S9E8: Cristina Junqueira is Revolutionizing Digital Banking Services with Nubank

I looked into the senior executives in that organization. I thought to myself, if that's what success looks like, I really don't want to become that. So I quit my job the day that I got the largest bonus of my life, and I took some time to think about what was gonna come next.

Welcome back to Season 9 of The Room Podcast. Claudia, happy Tuesday.

Happy Tuesday, Madison. Thrilled to be back behind the mic with you. Since last season, you've had a few updates on your end. You're now at Harvard Business School. Congratulations.

Thank you so much, Claudia. It's been a dream of mine for some time to attend, and I'm thrilled to be back on the East Coast this fall. You'll have to keep me updated on what's going on in the Bay Area news and all things Pryve, where you're still co-CEO and co-founder.

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Welcome back to the season 9 finale of The Room podcast. We are absolutely thrilled to introduce Cristina Junquería, the co-founder of Nubank, as Madison and I sit down to chat about her founding journey. Nubank, a leading global digital financial services provider catering to over 85 million individuals in Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, is innovating the face of fintech. Nubank utilizes cutting-edge technologies and groundbreaking business strategies to craft innovative financial solutions and user experiences for both individuals and small to medium-sized businesses. These solutions are designed to be straightforward, user-friendly, convenient, accessible, and empowering. Driven by its mission, Nubank is actively promoting access to financial services throughout Latin America and beyond. Nubank went public in December of 2021 and was valued at $45 billion at IPO. Join us as we explore the journey of Nubank from its inception to becoming a company with over 6,000 employees, Changing the face of fintech. With Christina, we discuss themes such as rooting product diversification and innovation in solving customer problems, putting the customer first, and building resilience and adaptability amidst challenges. We hope you enjoy our season 9 finale. Thank you for listening to us this season. 10 is right around the corner. Let's open the door. Chris, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. It's such a pleasure having you here.

Thanks for having me.

Awesome. We like to start at the beginning with our guests. Many years prior to Nubank, you grew up and are now still based in São Paulo, Brazil. Tell us a little bit more about your early upbringing and how that shaped your view of the world.

I was actually raised in Rio, not in São Paulo. I came to São Paulo for college. I really wanted to go to college here. That's where some of the best universities in the country are, and I'm an engineering formation. So that was undergrad and grad school, master's degree at University of São Paulo. And what I wanted in the beginning of my career was to learn a lot and keep my options open. So I started my career at the Boston Consulting Group, with BCG, doing consulting. And as a natural path, it just led me to grad school in the US, got my MBA from Kellogg. And as I was coming back from that, I wanted to transition into an executive role. I wanted to come out of consulting to have a less demanding lifestyle from a travel standpoint. At this point, I was already married, so I wanted to be able to stay home because of my family. And I was hired by one of the big incumbent banks here in Brazil. Through that, I was able to have different roles and run different businesses. But 5 years into it, I looked ahead and I didn't see myself going much further. I was well evaluated. I was well compensated, but the reality is I wanted something that had more meaning. Looking to the senior executives into that organization, I thought to myself, if that's what success looks like, I really don't want to become that. So I quit my job the day that I got the largest bonus of my life, and I took some time to think about what was going to come next. I felt that I was coming to maybe my prime years where I had all this experience. I still had all this energy. And I really wanted to put that to good use. And that was when luckily I met David, who's our CEO and, and founder here at Nubank, that was coming from the VC industry, Madison. So he was working for Sequoia. He was looking to companies to invest in Latin America, and he was looking for something truly original and didn't find anything. And he was very puzzled by the fact that no one was trying to disrupt financial services. No one was trying to use technology or design to do something materially different in that space. So he wanted to do that. I was like, I might as well do this. And he was looking for somebody that had the background, that had operated, that knew the industry, that was a local. And that's how we met. And then I ended up here.

That's an incredible overview of how your career has really shaped you and has taken you on this journey to where you are now, really building a life-changing business that impacts millions of customers. But I think there's a few junctures in your early career and early education that really, I think, set the stage for where you are now. I'm curious, when you were younger, did you think you would always become a founder?

