colombia.
• Why they took on the added complexity and cost of allowing their retail customers to participate in their IPO.
• How becoming a public company has impacted their mission.
• With 60% of adults in Brazil, how Nubank can still grow in their home market.
• When they decided that the U.S. was going to be in their expansion plans.
• What they see as the opportunity for Nubank in the U.S.
• Why they decided to file a de novo bank charter application rather than acquire a bank.
• Nubank’s approach to digital assets.
• How they are partnering with OpenAI and their approach to AI in general.
• What Cris is most excited about for this new chapter for Nubank.

Read a transcription of our conversation below.

FINTECH ONE-ON-ONE PODCAST NO. 562: Cristina Junqueira

Cristina Junqueira:

So the amount of work that it takes to build a new country, to spin off a new country in the way that we do it, which is different from what other fintechs would do. But we like to have licenses. We like to be primary banking relationships to our customers. We’re not a thin layer in Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. We’re competing to be the primary banking relationship of these customers. So that’s a big effort. So when you think about the cost of coming into a market, it varies a little, but not a lot, like still a big effort. So if you’re gonna pay that type of cost, why not go to a market that is actually much larger, where the payoff is gonna be much larger.

Peter Renton:

Nubank has become one of the most remarkable success stories in all of fintech, growing from a tiny Brazilian startup to a publicly traded company serving 127 million customers across three countries in Latin America. Co-founder Cristina Junquiera joins me on the show today to share the journey from those early days when potential customers were begging to get off the wait list. That’s not something you hear very often in financial services, to today, when Nubank serves 60 % of adults in Brazil and has become not just the most valuable financial institution there, but the most valuable company, period. In our conversation, we discussed Nubank’s expansion into Mexico and Colombia, the complexity of conducting simultaneous IPOs in New York and Sao Paulo, and why Nubank is now taking on its biggest challenge yet, entering the US market.

With a newly filed OCC banking application and Chris having relocated to Miami to lead the charge, she explains how the company plans to leverage its proven model of fighting complexity and empowering customers in the world’s most competitive market. Now let’s get on with the show.

Welcome to the podcast, Cris.

CJ: Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

PR: My pleasure. So let’s kick it off by delving into your background. I know that you’ve been doing Nubank for quite some time, but you did have some other stops in your career to date. So give us some background on what you did before Nubank.

CJ: Of course. So I’m an engineer by background. I went to University of Sao Paulo, both for undergrad and my masters. And I started my career in consulting. So I worked for a few years with the Boston Consulting Group back in Brazil and Sao Paulo. I came today to ask for a business school. I went to Kellogg. And when I was coming back to Brazil, coming out of business school, I was recruited by a retail bank back in Brazil for their MBA program. I wanted to do a career transition to be an executive, be responsible for something, like to be closer to execution in Brazil. I was with them for five years. I had a number of different roles that I’m very grateful for. It really helped me to learn how to manage people, how to manage a business, how to manage stakeholders, how to manage a number of different things. But eventually I looked into the future, looked into the next five to 10 years of my life. And that’s just not where I wanted to be.

When I looked into what success looks like within that organization, when I looked into the senior people there, like that’s just not what I wanted for me. So I resigned, I quit my job. Funny enough, the day that I received the largest bonus of my career to date, and I wanted to take some time off to think about what the next chapter will look like. And this was long before, you know, sabbaticals were cool or people were taking them left and right. But I really, what I wanted was the mental space. I knew that had I continued to work, I would never have enough like mental space to really envision something very different. And funny enough, like I didn’t do that to become an entrepreneur. Like I thought I was gonna land somewhere. I was trying to figure out like what company I should join, but funny enough, I met David.

PR: Okay, so how did you, David and Ed, come together?

CJ: Yeah, so what happened was like during that period that I, the brief period that I was thinking about what to do next. I of course, like, you know, met with a lot of people and one of the people that I met was a mutual acquaintance. He said, you know what, you should talk to David. And I was like, okay, I didn’t come into that conversation with a lot of high hopes, but you know, I said, I might as well take the meeting. And David, funny enough, was having his own moment, you know, coming out of venture capital and thinking, you know what, maybe. Maybe now is the right time to start a company. He’s the opposite of me. So he’s always wanted to start a company. He’s always wanted to be an entrepreneur, but there was always something, you know, in the middle, like, or something that he needed to do first. And he decided that was the right moment. And he was just looking for somebody that had an experience very much like mine. He was looking for somebody that knew the industry, that knew the country, that had an operating experience. And it just felt too much like a phenomenal opportunity for me to miss on.

