Part IThe Story
Months for a Credit Card
The co-founder of the largest digital bank in the Western Hemisphere could not get a credit card.
This was in Miami, after Cristina Junqueira landed there with her husband, Rubens Pereira, and their four children in tow. She was in the city to build a bank. Before she could build one, she had to use one, and so she did what wealthy newcomers do. She went to the private banking division of a major American institution, the velvet-roped tier of the industry where clients are supposed to be spared the queue, and she asked for a card. "That took months," she told Bloomberg in an interview in Miami on March 2. She did not name the bank. She did not need to. The point was not the institution. The point was the wait.
Consider what she was carrying into that waiting room. Forbes had counted her among the world's billionaires, twice. Her stake in Nu Holdings, a company trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker NU, had been worth $1.3 billion on its first day of trading. The firm she co-founded in a rented house in São Paulo in 2013 had issued its first purple card on the promise that a Brazilian could apply for credit, check a balance, raise a limit, block a stolen card, and reach a human being without ever entering a branch. Its customers had once begged to be let off its waitlist, which was not something anyone in Latin American banking had heard before. Now the woman who designed so much of that experience was on the other side of a waitlist, in a foreign country, holding a phone, being told to wait some more.
There is a certain kind of person for whom this would be humiliating. Junqueira seems to have found it clarifying. The ordeal, as she put it, "was a reminder of why she came to the US in the first place."
— Cristina Junqueira, to Bloomberg, in MiamiWe know how to solve these problems.
Five words, and the whole biography is folded inside them. We know. It is the voice of an engineer, a consultant, a former card-portfolio manager at Itaú Unibanco, the largest private bank in Brazil, who spent five years learning exactly how the machinery of consumer credit was rigged against the consumer and then quit. How to solve. It is the voice of a woman who, by her own account, has always been "one of those people who complain, who ask to speak to the supervisor, who demand their rights and who don't give up until the right thing is done." Kellogg's alumni magazine, writing about her in the spring of 2021, called its feature "Entrepreneurship from Outrage." The headline was more precise than alumni-magazine headlines usually are.
Most founders tell a story about a gap in the market. Junqueira's story is about a grievance, and the grievance is personal, and it keeps recurring. She was the aggrieved customer in Brazil in the early 2010s, paying for services she never asked for. She was the aggrieved insider at Itaú, proposing fixes that went nowhere. She was the aggrieved mother-to-be signing term sheets during labor. And here she was again, more than a decade and some 135 million customers later, the aggrieved immigrant in Miami. In September 2025, Nubank filed with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for a national bank charter. The conditional approval came in January 2026, 121 days later. On March 4, 2026, Inter Miami CF announced that its new stadium at Miami Freedom Park would be called Nu Stadium. It was a name almost nobody in the stands would yet recognize. "In many ways," she wrote that spring, "building in the US feels familiar."
Familiar is the word to hold onto. Everything Junqueira has built began with a woman standing in a line she thought should not exist.
By the Numbers
The Purple Machine
135MNu customers across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia by Nubank's 13th anniversary
2.9%Junqueira's stake in Nu Holdings at the December 2021 IPO
$45BNubank's valuation after first-day trading on December 9, 2021
90Nubank's reported Net Promoter Score, nearly 3x incumbents
$2.9BNu Holdings net income in 2025, after losses through 2022
121 daysFrom OCC application to conditional U.S. charter approval
43%Share of Nubank employees who were women in 2020
The Eldest Daughter Does the Shopping
"I remember being 11 years old and doing grocery shopping for the month," Junqueira once told TechCrunch. "I did everything very young."
The family arithmetic explains it. She was born in September 1982 in Ribeirão Preto, the old coffee capital in the interior of São Paulo state, and carried as an infant to Rio de Janeiro. She was the eldest of four sisters. Both her parents were dentists who, as she remembers it, were always working to keep the practice going. In a house like that, the oldest daughter becomes a kind of deputy, a junior operations officer handed the list, the money, and the responsibility for returning with the right things and the right change. It is not a romantic origin. It is a logistical one. And logistics, it would turn out, was the thing she was good at.
She was educated at a Jesuit school in Rio's Botafogo district, the sort of institution that runs on discipline and examination. In 2000 she moved to São Paulo by herself to enroll at the Universidade de São Paulo, sharing an apartment with three other women, and studied engenharia de produção at the Escola Politécnica. The English translation is industrial engineering, which sounds dry. The thing itself is the study of how work moves through a system, where it piles up, where it is wasted, and what happens to the person at the end of the line. A grocery list for a household of six is a small supply chain. She had been running one since she was 11.
She graduated in 2004, after internships at Unibanco and at Booz Allen Hamilton, and went to work as an associate consultant at the Boston Consulting Group in São Paulo, where she stayed for nearly three years while finishing a master's degree in economic and financial modeling at USP, completed in 2006. BCG supplies the first truly vivid scene of her adult life. She recalls working on one project for six months straight without taking a single day off. Eventually she went to her boss and told him she needed to sleep, that she literally could not go on. "I made a pile out of paper on the floor to use as a pillow," she said, "and he let me sleep for two hours."
Paper pillow, consultant's floor, a boss who granted two hours. The picture is comic and a little grim, and she offers it without self-pity, the way a former athlete describes a broken bone. Then she drew the conclusion that every founder eventually draws about their past: "My whole life has been training for a startup."
That line is retrospective, of course. Nobody pulling all-nighters at BCG in 2005 knows they are in training for anything. Still, the pattern in her early life is consistent: enormous quantities of responsibility arriving early, accepted without much complaint about the load, though with plenty of complaint about the system that produced it.