No, not at all. Quite the contrary. I saw myself having a career in a big company, probably. I came into college with that perspective, coming to one of those training programs, maybe, but being recruited by a big company and just following a corporate career. And by the way, when I quit my job, I didn't quit to become a founder. I just thought that a different organization might value my skills more and might put me to better use in a more impactful role. That's what I was looking for. And this was over 10 years ago, keep that in mind. So a lot of this founders and startups wasn't really there, especially not in Latin America and specifically not in Brazil. So it wasn't as glamorous as it seems to be these days, you know, where every kid coming out of college dreams of being a founder. Like, this was actually the crazy thing to do back then.

It was not a tracked path, the glamorized standard way of living, for sure not. But you were looking for ways to scale your impact and do something meaningful. You mentioned that you went to Universidade de São Paulo for both a bachelor's and master's in industrial engineering, and then you went to the US to get your MBA at Kellogg. Very different touchpoints in your education. Tell us a little bit more about why you decided to get an MBA and come to the US.

Yeah, I started my career in consulting, as I mentioned, and within that industry, I guess, there are many people that have MBAs. That's a very regular path, and I was really looking forward to having an international experience as well. I had lived for the most part of my life in Brazil. I had gone abroad for just traveling, but not really had a, a formal experience or a professional experience or any formal education. So I felt that that was a relevant gap for me to fill. And the consulting career kind of puts you in that track of going to business school. So it was a little bit of a natural path that I felt would also open a lot of doors for me. My husband, whom I met working consulting, had gone to business school as well. He went to MIT. 10 years earlier than I did. So I also had that example very close to me, and I felt that it could really be an interesting experience. And in fact, it was. It opened a lot of doors. It facilitated this transition out of consulting, which was something that from a personal standpoint, I was really looking forward to. And I'm glad I did. I feel that the industry has changed a ton. This was over 15 years ago. I, I just came back. This year, for my 15-year reunion from Kellogg. I feel very old saying this.

I just had my 5th-year college reunion and I was shocked. It felt like 5 months. So I'm sure 15 will also feel similarly short. So coming out of Kellogg, you really dove headfirst into fintech. You had mentioned that you were sort of building out credit products, sending them to market, but they weren't products that you were necessarily passionate about. Tell us a little bit more about some of the learnings from the banking and credit sector in LATAM that you collected during this period of time that really helped you gain confidence and conviction that you needed to embark on building something new.

That's a great question. I feel that many of the learnings that I have from those years is about what not to do. And I came out of business school, I had never had a formal management role, and it was my first coming into financial services and coming out of business school. I was a newbie, right? Like, I had a lot to learn, and I was lucky with the roles that I had in which I had relevant autonomy in terms of how to think about the team, how to think about the strategy of the business that I was running. So there was a lot to learn. It wasn't until my 5th year where I was running the largest credit card business that they had that I started to realize that things were really actually off. I was spending all this money to sell these credit cards through telemarketing, and I was barely offsetting the churn. And I was like, something weird here. This looks like a leaky bucket. Why? And the reason why was because customers didn't actually want the product. We're forcing it on them and they really didn't like it, so they would churn. And would spend a lot of money to pretend that we were acquiring customers, but not really. And customers were very unhappy, and we were looking to the economics of that business, and it was like a lot of fees. It wasn't something that customers actually benefited from. And I, I scratched my head and I was like, what if we actually had products that customers wanted? This would look much different, but that just wasn't the way that the industry was built. The industry was built on, we have this product, so we gotta market the hell out of it and get as many customers as possible to buy into it, and then we're gonna make some money. It was much more of a push approach rather than a pull. And I was like, this dynamic is just off. I decided to quit my job after almost a full year working on a revamp of the product portfolio, saying we gotta do things differently, created different products. Until I heard from somebody very senior in the organization, they were like, "No, we don't, never mind. All this revenue that's going down the drain because of churn, we'll just come up with another fee to compensate for the revenue," which was mind-blowing. I was like, "Okay, now I'm positive this is not where I belong.

I gotta go." You have this challenger mindset within an incumbent for a large fintech that already exists, that's providing a service that you're just seeing not meet the needs of the customer base. And I'm hearing a little bit of a sense of disillusionment with the experience.