PR: Right, right. Because David is Colombian, right? And you’re Brazilian. So that makes sense. And then Ed, Ed’s an American, right?

CJ: It’s like one of those jokes, know, like a Colombian and American and a Brazilian get into a bar, you know.

PR: Right. Well, it certainly worked out well. No joke. So tell us about those early days. did you see was missing in the market? And you’ve obviously had experience at the largest bank. What did you see that was really that Nubank could really make a difference?

CJ: That’s a great question. So when I came out of my last role at this incumbent bank, they weren’t just the largest. They were also the best. And I remember thinking to myself, was like, I’m done with financial services. I’m probably going to have to make a career transition into a different industry because these guys are the best. And if this is not good enough, like, you know, no one else will be. I had spent the best part of my last year there trying to convince them that we need to do something dramatically different.

That it wasn’t normal. that, you know, it didn’t, the way that I saw the world, I was like, it’s not normal. They were having to really push these products down people’s throats because they really don’t want them. You know, it’s not normal that we have to make like this enormous effort to only offset churn by a slim margin. And we should actually design products that people would want and stop like investing so much in marketing and so on. So, and they weren’t ready for that conversation, but I certainly had my opinion in terms of what was wrong with the market. So products were very bad for customers, very commoditized. There was very little differentiation. The customer experience was awful. And David coming from the venture capital side, he had been seeing technology disrupt all other industries, right? So transportation, hospitality, media, retail, like everywhere else, technology was, you know, making a big difference.

And financial services, somehow, you know, no one would touch. So the thesis was we could use technology, data, design, and this customer obsession to create something very different that people would actually care about, that people would actually want. And that could change the way that the industry works dramatically.

PR: So when did you realize that you were onto something, that you had product market fit, shall we say?

CJ: Yeah, so when we first started, I’ve always been a big believer of the thesis. I remember that I met David, we spoke for a couple of hours, and then eventually it was late in the evening already and I had to go home, but I couldn’t sleep that night. You know, like I was ready, like really bought into this. But as bought in as I was, I knew, I really knew it was going to work. I thought that it was going to require a lot more effort to get there. You know, I thought that would have to spend a lot of money actually marketing because people already saw the banks, especially credit cards as the villains. You know, like I like to say that, you know, if the banks were Darth Vader’s like the credit cards were the Death Star, right? Like their weapon of mass destruction. So I thought that it would take a lot to overcome that negativity, you know, like that, that barrier to establish any, any connection with consumers. So, in that context, we were really surprised when we started having customers. And of course, like we’d begun with ourselves and then, you our spouses and our siblings and, you know, the people around us, you know, what we call friends and family. And then those people were like, this is super cool. Can I bring my own friends and family? Right.

Like, and it started from there. And we just started to see like this very organic, you know, flywheel happening, right? Like, you know, this member get member situation to the point that we couldn’t keep up with demand. We had to create a wait list because we couldn’t, we couldn’t have the right people, because a lot of things were manual back then. Like I’m thinking, you know, early or second half of 2014. So we got a product out there, but there was still a lot to build to be able to scale. So we started seeing a lot of demand and then we had a wait list and we had a few thousand people on the wait list or tens of thousands of people on the wait list. And people were going on social media, were going on Twitter back then or Facebook or whatever, and asking us to get them off of the waitlist and to ask for the product, which was something like unconceivable, you know, in financial services. So that’s when we knew like, you know, there was something about what we were doing.

PR: And then obviously you’ve famously now have expanded tremendously inside Brazil and you have led the charge outside Brazil. Tell us about your first expansion, which was to Mexico. What worked directly from Brazil to Mexico and what did you have to change?

CJ: Yeah. So when we, when we started the company, we already had big ambitions, like international ambitions from the get-go. We’ve always dreamed, you know, about when this would be possible to take, you know, internationally. But we also were very mindful of doing fewer things, but doing them really well and earning our right to do the next thing. So we only did credit cards in Brazil for maybe like five years, you know.

And then when things were kind of like scaling there, we said, okay, but we really need deposits. So then we did the account, you know, that was initially positioned as a savings account and then came the debit card and the transactions that you could do out of the account and then personal loans. And, you know, so till this date, we’re very mindful of trying not to do too much, you know. There are different companies out there. Those are different strategies that they’ll throw a lot of spaghetti on the wall, see what sticks and if it doesn’t, they’ll pull back and that’s fine.