It is worth pausing on the sisters, because one of them later turned up on a stage beside her. On June 2, 2025, at VTEX Day in São Paulo, Junqueira appeared publicly with her sister Thaís Junqueira, a finance director at Microsoft, for the first time. They talked about leadership. Cristina said feedback "has to come from a place of help and not of criticism." Thaís added the line an older sister might once have given a younger one: "If you're not getting feedback, you'd better ask for it. It's not perfect." Two daughters of a pair of dentists from Rio, one running growth at a bank with more than a hundred million customers, the other running numbers at a global technology company, sitting side by side and discussing how to tell people the truth. The girl who did the monthly shopping had not been the only one paying attention.
Trying to Turn the Titanic
In 2007 Kellogg admitted her to its MBA program in Evanston, Illinois. She graduated in 2008 and came home to a Brazilian banking industry that was in the process of becoming even more concentrated.
The return had a strange formality to it. At the time, Unibanco's president, Pedro Moreira Salles, was personally interviewing Brazilians fresh out of American MBA programs, the way an old family institution might pick its future officers. Junqueira was one of the people he saw. Given a choice, she took what one Brazilian account calls, with some bemusement, an area of little visibility that posted bad results every year: insurance for small and medium-sized businesses. She went in as a superintendent, a leader in a part of the bank nobody was competing to run.
This choice comes up again later, so it is worth noting now. Ambitious people back from American business schools usually want the visible jobs, the ones with large budgets and wide audiences. She picked the losing unit, where the problems were plain to see and nobody would mind if someone tried to fix them.
Then the ground moved. In 2009 Unibanco merged with Banco Itaú to create Itaú Unibanco, one of the largest private banking groups in the Southern Hemisphere. Junqueira became a portfolio manager in the merged bank's credit card department, and that same year moved to LuizaCred, a consumer-credit joint venture between Itaú Unibanco and the retailer Magazine Luiza, where she was head of marketing and products from 2009 to 2012. LuizaCred is the kind of operation that rarely gets mentioned in a founder's origin story: store credit, installment plans, the financial machinery attached to a chain selling refrigerators and televisions to the Brazilian middle class. It was also, quietly, a lesson in what Brazilian consumers actually do with credit and what it costs them.
Magazine Luiza belonged to Luiza Trajano, who matters to this story later on. Trajano built the chain into one of the country's great retailers and became, for years, the only Brazilian woman on the Forbes billionaires list who had made her money rather than inherited it. In 2018 she told the BBC that she had nearly been attacked, "even by women," for defending gender quotas in companies. She is blunt and impatient with polite consensus. Junqueira, as it happens, is cut from similar cloth.
By 2012 Junqueira was back at Itaú Unibanco, managing the Itaúcard portfolio, by Forbes's description the bank's largest credit-card division. She was near the center of a market that a few institutions controlled almost entirely. Five banks (Itaú, Bradesco, Santander, Banco do Brasil, and Caixa) held about 80 percent of it. They earned enormous profits on loan interest and fees, and their service was poor. Some of them charged customers a monthly fee for text-message alerts about their own card purchases. Junqueira was the person administering products like that.
"I never understood why we had to force people to sign up for these horrible services," she told Forbes. "Customers hated them."
So she tried to change them from the inside. She proposed credit cards without the usual commissions and fees. She proposed communicating with customers clearly. According to her interviews, none of it was adopted. Years later, describing that period, she reached for the obvious metaphor. She had spent years, she said, trying to get the Titanic to change direction. That kind of frustration usually ends in one of two ways: people give up on the idea, or they give up on the institution.
— Cristina Junqueira, to Fortune, 2019I worked for the largest incumbent bank in Brazil for five years, and I was just done making rich people richer. 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.'
One account, the sort of detail that tends to get polished with each retelling, says she quit in 2013 right after receiving the largest bonus of her career. I can't confirm the timing from her own words. If it's true, it's a neat bit of symbolism: the incumbent pays its talented manager her best reward ever, and she takes it as confirmation that she should go. Even if it's only partly true, the logic holds. The bank was very good at paying people. It was not willing to change.
"I'm often asked why I left a solid career in the Brazilian banking sector to work with two foreigners to disrupt this same industry," she wrote in 2025. "It's precisely because I saw, from the inside, everything that could be done better."
Sixty Days and Ten Books
Before David Vélez, before the house in Brooklin and the purple card, there were about two months of reading.
She described them later on LinkedIn. Having resigned, and a few months before she met the people she would build Nubank with, she spent "about two months reading as many books as possible, talking to people to define what I wanted for my next five years." The experience, she said, was almost as valuable as a second MBA.
The reading list, which Nubank later published on its blog, is interesting because of what kind of list it is. Someone imagining a future bank founder might expect books on banking history, payments infrastructure, or monetary policy. There are none. What she read was closer to the curriculum of a person trying to decide who to become. Richard Bolles's What Color Is Your Parachute?, the standard American career-change manual. Donald Asher's Who Gets Promoted, Who Doesn't, and Why, which argues that competence and results are often not enough to advance. J.T. O'Donnell's Careerealism. Claudio Fernández-Aráoz's Great People Decisions, on hiring. Patrick Lencioni's The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Larry Bossidy's Execution. Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In. And two books by Malcolm Gladwell.
The two Gladwells point in different directions, which seems fitting. Blink is about when to trust a snap judgment, the instant read of a situation that a lifetime of experience makes possible. Outliers argues more or less the opposite case about success: that there is no such thing as purely self-made, and that where you come from, your family, your schooling, your culture, and your timing explain most of what gets credited to genius. She read the book that dismantles the idea of the self-made person in 2013. In 2021 Forbes would list her as Brazil's second self-made female billionaire.