No, for sure. But you know what? Those are the moments of truth in your life when you come into reality, wide eyes open, right? And, and you just have to face it and you gotta make a decision whether you accept that and you just learn to live with that, or you just go in and change it, or in my case, build something new. I tried to change it, but at some point I realized wasn't gonna get me where I needed to be.

This is a clear pillar of influence for what ultimately has become Nubank. But earlier you were mentioning your co-founder David, who had similarly had some insights around the evolving fintech landscape in LATAM. Could you just marry this moment together between your aha moment within working through your old company and meeting David that ultimately became what is Nubank?

Sure. So the word fintech as we use it today, I don't think it was even coined back then. It didn't exist. So when we first started explaining to people what we were gonna do, they were like, so it's like a bank. We're like, yeah, but not really, but digital, no branches. We're like, yeah. Today is very easy for people to understand the concept of a digital bank or a mobile fintech or whatever. But back then it was something very odd for people because this industry Unlike transportation or hospitality or, you know, entertainment or some of the other ones hadn't been touched by technology. Incoming banks were adopting technology at their own pace. Sometimes, like, if it happens that they could make the customers' lives better, great. But if you didn't, that's fine too. There was no sense of urgency in terms of dramatically changing the customer experience. The opportunity that we saw was precisely that one, was to have the same type of mindset that Netflix had or Amazon coming into the industry and using technology, design, or even data to do things dramatically differently. So yeah, it was something very unusual for people to see, but what we realized was that customers were ready. I remember when we first started, I talked to David about how we would need to spend a lot of money in marketing because people really hated financial institutions, they really hated credit cards. But the reality was as soon as we launched the product, people kept coming back for more. Like, we had this very long waitlist of, first it was a few thousand people, then it was like tens of thousands, 100,000, half a million. People just couldn't wait to have it. And we're like, what the hell is going on? And the reality is that the customer pain was so alive and so painful that as soon as people realized that there was an alternative, they just came. And to this day, over 80% of our customers, and we're serving north of 85 million customers now, but over 80% of them came organically through word of mouth. We spent very little on marketing to date.

That's an incredible statistic on both accounts, both your kind of go-to-market strategy and of course where you are today from a metrics standpoint with your consumer base. And I want to touch on that before we go down that path, though, I want to align because we're talking about a few different things, right? Fintech is a category, neobanks is another vertical, and then of course credit cards. Could you just ground our listeners in what was that initial product that you launched that had those initial first 1,000 signups in Brazil and what really initial core need you were meeting for the Nubank customer?

Sure. So we chose, unlike the vast majority, if not all the digital banks or neobanks everywhere, we chose a very different route. We started with credit cards first. Most of these players all over the world, they start with a debit card and account, but we started with credit cards, which is much harder. In every single aspect because you gotta do credit underwriting, you need capital, you need funding, you, you take risks, right? Like delinquency risks. Everything is harder, but the reality is there was a, a very big need for credit. Also, the relationship that you have with customers is inverted from a trust standpoint. Like we were trusting customers that they would pay us back, whereas when you start with an account and a debit card, customers need to trust you to deposit their money into the account. So that helped us build a brand and, and build trust so that by the time we launched our account product, people were already asking for it. They were like demanding that we would give them an account product and a debit card and a personal loan and everything else that followed. So it was a very different strategy, but that allowed us to build a very strong foundation and customers really enjoyed it. For the first customers that started using the product, when they saw how easy it was, how much better the experience was, how much more transparent we were, how they could finally understand what was happening, where they were spending their money and what they were being charged. They started telling their friends and they started asking us for more, and that's what they do to this day. So every product launch that we have, it's something that customers have been asking us for a while now. So that feeds this virtual cycle of product development.