Like we care a lot about the products that we’re building, the experience. Like we want people to be able to appreciate the craft and the thoughtfulness. So it’s a different approach. And when it came to international expansion, it was the same thing. Like we had been thinking about going to Mexico for a while until we actually did. And even when we did, we didn’t know what we’re going to find. If we’re going to hear crickets, you know, if people in Mexico weren’t going to give us, you know, the light of day. Like we had no idea.

So we did it all in a very scrappy way. Like we forked code, you know, like we, just wanted to put something out there and see, you know, if people would give a damn about it. And, they did, right. Which was very interesting because having a data point that proves that Nubank wasn’t just, you know, this Brazil specific thing. that works because Brazil is like this particular animal, right? Like the behaves this specific way. That’s why it works there, being able to prove that was going to be a big part of our growth thesis, right, like into the future. So we did our best to find our first customers, right, to get some traction, which we did. And then we started to make more thoughtful investments, right, like to think about the sequencing of products, to launch the deposit product, to expand into personal loans, to think about growing the book, to fund our lending book. And Mexico has been going really well.

If you look at the numbers, we’ve shared some of these numbers with the market, even Colombia. So when we control for the size of the population and we compare Mexico at the same age, so to speak, as Brazil, Mexico is actually trailing ahead of Brazil and Colombia is trailing ahead of Mexico. know, like things are happening faster and faster. So it’s really nice to see.

PR: So is the product suite pretty similar from Mexico to Brazil?

CJ: It’s fairly similar in the sense that, you know, we’ve also started with a credit card and, you know, then came the account and the debit card and so on. the, like the, if you think about the structure, those are the same products, right? Having said that, the credit card works very differently in Mexico than it does in Brazil. Because in Brazil, most people, the vast majority of people, like almost 90 % of people, they use credit cards as a means of payment.

They don’t necessarily use it for credit, like for financing purchases. People do revolve here and there, like on the credit card, but interest rates are very high and so are losses. So people don’t like actively finance on the credit. It’s more of a last resort type of situation. In Mexico now, like Mexico and in Colombia, to be fair, credit cards are actually a means of financing. People will use the credit cards with the intention of financing such purchase.

So that means that the whole unit economics is very different because you have a lot, a much higher share of interest in varying balances. You need a lot more funding because a bigger portion of that actually goes towards financing purchases. So it’s a very different dynamic and the way people use the product is very different.

PR: Right. Okay. So I want to talk about the fact that you’re now a public company. went public on the New York Stock Exchange almost four years ago.

CJ: Four years ago, it’s going to be four years, December 8th, I believe.

PR: Yes, yes. Which will be just after this podcast is published. you know, and I thought it was really interesting that you wanted to give access to the IPO to your customers. Now that’s, that’s not an easy thing to do. It happens very rarely. I know of one other FinTech company that’s done it this way. Tell us why you decided to do that and what the obstacles were that had to overcome.

CJ: Yeah, that was a very particular decision that we made. And it was so tough because we, again, we were based out of Brazil. So for us to be able to give access to customers, like to buy the IPO, we needed to do actually two IPOs in the same day. Like we needed to list at the New York Stock Exchange at the same time they were listing the local stock exchange in Sao Paulo. So it was so much work, but it was something that we were convinced to do because we want to be the most customer obsessed company out there, you know, in this space. We knew that we owe it to our customers to take them with us at this moment, this very important milestone. We were and are, of course, like very confident of the value creation that we’re going to be able to drive in the long run. And we really wanted to make sure that customers were a part of that. So there was a lot of work. Like we had a team of like maybe 200 people focused on making the everything that we needed to build come together to enable the IPO to happen in the US and in Brazil at the same time and to allow people to actually put their orders using our app and to be able to have custody of those shares, to set them aside in Brazil. So it was very complex. We had to file at the same time with the SEC and with CVM, which is a local SEC. Imagine twice the amount of work plus all the product building that we needed to do to make sure that this flew into our app. So it was tough, but I think hadn’t we done that, we would have regretted it, you know?

PR: Right, right. Yeah, that’s great. So then, so you’re a public company now and how has that sort of changed the company, particularly around like around your mission? What, mean, obviously there’s certain things a public company has to do that you didn’t have to do when you’re private, but I’m curious about the mission itself and how, how that’s impacted.