The habit of reading as a way of thinking things through stayed with her. More than a decade later, asked by McKinsey for book recommendations, she chose Shane Parrish's Clear Thinking ("I genuinely recommend this one to almost everyone I meet") and Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation, a book for parents worried about their children and screens, which was relevant for a mother of four. When Bloomberg asked for its annual list, she picked something more surprising: Matthew McConaughey's Poems and Prayers, which she recommended in the audiobook version because McConaughey narrates it himself. "I truly resonate with the belief that the world is in need of more poems and prayers," she wrote. A fintech executive recommending a movie star's devotional verse is a little funny, and she seemed unbothered by that. At VTEX Day 2025 she moderated a panel with Parrish and handed out purple caps printed with Foco no seu, roughly "focus on your own." The crowd loved it.
The two months ended with an introduction. Brazilian accounts say she met Vélez almost by chance. She remembers it differently, or at least with more weight: "About thirteen years ago," she wrote in 2026, "David Vélez invited me to the most important meeting of my life."
Three Passports, One Bathroom
David Vélez Osorno was the outsider in the story, the Colombian who had grown up between Colombia and Costa Rica and came to Brazil without belonging to any of its circles. He had a bachelor's degree in management science and engineering and an MBA, both from Stanford, plus stints in investment banking and growth equity at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and General Atlantic. He was a partner at Sequoia Capital responsible for Latin America, and he ran into a problem that most venture capitalists would never acknowledge: he could not find any companies in the region that he wanted to back. After a frustrating encounter of his own with Brazil's banking system, he decided to start one himself. Sequoia's later account of the company calls it "a literal David vs. Goliath story," which is the sort of pun only an investor could enjoy.
Vélez knew what he lacked. He was not an engineer and he was not Brazilian. His investors told him to recruit two people to cover those gaps. The first was Edward Wible, an American with a computer science degree who had spent most of his career in private equity. Wible did not have years of coding behind him, but he had what Vélez valued more, a strong belief in the product and an equally strong commitment to building it. He would be chief technology officer for eight years. In April 2021 he stepped back from that role to work more directly on the company's systems and infrastructure as Director of Technological Platforms, the founder's version of asking to be sent back to the workshop.
The second role was harder to define, and it went to Junqueira. TechCrunch later laid out the requirements: someone who combined knowledge of the Brazilian market and local savvy with banking expertise, who also believed in a Silicon Valley-style focus on the customer, and who was willing to work in São Paulo for minimal pay in a small office with one bathroom, betting that the equity would be worth something someday. That is a lot to ask of one person. She checked every box.
There was a question of credit even then. "Once someone said I was the glue of the operation, and that someone else was the brains," she told TechCrunch.
— Cristina Junqueira, to TechCrunch, 2021And I said, 'No, I'm the glue and the brains, and I bet my brain is even better than his.'
The anecdote is funny, and it is also pointed. "Glue" is a compliment that keeps a person in her place. It is the label given to whoever holds things together while someone else gets credit for the strategy. She turned it down plainly.
Nubank was founded on May 6, 2013. Its first headquarters was a small house in the Brooklin neighborhood of São Paulo, which everyone came to call the Casinha, the little house. It turned out to be useful for hiring. "We joked that the first employee screening took place as soon as the candidates arrived at the Casinha," she wrote on the company's tenth anniversary. "Some turned around and walked away. Those who remained really believed in what we were building." The building itself did the first round of interviews.
The three of them split everything a company needs done. Junqueira leased the office space. She worked on the website. And she handled the phone. "If somebody called our customer service line," she said, "it would ring on my cellphone." In practice that meant at any hour. In the earliest days of what would become one of the largest digital banks in the world, the entire customer service department was one woman's mobile phone.
They called it Nu. In Portuguese the word sounds like "new" and also means "naked," a deliberate statement about transparency in an industry known for hiding fees. Sequoia later noted that the vision in the seed pitch deck was carried out almost exactly as written over the following decade. The only thing that changed was the name. Even so, the seed money took more than six months to actually arrive. Brazil, Junqueira pointed out in a 2018 column, ranked 125th out of 190 countries in the World Bank's "Doing Business" index. Starting a company there meant waiting on a lot of things.
Contractions
She was pregnant with her first daughter during the founding year, and the accounts of what happened don't fully agree. That disagreement is telling in its own way.
Vogue Brasil, interviewing her in 2017, said that in 2013 she went into labor in the middle of a meeting, answered emails between contractions in the maternity ward, and was back at work a week after her daughter Alice was born. Fortune, in its 2020 "40 Under 40," said she signed Nubank's first round of investment documents in the hospital while in labor. Estadão, writing in December 2021, said that in 2014, seven months pregnant with her first daughter, she flew to the United States to close the bank's first major round of funding. In September 2014 Nubank announced $14.3 million from Sequoia, Kaszek Ventures, and Nicolas Berggruen, Sequoia's first investment in Brazil. Junqueira herself, writing in Marie Claire in 2018, said only that her daughter was born in the same month they launched the business, "but that story I'll tell another time."
I can't reconcile the dates and won't pretend to. What all of the versions agree on is this: in the year she was founding a bank, a woman raised venture capital while visibly pregnant, in a room full of investors who were almost all men, and closed the deal. Fortune described her as "a model of success in the face of gender bias and discrimination as a woman raising venture capital while pregnant." She did not frame it as triumph.
"It was hard," she told Vogue. "I did what I had to do at that moment, but I'm not proud of it. Some things could have been different."
That sentence is unusual for a founder. The usual version of this story is pure heroics: the emails between contractions, the return after a week, the deal signed from the hospital bed. She allowed some of that, and then added the second half that most founders leave out. I'm not proud of it. Over the following years she would build a company with maternity programs designed so that the next woman would not face the same situation.