I, I love this visual of the inverted trust experience with your customer base and just how that brings to life the unique strategy that you were building with Nubank to get in front of these consumers who maybe historically are people that you're maybe a little more anxious to get into business with, given you don't understand specifically, uh, how good of a customer they'll be and what that'll have an impact to your bottom line for. But it ended up being a successful trust-based relationship, having scaled to 85 million customers across 3 major markets today, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. Before we get to the expansion beyond your initial market of Brazil though, I'd love to understand maybe some of the tactics or tips you have for a founder who's also looking to hit an 80% word of mouth strategy on go-to-market. How did you all achieve that and what were some strategies that worked for you?

I think it comes down to principles. We've always believed, you know, the best marketing is a great product. We wanted a product that was so good that it would almost sell itself. We'd much rather invest more on the product side and then have lower CACs. And that's, I think, the majority of what was helping out. Sure, there were tactics here and there. One of the things that I've always told my teams was that our competitors, they have literally billions of dollars in marketing budgets every year, right? I don't think we've spent that much money to date in 10 years. Each one of them will do that every year. So there was no way that we were gonna outspend them. If you had to rely on doing more marketing than he did, we would be screwed. We would be dead before it begun. We needed to outsmart them. We needed to do something that was first very consistent. We couldn't afford to waste a single customer interaction with a single touchpoint that didn't reinforce the brand of the marketing messages that we wanted to convey. So that, that was one thing. And the second thing is like we relied a lot on just earned media. Everything that we did, even from a marketing standpoint, we needed to go at it from an earned media angle first because just buying media for us would be very inefficient. Given how constrained we were.

No, that makes sense.

And it's really helpful to think about the broader landscape of credit card competition. I know myself too, speaking of that word of mouth approach, I actually think all of the credit cards I've ever had as an adult have been recommended from friends. It's something you socially put your card down and, and you go, oh, what's that card? Why did you choose that? And what are those benefits? So I also see some unique kind of viral growth loops within the core product itself. And so expanding that core product beyond the borders of Brazil to Colombia and to Mexico, That's not necessarily the first thing most companies in the US think to do when expanding their market. And so could you speak to that unique experience of building a cross-border business in fintech and specifically what advice you would have for any founder who's also considering this go-to-market strategy?

There's something that we've always been really thoughtful about, which is earning our way into the next thing. That's how we operate. And it's a choice. I understand that different companies might choose differently. Some companies will just expand into every single market they can possibly think of and throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. And that's fine. That works out for them. Like, for us, we always had a very long-term mindset. We wanted to build, like, the right foundations in place. We didn't want to take the next step without being really certain that the previous one was on solid ground. So It took us over 4 years to do our second product, which was the account product in Brazil, and then another at least year for us to do the debit card, which was the next thing after the account product, and so on. We were very thoughtful about that. And the first country that we expanded into was Mexico, and it wasn't until we felt good about Brazil that we actually took that step. We had been thinking about it earlier, And it wasn't the right timing. We didn't feel confident enough about Brazil just yet until we felt that we had earned the right to go do the next thing. That's the advice that I have is make sure that you've earned the right to go do the next thing. At least that's how we think about it.

Earned it, you did. In 2021, you and the Nubank team took your company public at a $41 billion valuation. So first of all, huge congratulations. That's an An incredible milestone for any founder. We are curious, who was that first person who said yes to investing in Nubank?

Great question. It was actually Doug Leone from Sequoia. So he's still a board member. He was our very first investor because David was coming out of Sequoia. He worked for Doug, and when he said, oh, you know what, I'm failing to find an investment for us in South America. But that's not for the lack of opportunity. I see this opportunity very clearly. Unlike myself, David always wanted to be an entrepreneur, always wanted to be a founder, and was like, I'm gonna start this business myself. And Doug was like, wait a minute, if you're gonna start this, maybe I'll throw you some seed money. So that was it. That was the first seed round that we raised was him and, and CASAC Ventures, which is the one Latin America fund that actually existed back then. And it's formed by the guys that came out of Melly. They had started their own VC fund. It was much earlier stage than they are now. They're very successful to date. So Doug put in $1 million in seed money and the Cassette guys put another million dollars and it took us, I don't know, maybe 6 months to even get our hands in that money because of all the bureaucracy of setting up the company and getting the money into Brazil and producing the bylaws and everything else. So we bootstrapped our way to getting there. Like it was our own money and everything. but it was mostly Doug. It was the first one.