CJ: That’s a great question. So we had many conversations before we went public in terms of what could change, what should change, what should not change after we became public. And we actually came to the conclusion that success would look like not a lot changing, actually. The mission certainly not, and it hasn’t. Some things like, I mean, it wasn’t avoidable. We now have quiet periods. now have you know, earning releases, we now have to like be very careful with how we share information internally because of that we now got to monitor instead of trading, right? Like and communicate that to employees. But all of those like very specific and clearly like regulatory requirements, not a lot has changed. One of the things that we did was talk a lot about that, like with our senior leadership and with all employees, frankly, to really reinforce how we wanted to continue to make decisions with the same long-term orientation. And we just had our earnings release last night. I know if you were able to catch it.

But David mentioned yet again that we’re going to continue to make decisions like for the long run. Somebody was asking a question about profitability in Mexico. And he was just clarifying how if we wanted to be profitable in Mexico today, we would. It’s a decision. It’s just to slow down growth, it would be profitable. But it’s not the best decision even for shareholders, like if we think about the long run. So we continue to be very committed to that, very committed to our mission, which is very simple. It’s fight complexity to empower people. That’s what we want to do. We’ve to get rid of that, all the complexity so that people can gain back control over their lives, over their financial lives. So that hasn’t changed. The other thing that we’ve done is like we talked a lot to all employees about volatility about stock price because most of them, if not all of them, they’re also stockholders, right? Like we have a relevant share of compensation paid in RSUs and before that it was stock options. and, and of course like that is directly related to people’s net worth and compensation. But we, had a lot, like many conversations about volatility, how we should expect the worst, you know, like we should be prepared to deal with a lot of volatility. And success was not going to be measured by the share price in the short term. So we feel good about being public and not a lot has changed.

PR: That’s good to hear. think everyone who invests in fintech is aware of the volatility. It’s been quite the wild ride for fintech investors in the public markets over last five years. anyway, I want to ask about Brazil specifically because I was scanning the headlines from your earnings and now up to 127 million customers. That is, I think, an incredible number that no other fintech can come close to. What I’m curious about is you have 60 % of adults in Brazil that has a Nubank account. I mean, you’re not going to get to a hundred, right? Can you still grow in your home market?

CJ: Yeah, well, that’s a great question. It’s something that we’ve been hearing people talk about for years. At some point, they keep telling us, at some point, you’re going to run into a wall. At some point, you have to slow down growth. We’re not booking on a monthly basis the maximum amount of customers that we have booked until recently. You could argue that from a number of customers exclusively, it’s not the highest that it’s ever been, but it’s still pretty high because we have some different avenues of growth in terms of number of customers. So just to give you one example, we’ve recently expanded into accounts for customers that are under 18 years old. So we’re now the largest financial institutions with kids and teens accounts in Brazil. So that’s a big portion of our menu customers growth coming from that. The other avenue is small SMBs, small and medium businesses.

So we’re also today the largest financial institution in Brazil with SME accounts. So there’s still a lot of room for us to continue to grow. Not in the same pace, sure, in terms of number of customers, but there’s a lot of room for us to grow in terms of revenue per customer. So I don’t know how much you’ve seen the numbers, but we know that incumbent banks operate at an average of $40 to $45 of average revenue per user. We are at 12, you know, or something. So we know there’s a lot of room. Maybe we won’t get all the way to 40, 45, because a lot of that is fees that we just don’t charge. But there’s a lot of room. Like when we look at our older cohorts, like people have been with us longer than a year or a year and a half. They’re in their 20s already, you know, and on their way to their 30s. So there’s room for us to double or triple the revenue in Brazil with our current customer base alone, let alone the additional growth that there’s still room for us to continue. And that’s with current products, right? And we don’t have such a wide array of products just yet. There’s a lot that we haven’t launched and that we can continue to pursue in order to extend growth in Brazil.

PR: Okay, so let’s talk about the big opportunity in front of you right now. I know I’m talking to you right now. You’re just outside Miami and you’ve moved to the US. You have filed with the OCC in September for a banking license. And this is obviously, US is still the biggest market in the world when it comes to financial services. I’m curious, first off, you thought about Nubank from the beginning of being very much an international operation. When did you decide that the US was going to be in your plan?