The product launched in 2014. The first transaction on a Nubank card took place on April 1, 2014, April Fools' Day, and according to her own later account, it failed. The first swipe of the card meant to fix Brazilian banking was declined. They fixed whatever was wrong and kept going.
What followed was the waitlist. Nubank's card was an international Mastercard with no annual fee, managed entirely from an app, at a time when that was rare in Brazil. Demand was so heavy that the company could not approve people fast enough, and prospective customers started pleading online to be let in. By 2017 there had been more than 2 million applications. Only applicants judged to be good payers received the small purple card in the mail. The interest rates, Vogue reported, were up to five times lower than the market average. That same year the company hit a milestone its founders had not expected until 2019.
Junqueira had a specific model in mind. Her goal was to build a bank as popular as Disney. Most people's experience of banks in Brazil involved standing in lines, and the joke about Disney is that it charges people to stand in lines and they come back happy. She wanted the happiness without the line.
By early 2017 the Casinha was gone. Nubank had 360 employees in a building at the corner of Avenida Rebouças and Rua Capote Valente in Pinheiros, with a food truck at the door, graffiti on the walls, foosball tables, and an average employee age of 26. Junqueira was 33. The company had raised close to $100 million in three years, most of it from Sequoia. Visitors found it looked like anything but a card issuer. That was intentional.
A Bank for People Who Ask for the Supervisor
Here is the line from her 2018 Marie Claire column in full, since nearly everything else in this section follows from it: Eu mesma sempre fui daquelas que reclamam, que pedem pra falar com o supervisor, que exigem seus direitos e que não desistem até que o que é certo seja feito. "I myself was always one of those people who complain, who ask to speak to the supervisor, who demand their rights and who don't give up until the right thing is done."
In most companies, customers like that are treated as a cost. Call-center scripts are designed to wear them down. Junqueira built a company where people like her set the standard. "Invariably," she continued, "much of this non-conformity is in Nubank's DNA." When the company later listed its core values, inconformismo (non-conformity) was one of five, alongside love for customers, responsibility, efficiency, and teamwork.
The clearest example comes from Sequoia's account of the company's early years. At one point Nubank failed to send customers the payment reminders it had promised, and some customers were charged late fees as a result. Strictly speaking, the fees were owed, since the customers had paid late. Nubank refunded them anyway, absorbing the hit to its profits because the mistake that led to the late payments had been its own. Sequoia described it as one of the company's defining moments: the point at which employees and customers both learned that the values were "not just marketing speak." It is the opposite of the monthly text-alert fee she had once been required to sell.
Decisions like that one became a growth model. According to a 2025 analysis by WhiteSight, Nubank added close to 13 million customers a year on average from 2015 onward, with about 80 percent of that growth coming from word-of-mouth referrals. Its Net Promoter Score sat around 90, nearly three times that of incumbents. In a podcast with Turner Novak, Junqueira explained how Nubank spent essentially nothing on marketing for most of its history. Instead of advertising budgets, there was service: 94 percent of customer calls answered in under 45 seconds, mostly resolved on the first contact by in-house agents the company calls "Xpeers," who are allowed to send small gifts, the "Nu WOWs," when a conversation with a customer goes especially well. The money other banks spent persuading people to sign up, Nubank spent treating its existing customers well enough that they recruited others.
Then there was the card itself. When Nubank redesigned it in 2018, the launch earned a Guinness world record for the largest unboxing. That was an absurd record for a bank to hold, and it was probably the only bank that could plausibly have set it. The card had become something people were excited to receive in the mail.
The company also moved slowly, which is not what the hypergrowth story suggests. For years it sold essentially one product. Its loyalty program and its digital account, NuConta, arrived in 2017. Debit came in late 2018. Personal loans were tested with a small group of account holders in early 2019. Junqueira later described a deliberate patience about new products. In her ten-year letter she put it this way: "We need to have the discipline to say many nos, to be able to have the right to get it right."
The hardest test was regulatory. In the Novak podcast she described an "existential regulatory surprise," a rule change that threatened to end the company. Sequoia's account says that the leadership chose to be fully honest with employees, admitting they did not have all the answers rather than offering reassurance they could not back up. The broader approach to regulators, as Sequoia summarized it, was for Nubank to be "the kid in the front row" getting A+ grades, the student who sits in the front and turns in perfect homework. It is an interesting position for a company whose cultural identity is non-conformity. They broke with the industry, not with the authorities.
All of this came together in a rule Junqueira gave Época Negócios, which may be the best summary of how she runs things:
— Cristina Junqueira, to Época Negócios (translated)If someone asks what you do here, you say: 'I do what's needed.' If someone asks, 'Who do you report to?' you say: 'I answer to whoever asks.' Those are the rules. They apply to my team and they apply to me.
I answer to whoever asks. This is the customer-service phone ringing in the Casinha, turned into company policy.
You Can't Dream of What You Can't See
"I grew up in the financial market and never had a female boss," she said. "I could never look up and have a female reference. My generation didn't have these references, and now we are starting to have them. It's a very big responsibility that I feel."
The world she came from was one of suits, worn, as she put it to Quartz, "just to fit in." "Looking back at my corporate career, I remember how tough it was to work in those predominantly male environments," she said. "At Nubank I was determined to create a working environment without all the stupid barriers that are very detrimental to women's career development."
"Stupid barriers" is not the language of diversity reports, and the specifics behind it are concrete. Nubank recruited female software developers through an event called "Yes, She Codes!" It used blind recruitment to reduce gender bias in hiring. It ran a mentoring program for women leaders that included discussion groups on unconscious bias, and a program to keep new mothers connected during maternity leave, which is a structural answer to the woman who once returned to work a week after giving birth. By 2020, 43 percent of Nubank's employees were women. In engineering the figure was 20 percent, and that was considered good. Women held 30 percent of senior roles, against 8 percent across the sector. "Many of the structural choices we've made in terms of gender equality and inclusion," she told Quartz, "are reflective of the fact that I have been here from the beginning."