That's an incredible story. And in normal circumstances, that is the most important thing going on in someone's life while they're fundraising for their first round. But in your instance, I believe we read that you were actually also expecting your first child during this process. So you were juggling many things. And just to maybe put a point on it, we read that you had expected your third child while you were IPOing. And so, We'd love to speak to that unique experience about funding a company, building a company while also building a family.

Yeah, I could go on for hours on this one because that's a very interesting and unique perspective of the journey that I've had. Well, David as well, he's the father of 4, and I'll give you one story. So when we met, he was single, right? Like he didn't even have a girlfriend and I was already married. So Alice, my first child, she was born. When we launched the company in Brazil, so a year into working together, and when we were raising our Series A. So I actually signed the papers for our Series A at a hospital because we were closing that week. And I was pitching to Sequoia in the letter for Series A while I was maybe 7 months pregnant. So we flew to California. It was a special moment to see a pregnant pitch. So that happened. And so my firstborn was born. He was still single, right? He met his wife, got engaged, got married, had Lorenzo, his firstborn, had Valentina. He was pregnant with Matteo, his third child, and I was still yet to be pregnant of my second child. It was all very intense for both of us on the family side. But yes, I didn't have a choice. Right? I wanted a family and I couldn't wait because otherwise for us women, it's just trickier. There's such a thing as a biological clock ticking and I just had to make it work. I didn't want to choose. And of course I made local trade-offs, right? The reality is that Alice, my firstborn, she was born on a Wednesday. I came out of the hospital on a Saturday and by Monday I was already working. I was already going to the office. Like I had a C-section, so I still had stitches on me and I was just doing what I had to do.

That's a really impactful story. I know both for Claudia and myself personally as two women who hope to someday have families, and then also I'm sure for our listener base who might be asking these questions slightly more in real time than Claudia and I are around family planning and how to think about that, but still not taking a step back in a career that you care a lot about and a mission that is so clearly a part of who you are and what you've been able to build with Nubank. So we do appreciate you sharing that unique story as well. I'm gonna pass the mic off to Claudia shortly here, but I just have one more burning question on the IPO side of things. What a journey to go through an IPO in 2021. I'm sure that was specifically a really interesting year to roadshow, um, especially since the IPO markets have been predominantly closed basically since that year. I'm really curious to hear any funny behind the scenes stories you could share or insights for founders who are perhaps gearing up to IPO this coming year?

So many stories. First, as you mentioned, the market has been closed since. We felt a little bit like one of those Indiana Jones movies in which you slide through the door that is like closing on you. That was us. We were probably the last IPO of that season, and it was great timing because we came into everything else that came, this big winter for tech, very well capitalized. Where many of the other companies out there are struggling. They're unprofitable, they're having to reduce burns, they're shedding a bunch of headcount, they're having to make massive layoffs, they're having to do down rounds. So we didn't have to go through any of that. So we were very lucky as well with the timing and everything. It was also, we knew an IPO would come, but coming into it at the, I guess at the end of the pandemic was, interesting to say the least, like very unique. So roadshow was almost exclusively via Zoom. We were in New York, but we were mostly like in this room having Zoom calls. So we probably broke the record of how many meetings we had on a roadshow altogether, because it must have been like 15, 16, sometimes 17 meetings a day for 2 full weeks. So the good news is that it was very productive because we didn't have to travel and to go like in between meetings across the city. But it was very intensive and I was 8 months pregnant, so that was also very tricky.

Incredibly impressive. Just having fundraised in the pandemic for a seed round, having maybe 5 meetings a day, I can attest to how 17 is mind-blowing and exhausting. We chatted a little about the product-market fit that Nubank found, you fundraising, building a family at the same time, and we know a founder's journey is just full of highs and lows. Maybe, Cris, could you share a little bit more about a moment in Nubank's life cycle where things just didn't go as planned?