CJ: So great question. So after doing Mexico, expanding into Columbia, scaling Brazil, you know, eventually we’re like, okay, so if we were to go into country number four, what would that look like? Right. And there’s an argument that country number four should be Chile, right. Or Peru or Argentina. Now that things are a little bit better there. And, you know, that’s a very valid argument. But what we also know is that a lot of our customers from Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia are in and out of the US or even living here, working here, studying here. And we already have a decent level of demand for our services on this side of the border. The other thing that we know is that, their markets are a bit more complex, markets are a bit less complex, but in general, this is a highly regulated market.

And financial services is fairly complex everywhere. So the amount of work that it takes to build a new country, to spin off a big, a new country in the way that we do it, which is different from what other fintechs would do. But we, we like to have licenses, you know, we’d like to be primary banking relationships to our customers. We were not a thin layer in Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, right? Like we’re, we’re competing to be the primary banking relationship of these customers. So that’s a big effort. So when you think about the cost of coming into a market, it varies a little, but not a lot. Like it’s still a big effort. So if you’re going to pay that type of cost, why not go to a market that is actually much larger? You know, where the payoff is going to be much larger. Now there are considerations on competition.

We know that the US is not just the largest, actually the most sophisticated, most competitive market in the world for a reason. So we were coming into this knowing that we were going to take one step at a time, knowing that also just a sliver of the US market could be as big as our business in Brazil because of the average per capita income, because of just how big the industry is, product penetration that is materially different from other countries like Mexico, Colombia, and so on. So, I mean, we’re cautiously optimistic about the demand that we’re seeing from people that know and trust the brand, but they are now in the US. They’re asking us for the product, you know? And we know that even a much smaller base can be very meaningful for our business.

PR: And obviously, you’ve got the diaspora of Brazil, Mexico and Colombia that there’s not an insignificant number of people who would know your brand intimately. But so beyond that, I mean, I’m curious when you look at the US market, is there something that’s missing that Nubank can provide? I what do you see as the wedge, the opportunity here?

CJ: Yeah, so we certainly believe that there is an angle for us to come in leveraging again, the brand awareness, the brand love actually that we bring from the countries they will operate in. But there’s nothing about our business model that we feel that is specific to Brazil or Latin America even. Right? If you think about this using Jeff Bezos hat, right? Like people are always going to want to pay lower fees. They’re always going to want to have better service. They’re always going to want to have better options. They’re always going to want to have a better experience. You know, they’re always going to want to deal with things in a faster, more convenient way than going to a branch. They’re always going to want to get better yield on their deposits, on their savings, right? So those are all problems that we know how to solve, right? That we’ve been working on for a while now. So we have a hypothesis that even beyond the people that already know and trust us and are here in the U.S. and there could be a few million of them. There’s a wider audience with whom this message can also resonate. So there’s no reason for us to believe that the cost structure advantages that we have on cost to serve, on cost of risk, on cost of funding, or even acquisition costs cannot be leveraged even in the US market. So we’ll see.

PR: Yeah, yeah, it’s going to be interesting. One specific question I was curious about is, you know, lot of fintechs are acquiring banks in order to get a bank charter. You decided to go the de novo route, which is to file a new bank charter. Why did you decide to do that?

CJ: We looked into options, into potential acquisitions. It’s just, we have a very high bar for acquisitions. And we heard from our lawyers, from our advisors, that from a timeline standpoint, buying a charter, buying a bank, buying a licensed institution in the US would not save us time versus a de novo license. It could bring other assets, Like potentially customers or talent or something else. But when we looked into the specifics, there was nothing that really stood out in terms of being a good combination of great assets and a good price. So there’s probably great assets that come with a price tag that just didn’t make sense for us or things that were more affordable, but then, you know, didn’t quite meet the bar that we have for ourselves. So it just didn’t happen, but we’re always looking.

PR: So I want to talk about crypto and stablecoins because you guys have been pretty aggressive in offering those types of products to your international, the countries where you operate in. And I just saw that you hired the director of product away from Coinbase fairly recently, which that signifies that you’re certainly going to stick to this type. This is going to be an important part of your future. What can you tell us about your plans there?