That last clause matters. It is an argument about where a founder sits. When a woman is present from the first day, the policies get written differently from the start instead of being added on later.
She did not seek the visibility that came with this. "Despite having always valued privacy a great deal," she wrote in Marie Claire in 2018, she had to find a way to handle being in the public eye, because so few Brazilian founders, and even fewer women in finance and technology, were known by name. She paraphrased a familiar line from American business writing: people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it, "and I understood that I have a very important role in that why." By 2023 she had more than half a million LinkedIn followers and a third of a million on Instagram, and she was answering questions from thousands of women about how to balance a career and a family, or how to handle a job interview. The woman who valued her privacy had made herself into the example she never had.
In 2020 Fortune noted that Nubank, by then valued at more than $10 billion, was the only female-founded company to reach that size. She was the only Brazilian on that year's "40 Under 40." She was 37.
She has three daughters, Alice, Bella, and Anna, and by the time she moved to Miami a fourth child.
— Cristina JunqueiraI want my daughters to grow up in a world where they can dream of being whoever they want to be — and you can't dream of what you can't see.
Under one of her LinkedIn posts, a man named Alexandre Fonseca wrote something that she would probably consider a bigger compliment than any magazine list: the return she could give society for her success, he said, was to keep showing that combining a career and motherhood "is possible."
Eight Months Pregnant at the Stock Exchange
On December 9, 2021, Nubank went public on the New York Stock Exchange as Nu Holdings and, on the same day, in São Paulo on the B3. Listing in two markets at once was expensive and complicated. Junqueira later explained on the Fintech One-on-One podcast that they did it so that Nubank's own retail customers could buy shares. The bank that had once let Brazilians skip the branch now let them buy into the bank.
The shares rose 15 percent on the first day, valuing the company at $45 billion, more than Itaú or Bradesco, the banks she had once worked inside. Vélez owned 23 percent, worth about $10.2 billion. Junqueira owned 2.9 percent, worth $1.3 billion. That made her the second self-made female billionaire in Brazil's history, after Luiza Trajano, and the first ever to get there through finance. The woman who had once worked at the Magazine Luiza credit joint venture was now in the same club as its founder.
She spoke to Forbes that day in a back room of the exchange. She was eight months pregnant with her third daughter. Vélez's wife was pregnant too, with the couple's fourth child. It had been a demanding few weeks of meetings before the listing. Estadão pointed out that this was the second time she had faced the financial markets heavily pregnant. The first had been the Sequoia round. The company that had begun as an early pregnancy was now completing its IPO in the third trimester of another.
"In a country like Brazil, where it's so hard to access financial services," she told Forbes, "we're like children in a candy store. We want to offer everything."
Nubank had 48 million customers. As the news coverage turned to her net worth, she answered questions on Instagram herself, in Portuguese, the way she answers most things. "Frankly, I don't pay much attention to that," she said. "It's all a calculation someone makes based on the share price. My shares are all there, I'm not going to sell, so this money isn't in the bank for me to use." Then she made a claim that is hard to verify and that I find myself mostly believing: "In almost nine years, David, Ed and I never once had a conversation like, 'Wow, we're going to make a lot of money.' It wasn't about that. It was about doing the things we're doing, about having the impact we're having. About proving to everyone that it could be done."
Provar pra todo mundo que dava pra fazer. Prove to everyone that it could be done. Her motive was not money. It was being proved right.
The share price did not cooperate. By May 2022, the BBC reported, Nubank had lost almost 65 percent of its value since its peak, and Forbes removed her from the billionaires list. Berkshire Hathaway, which had put a total of $1 billion into Nubank before and after the IPO (and whose CEO, Vélez, had been compared by Bloomberg to Charlie Munger), held on. Junqueira was not selling either, as she had said.
The company's financials told a slower story than the stock did. Nubank lost money in 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022, about $400 million in that last year. Then it turned profitable: $1.0 billion in 2023, $2.0 billion in 2024, $2.9 billion in 2025. On April 2, 2024, Forbes put her back on its billionaires list at $1.4 billion, ranked 2,152nd in the world. By then Nubank was the fourth-largest financial institution in Brazil, having passed Banco do Brasil, one of the five incumbents.
Her title changed along the way. From August 2022 she was Chief Growth Officer of the group. On the company's tenth anniversary, May 15, 2023, she published a list of ten lessons. One of them reads as a description of her career: "My mission is to be where I am relevant and make a difference for the team." Another sounds like a provocation from someone who has exceeded her own projections: "If you always hit the targets, it means they could be bolder."
At VTEX Day in 2025 she went further. "One of my goals is to make myself irrelevant," she said, meaning she wanted her teams not to need her. "Part of the job as a leader is not to create complexity, to let people work in peace. But how can I help you, how can I speed up your agenda?" Valor, writing about her after the IPO, said she "dribbles past banker stereotypes." It is a soccer metaphor, and an accurate one. Brazilian football has always valued a player who wins by getting around obstacles rather than through them.
Country Number Four
Which brings us back to Miami, and the credit card that took months.
The case for the United States, as she explained it to Peter Renton on Fintech One-on-One in late 2025, was mostly about cost. Nubank does not enter a country as a thin app layer on top of someone else's bank. "We like to have licenses," she said. "We like to be primary banking relationships to our customers. We're not a thin layer in Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia." Entering a new market that way is expensive, and the expense does not vary much between countries. "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."