Sure. So there were many things that didn't go as planned, but having said that, I feel that we were very privileged. We had a lot going for us. We saw traction very early on. We saw product-market fit very early. We had great investors that shared our long-term view. We had a good board that wasn't all over us that we needed to respond to. We made great choices. We had a great team. The fact that the three founders are still here 10 years after together, that in itself is a very odd case that we survived together that long. So I feel that we were very lucky. I feel that we were one of the few companies that didn't have such dire situations. To come out of. Having said that, one that we can name, so being in the financial services space, it's a very regulated space. So, one of the risks that we've always had very high on our lists was regulatory risk. And there was a moment in which here in Brazil, very early on in our journey, that the government considered changing regulation in a way that would require us overnight to have access to billions of dollars in funding because they would change the settlement cycles for credit cards. And that would've meant, if not the end of the company, but a very big adjustment. And it was a very tough moment to live through. We, of course, went to the mattresses and did everything that we possibly could. We reached out to the regulator, reached out to the executive branch, and educated them on the unintended consequences of such measure. We worked the press, we worked opinion makers. We had to even address customers at some point because at some point this got to the press and the way that we could be impacted. So customers were really upset. And the beautiful thing that we saw was actually customers rallying behind us and supporting us through it and actually pressuring the authorities not to make a hasty move that would mean the end of the company. So that was a, a very special moment that we lived through. To tell the story.

Thank you for sharing that. It's a very unique and incredibly powerful moment to realize that your customers are your advocates in making political change and system-wide change. Thank you for sharing that. As we look a little bit forward to all that is to come with Nubank, I'd love to dig a little bit into what's next from a product roadmap standpoint. Nubank provides financial platforms across digital accounts, credit cards, loans, business banking, investments, and more, as we've discussed. We hear that there might be whispers around secure lending in Brazil. Tell us more what your customers should be excited to expect.

Secured lending specifically is something that we're very excited about. It's a big market, and it's a beautiful thing because it aligns incentives very well because customers can have access to credit at much lower rates. And that, of course, can be very transformational for people. And we get to pass a lot of the efficiencies that we have from our low cost to serve model into those customers without having to take a lot of risk on the delinquency side. So it, it works really well. It's something that we're very excited about. It's a huge profit pool. It serves tens of millions of people in the country. So it's something that we're super bullish on for sure. But it's not the only thing. The reality is that we are young. As a company, again, we launched in Brazil, which is our oldest market, 9 years ago, more or less. So there are many products that we're yet to build for our customers, right? Many different types of secured loans, or even if you think about it, mortgages or auto loans or pension funds. There are many more like sophisticated products that we're yet to offer. So there's a lot of room for us to continue growing the product portfolio in Brazil and to continue to deepen the relationships that we have with the over 80 million customers that we have in the country. Credit cards, which is our oldest product, we enjoy 11 to 12% market share. Everywhere else, it's low one digits. It's like 1% here, 2% here, 4%, because those are very young products. They're still maturing and growing. So there's a lot of room for growth. And when we look into Mexico and Colombia, of course, there's a lot of room for us to take all these products there in the first place. Mexico only has credit card and we We just launched the conta product, the account product with the debit card. We're preparing to do that in Colombia later this year, and there's so much more that can come after that. So there's a lot to be excited about in Valishaban.

I think what's incredibly interesting as well is Nubank has this unique POV from a macroeconomic standpoint where you're understanding boots on the ground what consumers are needing from a financial perspective. I'm curious, what trends are you seeing from your customer base, especially over the past year as the global economy is shifting, and how has that impact what products your customers are leveraging?

I believe the pandemic accelerated a lot of the trends that we're already seeing across the globe. Digitalization as a whole, people shedding everything that is physical cash. The use of cash is rapidly declining. In Brazil specifically, where we have a fairly advanced instant payment infrastructure as well as open banking infrastructure that is now growing and, and being expanded. There's a lot of potential for us to also leverage that, the type of data from customers that they now have the power to share with whomever they choose. I think a combination of that and just much more, in our case, right, like much more modern tech infrastructure can be very powerful in terms of widening access to credit and to better products that are much more efficient for customers. We certainly can see a lot of that accelerating. Other than that, the next big thing is just AI, which should allow us to customize a lot what customers see and personalize a lot of the interfaces that they're seeing and the exact build that they're gonna be able to enjoy. Ideally abstract a lot of the complexity, the intrinsic complexity from financial services away and make sure that they have access to better advice. So that they can better understand what's happening with their money and be in control of their financial lives in a way that serves them much better. So there's a lot. It's a very interesting moment to look into the future.