CJ: So one thing that you should know is like we currently only operate with digital assets in Brazil and We take a fairly…how should I put this fairly conservative stance? Indigital assets in the following sense. We don’t offer every single mean coin Out there to our customers, you know, like we we offer a very specific curated set of digital assets that customers are very interested in and we see the behavior from our customer base in Brazil very much being customers that are interested in that type of asset class. So we haven’t tailored our product or even our pricing to favor, you know, heavy traders. That’s just not the type of business that we’re seeking. And it’s funny because like you may be following Bitcoin is now in a moment with a bit of a correction. Whenever that happens, our customer base in Brazil is always net positive. People are always buying.

You see the shift in behavior and that illustrates the type of customers that we’re serving. And that has led us to be now the second largest digital assets player in Brazil in terms of number of customers with custody. So the way that we think about that is very aligned with what we’re seeing with our customer base, which is, this is an asset class and there’s a lot of interest on that asset class for people to have that as part of their asset holding. And there’s a lot of value and convenience in being able to have those assets in the same place that you’re banking, that you have your savings, that you have some investments, that you have your credit card, that you have your banking relationship. So that’s a little bit of how we’re thinking about it. Even in the context of the US, our business plan that we’ve submitted to the OCC mentioned that we’re going to have an offer of digital assets. But it should be very similar to what I’m describing here.

PR: Okay. So one of the things I want to ask about is your partnership with OpenAI and we haven’t really talked about AI yet, but, I would love to kind of get your perspective on what that’s maybe just specifically about what that partnership means. What are you building?

CJ: I don’t know if I’d be able to share a lot in terms of what we’re building, but what I can say is we are leaning very heavily into AI across multiple parts of the company. We have a very strong team that we call AI Core that handles not just like all the tooling, but the partnerships with OpenAI and some other companies that we’re partnering with, which is critical. It’s vital for us to be able to use our data to train models, right? Like to be able to use in a safe way, right? In a way that protects us, that protects our IP, that protects our data. So that’s, you know, the core of what we’re doing with OpenAI is ensuring that we have this partnership very clearly established and with the right parameters so that we can use our data in a safe and compliant way. First, to be able to train our models using their infrastructure. Well, we also have a partnership with them. I don’t know if you’ve seen on the news. But we’re partnering with them to be a distribution channel for them in Brazil. So Brazil is a big country in terms of AI adoption, even by consumers. And we have a partnership with OpenAI to distribute ChatGPT 5 to our customer banks, allowing Nubank customers to have up to 12 months for free. So that was very interesting. It’s a very powerful way for them to access a big distribution channel with, you know, 100 plus million customers in Brazil, which is a core market for AI tools. So there’s a lot that we’re doing not just with OpenAI. We’re leaning very heavily. We’re already seeing, David also mentioned on the earnings call last night about some of the AI applications that we’re developing using our own data, you know, advancing our training models for credit underwriting that has allowed us to significantly expand credit in Brazil, which will bring a lot of purchase volume and a lot of interest in bearing balances without compromising the quality of the credit book. So we’re very bullish.

PR: So last question then, you’ve moved to Miami, you’re all in on the US, but what are you most excited about for this new chapter at Nubank?

CJ: I think international expansion is a big thing for us. I think being able to be in the position that we are today, well capitalized, coming from a place of strength, having operated multiple regulated entities and licenses across multiple jurisdictions with great relationships with regulators in all our markets and with a lot of technology, proprietary technology and intellectual capital that we’re able to develop over the past 12 years and being able to bring that here. I think it’s a very interesting opportunity. It’s something that keeps me engaged, keeps me very excited about the future. I usually tell people as far as we’ve come with Nubank, I’m positive there’s a lot more ahead of us than behind us at this stage. We’re just at the beginning and as proud as we are of everything that we’ve achieved, there’s a lot more to come for sure.

PR: Well, you’ve already, you already have achieved quite a lot. Anyway, we’ll have to leave it there, Cris, just a fascinating story of what, what you’ve been able to achieve in the last 12 plus years and, best of luck as you, as you enter the U S market.

CJ: Appreciate it. Thank you so much.

PR: I have been following Nubank since QED invested in their Series A more than a decade ago and have always been impressed by their high level of execution, not to mention their rapid growth. But I was a little surprised that their fourth country was not one of the Latin American countries that Cris mentioned. Having said that, I came away from this interview certain that they are entering the US market with their eyes wide open.

While it is a highly competitive market, it would be naive to think that Nubank can’t be successful here given their track record to date.

Anyway, that’s it for today’s show. If you enjoy these episodes, please go ahead and subscribe, tell a friend or leave a review. And thanks so much for listening.