That is an engineer's reasoning: if the fixed cost is the same everywhere, choose the market with the largest upside. It also reverses the usual direction of things. Since the colonial era, financial models have generally flowed from the north to Latin America. Brazilians went to Evanston to learn how American business worked, as she did in 2007. Now a company founded by a Colombian, an American, and a Brazilian was bringing a model built in São Paulo to the most competitive banking market in the world, and the Brazilian was leading it.
Mexico came first, announced in May 2019. Colombia followed in November 2020. In October 2023 the Mexican subsidiary applied for a full banking license, and by early 2026 Nu said its total investment in Mexico would reach $4.2 billion by 2030. The United States would be, as a line in Nubank's anniversary video put it, "our country #4." Nubank applied to the OCC in September 2025. The conditional approval in January 2026, which included the ability to offer crypto custody alongside traditional banking services, came 121 days later. She was designated CEO of the American operation it would become. In April 2026 CNBC named her one of its Changemakers, recognized at a summit in New York, for having "oversaw the expansion of Nubank into a third international market."
On Nubank's thirteenth anniversary she wrote a post that reads like a letter to herself in 2013. "Now we have the support of global products and platforms that give us a foundation we didn't have in the early days in Brazil. But also that feeling of starting from zero, in a market that people don't know Nu, is still here." And then: "That tension is where the most interesting work happens." The recipe, she said, was "to build something that actually works, treat people like they matter, and earn trust one interaction at a time." She thanked David and Ed, and noted that the culture had taken them "from a small house in São Paulo to 135 million customers."
A few weeks later, on Saturday, June 13, 2026, something went wrong.
Some Nubank customers in Brazil opened the app and found a message suggesting the institution was being liquidated. It came at an especially sensitive time. Brazil was already preoccupied with liquidations following the Central Bank's handling of Banco Master. According to Nubank's later statement, a developer had accidentally triggered a communication workflow designed for the liquidation of financial institutions. Because no actual institution was linked to the workflow, the template fell back to a default placeholder, and the default placeholder was the company's own name. A system built to announce the death of some other bank had announced Nubank's.
Cybersecurity experts who spoke with Valor did not rule out sabotage or an attack, and they asked why a bank would keep a ready-made template for its own liquidation in the first place. That is a reasonable question. Every institution that has thought seriously about failure has some version of that document. Very few ever send it.
Junqueira answered the questions herself, on Instagram, in her own words, on a Saturday. "It really was bizarre, but that's exactly what happened — an operational error," she wrote. "Someone submitted a PR that ended up accidentally activating the protocol that exists for situations like this." She apologized to everyone who had received the message. A follower guessed she must have been very upset. "Yes, and it wasn't just me," she replied. "We all were. But we acted quickly to fix it."
She could have let the press office handle it. She is the co-founder of a company with more than 10,000 employees, the CEO-designate of an American bank, and a billionaire on paper. She logged on and answered people directly, as the person who used to be the only one picking up when customers called. She said so herself, years ago, about the little house in Brooklin with one bathroom and a front door that sent some job candidates straight back to the street:
"If somebody called our customer service line, it would ring on my cellphone."
Part IIThe Playbook
What follows is an attempt to extract the operating logic behind Junqueira's career: the decisions that repeat, the instincts that held up under pressure, and the habits that turned a personal grievance into a company. None of these principles is original to her in the abstract. What sets them apart is how consistently she applied them, and how often they cut against what a talented, well-credentialed executive is supposed to do.
The principles
- 1.Defect from the inside.
- 2.Volunteer for the losing unit.
- 3.Take the interregnum seriously.
- 4.Insist on full credit.
- 5.Let the building do the first interview.
- 6.Answer the phone yourself.
- 7.Pay for your own mistakes in public.
- 8.Spend on service, not acquisition.
- 9.Rebel against the industry, not the regulator.
- 10.Build the structure you needed.
- 11.Miss your targets on purpose.
- 12.Work toward your own irrelevance.
Principle 1
Defect from the inside
The usual founder myth involves an outsider who sees what insiders can't. Nubank had one of those in Vélez. It also had the opposite, which was arguably more valuable: someone who knew the incumbent's economics in detail because she had run them. Junqueira managed Itaú's largest card portfolio. She knew which fees customers hated because she administered them, including the monthly charge for text alerts on purchases. She knew which proposals the bank would reject because she had made them and seen them rejected.
That kind of knowledge can't be bought from consultants. It comes from years inside an institution, trying to change it and failing. Her frustration was precise. It came with a list of specific products, fees, and communication failures that a new company could address one by one. Sequoia's summary of the founding ("outsider perspective combined with insider talent") is accurate, but it understates the inside half. Vélez knew the system was broken. Junqueira knew how it was broken.
Tactic: Before leaving an incumbent to compete with it, write down every reform you proposed that was rejected, because that list is your product roadmap.
Principle 2
Volunteer for the losing unit
Back from Kellogg in 2008 and interviewed by Unibanco's president, Junqueira had her pick of assignments, and she chose small-business insurance, an area with little visibility that posted bad results every year. That looks like a strange career move until you notice how it lines up with everything she did afterward. A struggling unit gives a young manager authority without much competition, problems that are obvious, and a low baseline, so any improvement can be traced to her.
LuizaCred followed the same pattern: retail credit, not the glamorous side of banking, but close to how ordinary Brazilians actually borrow. Nubank's first product was the least glamorous financial product there is, a credit card. Her career consistently moves toward the work others avoid, on the theory that the underappreciated problem is where both learning and leverage are.
Tactic: When offered a choice of roles, look for the one with the worst recent results and the least executive attention, then ask what you could fix there that no one else is trying to.
