the Brazil fintech chief shaking up banking | USAEMALL.com

Cristina Junqueira says the meeting that persuaded her to abandon a career with big corporate names and join an insurgent effort to revolutionise banking was an easy sell.

The person making the pitch was David Vélez, a Colombian then working in venture capital, who wanted her to join him as co-founder of a new Brazilian digital banking platform. “People in Brazil and across Latin America thought very high charges, very high interest rates, a dreadful [customer] experience and being treated badly were normal,” she recalls.

Junqueira had recently quit her job after struggling to implement changes at a large Brazilian bank, and a mutual friend had introduced her to Vélez. He saw big opportunities for fintech in Brazil but needed a local partner who knew the country and understood its banking industry.

“The way he saw the financial industry and its problems was very similar to the way I saw it,” says Junqueira, speaking from her office in São Paulo. “He was also unwilling to accept the terrible things that were going on.”

Together with Edward Wible, a young American software engineer, Vélez and Junqueira started Nubank in São Paulo’s affluent Brooklin district in 2013. Their aim was to use bespoke technology to cut costs for customers, offer financial services to millions who had never had access and improve service.

Nubank went live the next year with a zero-fee credit card managed by a mobile app. Its explosive growth over the past decade has made it the biggest digital financial services platform in the world outside Asia, with 114mn clients, including more than 10mn in Mexico and 2.5mn in Colombia.

The company is now worth around $50bn, making Junqueira a paper billionaire thanks to her 2.6 per cent shareholding — as well as a rare example of a high-profile top female Brazilian business executive. Her role at Nubank is now chief growth officer.

“I often like to tell people that in my whole career, I have never had a female boss, ever,” Junqueira says.

When she started out as an intern at consulting firms in Brazil, “I and another girl who joined at the same time were the most senior women in the office because there weren’t any other women — just us.”

Diversity has been a key value for the bank from the start, she says. When Vélez founded Nubank he wanted co-founders and “his first instinct, which was absolutely right, was: ‘I need people who complement me, people who have different experiences to mine’”.

Junqueira brought her experience as a Brazilian executive who had worked in banking and consulting.

The three co-founders are all “very different”, she explains. “From our beginning, we already saw the value of having people who complement each other.” 

She has co-founded a company that has done incredibly well and at the same time juggled a family

Nubank, she says, does not fix hiring quotas for the proportion of historically under-represented groups but it has made big efforts to recruit them. Today, around 43 per cent of its leadership positions are held by women and the company has promoted women in areas such as software development.

Married with four children, Junqueira has also been keen to act as a role model for Brazilian women who want to combine a career and a family. Her husband is in business too, as an executive for a steel company.

Her Instagram account, which has more than half a million followers, features topics such as “The Pregnant Woman is the Most Efficient Mammal on the Planet” and “The Power of Maternity”, along with posts on more conventional corporate subjects such as reputational risk and fear of failure.

She recalls travelling to San Francisco when expecting her first baby to seek Series A funding from venture capital firm Sequoia Capital. “I was seven months pregnant when I arrived there to make the pitch,” she says. “There were some surprised faces but I was treated well . . . two months later my baby was born and I signed the Series A paperwork in the hospital.”

Just three days before her second child was born, she posed for a Forbes Brazil magazine cover, clearly heavily pregnant, and she travelled to New York for Nubank’s 2021 initial public offering when eight months pregnant with her third child. Her fourth was born a few months ago.

“I get very sad when I see the number of women who still think they have to make a choice [between family and career],” she says. “It’s not easy to reconcile the two, I don’t want to pretend that it’s super-easy because it’s not, it’s very difficult. But it’s not impossible.”

Junqueira often receives requests for advice from women who ask about balancing a career and a family, and is happy to oblige. “I have no doubt that communication is one of the most fundamental [qualities of] leadership,” she says. “It’s something that women could invest more [time] in — and that would have quite a big result.”

Susan Segal, president of the Council of the Americas business lobby, describes Junqueira as part of a new generation of Latin American women who balance successful careers with family responsibilities. “She has co-founded a company that has done incredibly well and at the same time she’s juggled a family. She’s a new generation role model for women in Latin America.”

Junqueira describes herself as “mad about Disney” and has a country home full of memorabilia. Her three daughters are named after Disney characters, and the entertainment group’s focus on customer experience was an inspiration for Nubank.

“I know it’s sometimes difficult for people to understand this,” she says on Instagram of her obsession. “For me the first thing is the beauty of the place, the beauty is uncontestable . . . and beauty calms our heart.”

Junqueira’s meteoric Nubank career has not been free of controversy. In a 2020 interview, asked about the bank’s difficulties in finding Afro-Brazilian managers because of stringent technical requirements, she said Nubank could not “level down”.

The remark provoked criticism and Junqueira quickly apologised on LinkedIn, saying she had not expressed herself in the best way. She now describes that as a “very sad episode”, saying that “we continue to believe that there is a lot of talent in all the under-represented groups and we will continue looking for the best talent wherever it is”.

Now 42, Junqueira believes Nubank’s best days still lie ahead. She is convinced of the bank’s potential to export its technology to bring financial inclusion to millions of people in other underbanked nations across the world.

“I really want to see what we will manage to do in the next 20 or 30 years,” she says.