It's certainly clear with the mission that you and Nubank have. We're a decade in, but certainly only getting started. And I think there's been a bit of recognition across your journey for how important this mission is and how much you are doing to further the fintech ecosystem and really democratize access to capital in LATAM. You are number 1 on the top 100 women in fintech list. So first of all, congratulations. How do you think about the future of female leadership in fintech, especially in regions like LATAM, and really what we can be doing to continue to help women achieve leadership positions in finance?

That's one of many recognitions that we were lucky to receive here at Nubank. And we really enjoy getting some of that recognition because it's a testament to the work of everyone that has been putting in a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into serving all these customers and to building something that is dramatically different. We're especially proud of some of the recognition that comes from customers. And I was just in Mexico the other day, and we were elected, I believe, the best bank in Mexico for the second time. And we're not even a bank, like it's Same thing in Brazil. I believe in Brazil, like, constantly we get some of those recognitions, and especially touching when it comes from customers. Now, as far as female leadership, of course, that's something that is very dear to us. I believe that the statistics that we have, Yvie, keep me honest here, but I believe at Nubank today we have 45% of the staff is women, and north of 42% of the leadership positions are taken by women. Those are very good numbers when you compare to both the financial services space as well as the technology space, which is where we're at. So, I think there's a lot of room for us to see that happening more and more across different companies. There's nothing intrinsically special about us that we're able to get to those levels and that other companies wouldn't be able to. I do expect that, that progress can be shared more broadly over the next few years. Only good things can come out of that, right? Of having teams and especially leadership that is more representative of the population that we're serving.

And certainly stories like yours help to spread the word and also be that impact realized for others. And then of course, through the work that you're doing with Nubank by helping provide increased access to credit, banking, and other features, you're only further empowering the customer base in which you serve. So, it's really incredible to get to share a bit about your story and the journey of building Nubank over these last 10 years. We have our hero question now that we love to ask all of our guests. That hero question is, who is a woman in your life that has had a profound impact on you and your career?

That's a great question. I've never really had any mentors or I, I've never had a female boss in my career and It's been hard to find some of those role models. And the other thing is I've learned through the years not to put people on those pedestals, because the reality is we're all human. And sure, we have things that we can learn from almost anyone, but we're all flawed. And sometimes it's easy to look up to someone and to assume that they're perfect because we believe that they're so great in one dimension. And then when we find out they're just human and there's things that they do that we disagree with, And then we throw everything in the trash and we don't buy anything else that the person is saying. So I think it's tricky. Having said all that, I believe that some figures that I, over the years, I've drank from, I think Sheryl Sandberg is one. I understand that she's had a trajectory that has had ups and downs, but when I was coming out of the incumbent bank that I mentioned to you and coming into this, she was launching her first book, Lean In. And it was a very powerful message for me at that moment. I'm a big fan of Melinda Gates. I feel the, the work that she's done in philanthropy is amazing, and she has had a tremendous impact for the past few decades. I'm a big fan of Michelle Obama as well. I feel that the way she's raised her children with the life that she's had is remarkable, and that's something that I admire deeply. But that's how I think about it. I try to to bring in a little bit of everyone, try to learn what I can from everyone that crosses my way, you know.

It's an important reminder that we can be inspired by people both close to us and far from us with incredible storytelling and real-life examples. I believe all the women you mentioned are upfront about some of the challenges they faced and shed light on those experiences for all of us here today in this room that we can resonate with and move forward. So hopefully this conversation and some of the incredible stories you shared, Chris, will inspire our listeners equally. So thank you so much for spending the time with us today here on The Room.

Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Thank you so much for joining us at The Room Podcast. If you want more from The Room every week, subscribe to our newsletter at theroompodcast.com/newsletter. We'll be back next week with a new episode Tuesday, 10:00 AM Eastern, 7:00 AM Pacific. See you in The Room.

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