Principle 3
Take the interregnum seriously
Between resigning from Itaú and meeting Vélez, Junqueira spent about two months reading and talking to people "to define what I wanted for my next five years." She said it was almost worth a second MBA. The reading list is striking because it is about careers and self-knowledge rather than finance: Bolles, Asher, O'Donnell, Fernández-Aráoz on hiring, Lencioni on teams, and Bossidy on execution.
The lesson is not that those specific books are essential. It is that she treated the gap between jobs as working time, planned with a five-year horizon. Most executives rush between roles, anxious about a gap on the résumé. She took the gap deliberately and came out with a clear sense of what she wanted, which is probably why she recognized the right opportunity when Vélez offered it. Someone who has already defined her next five years can say yes quickly.
Tactic: Before your next major career move, block out a fixed period of weeks to read and talk to people with a single written goal: a one-page description of the five years you want.
Principle 4
Insist on full credit
"I'm the glue and the brains, and I bet my brain is even better than his." The joke has a serious purpose. In founding teams, and especially in teams with one woman, roles harden into narratives early, and narratives turn into equity conversations, board seats, and press coverage. "Glue" sounds like praise but is really a classification, and the classification sticks.
Junqueira rejected it on the spot, publicly and with humor, which made the rejection hard to argue with. That matters beyond her own reputation. The person who is seen as the glue gets the operational work. The person who is seen as the brains gets the strategic decisions. She wanted both, and given the range of work she was actually doing (leasing, web design, customer service, fundraising, brand), she had earned both.
Tactic: The first time someone describes your contribution in a way that narrows it, correct the description immediately and lightly, before it becomes the accepted story.
Principle 5
Let the building do the first interview
"We joked that the first employee screening took place as soon as the candidates arrived at the Casinha. Some turned around and walked away." A small house with one bathroom and minimal pay did not appeal to people who wanted a corporate career, and that was the point. The early team selected itself for belief.
The general idea is that discomfort can serve as a filter, as long as it is honest and not manufactured. Nubank didn't pretend to be anything other than a scrappy startup taking on the country's biggest banks, and the people who stayed did so with full knowledge of what they were joining. Years later Junqueira described the culture those early hires set (passionate, efficient, adaptable, customer-obsessed) as "our real competitive advantage." It started with the people who didn't leave at the front door.
Tactic: In early hiring, show candidates the least appealing honest version of the job up front, and treat the ones who stay as your strongest signal.
Principle 6
Answer the phone yourself
In the first days of Nubank, customer service calls rang on Junqueira's cellphone. A decade later, the company's culture rule was "I answer to whoever asks." In June 2026, after the false liquidation alert, the co-founder was answering upset customers herself on Instagram on a Saturday. The method didn't change as the company grew. It just moved to different channels.
This is more than a nice gesture. A founder who takes the calls herself gets the most direct feedback a company can have, at no cost and with no filter. Every complaint is data about the product. A founder who never hears complaints directly ends up relying on summaries, and summaries tend to make problems look smaller. Being the kind of person who asks for the supervisor made her the right supervisor.
Tactic: Regardless of your title, keep a direct, unfiltered channel to complaining customers and read from it every week.
Principle 7
Pay for your own mistakes in public
When Nubank failed to send promised payment reminders, it refunded the resulting late fees, even though customers technically owed them and the refund cut into profits. Sequoia called this one of the moments that defined the company's culture, the point at which employees understood the values were real.
Values become credible when keeping them costs money. A company that waives fees only when it's free to do so hasn't shown anything. A company that eats a loss because the error was its own has shown everyone, inside and out, how it will act when the stakes rise. The 2026 liquidation-alert response followed the same pattern on a different scale: a fast admission, a plain explanation, an apology, and a fix.
Tactic: When your company's error causes a customer cost, reverse the cost before anyone asks and tell your team exactly why you did it.
Principle 8
Spend on service, not acquisition
Nubank spent essentially nothing on marketing for most of its history. Around 80 percent of its growth came from referrals, supported by a Net Promoter Score near 90 and a support operation that answered 94 percent of calls in under 45 seconds. The money other banks put into advertising went into answering customers quickly and well.
Junqueira describes the result as a flywheel: a lean cost base allows better products and lower acquisition costs, which allows more value to go back to customers, who then bring in more customers. The less obvious point is that this model requires patience early, since the referral engine needs time to get going, and it needs a product that people actually want to talk about. The Guinness-record unboxing in 2018 was funny, but it also showed that the purple card had become something people wanted to show off.
N
Conventional Banking vs. the Nubank Model
How Junqueira's operating choices inverted incumbent logic.
| Incumbent practice | Nubank choice | Type |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly fees for SMS purchase alerts | Real-time tracking in the app at no charge | Product |
| Heavy spending on marketing for acquisition | Near-zero marketing; about 80% of growth from referrals | Growth |
| Fees enforced whenever customers are technically liable | Fees reversed when Nubank's own error caused them | Culture |
| Branches, lines, and paper contracts | Simple interface and contracts that are easy to understand | Product |
| Thin entry abroad through partnerships | Full licenses and primary banking relationships in each country | Risk |
| Diversity programs added after the fact | Blind recruitment and maternity programs built in from early on | Culture |
Tactic: Take the next dollar you planned to spend acquiring customers and model what it would do if spent cutting support response time instead.
Principle 9
Rebel against the industry, not the regulator
Nubank's identity rests on non-conformity, but its stance toward regulators was the opposite. It wanted to be "the kid in the front row," getting A+ grades. When a regulatory change threatened the company's survival, leadership told employees the truth, including that they did not yet have the answers. The license-first approach in Mexico, Colombia, and the United States follows from the same thinking: Nubank wants to be a fully regulated primary bank in each market, not a light layer on top of someone else's.
The distinction is important. Challengers often treat regulators as just another part of the establishment to fight, and they lose years and credibility doing it. Junqueira's model separates the two. The incumbents are the opponent. The regulator is the referee, and you want the referee to trust you. The result was an OCC conditional approval 121 days after the application, which is about as close to an A+ as American bank chartering gets.
J
The Long Arc to Country Number Four
Key moments in Junqueira's path from Itaú to Miami.
2000
Moves alone to São Paulo to study industrial engineering at USP's Escola Politécnica.
2008
Completes her Kellogg MBA and returns to Unibanco, choosing a struggling small-business unit.
2009
Unibanco and Itaú merge. She leads marketing and products at LuizaCred until 2012.
2013
Leaves Itaúcard, spends about two months reading, meets David Vélez. Nubank is founded May 6.
2014
First card transaction on April 1. Sequoia leads a $14.3M round in September.
2019
Nubank announces its first expansion abroad, into Mexico.
2021
Dual IPO in New York and São Paulo on December 9. Valued at $45B.
2022
Becomes Chief Growth Officer in August, as the stock falls about 65% from its peak.
2024
Returns to the Forbes billionaires list on April 2 at $1.4B.
2025
Moves to Miami. Nubank files for a U.S. national bank charter in September.
2026
OCC conditional approval in January, Nu Stadium in March, CNBC Changemaker in April.
Tactic: Pick one regulator whose approval your business depends on and plan to exceed its requirements, not just meet them, before you ask for anything.
Principle 10
Build the structure you needed
Junqueira never had a female boss. She wore suits "just to fit in." She went back to work a week after giving birth and later said she wasn't proud of it. Nubank's gender policies read like a direct response to that list: blind recruitment, "Yes, She Codes!", mentoring for women leaders, and a program to keep new mothers connected during maternity leave. By 2020 women held 30 percent of senior roles, against 8 percent in the sector.
Her own explanation of how this happened is the most useful part: the choices reflect "the fact that I have been here from the beginning." Inclusion is much cheaper to build into a company's structure at the start than to retrofit after the culture has set. The founder's own bad experiences become the specification. She didn't need a consultant to tell her what the barriers were. She had run into all of them herself.
Tactic: List the three worst structural obstacles you personally faced in earlier jobs and write a company policy that removes each one before you reach 50 employees.
Principle 11
Miss your targets on purpose
"If you always hit the targets, it means they could be bolder." The line comes from her ten-year letter, and the record supports it. In early 2017 Nubank reached a milestone the founders had projected for 2019. The company began with one product in one country and became the fifth-largest financial institution in Brazil within a decade, then the fourth.
The point is not recklessness. Goals that are always met are too low, and a team that always meets them learns to sandbag. Setting targets you will probably miss keeps the organization reaching for things it would not otherwise try, and, as she wrote, "yet we are constantly surprised, surpassing the most audacious goals." It only works where missing a target isn't punished, which is why it pairs with her comment that "the comfort with error is hard," and has to be built deliberately.
Tactic: Set next quarter's main goal at a level your team considers 30 percent likely, and agree in advance that hitting 80 percent of it counts as success.
Principle 12
Work toward your own irrelevance
"One of my goals is to make myself irrelevant." "My mission is to be where I am relevant." These two statements look contradictory and are really the same idea from two directions. A leader should make each team able to run without her, and then move to wherever she is most needed. Junqueira's career shows it: VP of branding and business development, then Chief Growth Officer, then CEO-designate of a market that doesn't yet know the brand. Wible did something similar when he gave up the CTO title to work directly on infrastructure.
It is a way of avoiding the trap that catches many founders, holding onto the job that made them important. She left the role she had mastered for one where she was starting from zero again, in a city where she had trouble getting a credit card. She called that tension the place "where the most interesting work happens." The paper fortune was handled the same way: the shares stayed put and she didn't treat the number as money she had. What mattered was the next problem.
Tactic: Every 18 months, identify the part of your role your team could now handle without you, hand it off completely, and take on the hardest open problem in the company.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Cristina Junqueira, Marie Claire, 2018 (translated)I myself was always one of those people who complain, who ask to speak to the supervisor, who demand their rights and who don't give up until the right thing is done.
— Cristina Junqueira, Nubank 10 Years: 10 Lessons from the First Decade, May 15, 2023If you always hit the targets, it means they could be bolder.
— Cristina Junqueira, on Instagram after the Nubank IPO (translated)Frankly, I don't pay much attention to that. It's all a calculation someone makes based on the share price. My shares are all there, I'm not going to sell, so this money isn't in the bank for me to use.
— Cristina Junqueira, to Vogue Brasil, 2017 (translated)It was hard. I did what I had to do at that moment, but I'm not proud of it. Some things could have been different.
— Cristina Junqueira, on Nubank's 13th anniversaryBut also that feeling of starting from zero, in a market that people don't know Nu, is still here. That tension is where the most interesting work happens.
Maxims
- Grievance is research. Complaints you make as a customer and reforms rejected inside an incumbent are the most precise product specifications you will ever get.
- Choose the unloved job. A struggling unit gives you authority, visible problems, and a low baseline to improve on.
- Pause with a plan. Use the gap between roles to write down the five years you want before you commit to any of them.
- Refuse the narrower label. Being called the glue rather than the brains is a classification that will stick unless you correct it right away.
- Let honesty filter. Show candidates the real conditions and build the company with the people who stay.
- Keep the phone close. A founder who handles complaints directly sees problems before any summary can soften them.
- Values cost money. A principle is only credible after it has cost you something to keep.
- Service is the marketing budget. Customers who are treated well recruit more customers than advertising does.
- Fight incumbents, court regulators. Be the industry's rebel and the regulator's best student.
- Become unnecessary, then move. Make each team able to run without you, and go where you are most needed.
