One woman’s drive to make a neobank as magical as Disney

Nubank EC-1 Part 2: Co-founder dynamics

As we mentioned in part 1 of this EC-1, David Velez had two key co-founding roles he needed to fill to get started building Nubank. For one, he needed a CTO to lead the engineering side of the business, as Velez didn’t have an engineering background.

Edward Wible, an American computer science graduate who spent most of his career in private equity, would take that responsibility. He didn’t bring years of coding experience, but he had qualities that Velez considered more important: A strong belief in the potential of the product and an equally intense commitment to working on it.

Given the occasionally hostile reaction of most incumbent banks to their customers in Brazil, Nubank’s starkly contrasting openness and transparency has garnered a huge following.

That left an even more important role to fill — one that was much harder to define. This other co-founder would need to blend knowledge of the Brazilian market and local savvy with expertise in banking, all while embodying a Silicon Valley ethos of focusing on customers. This person would also have to work in São Paulo for minimal wages out of a small office with just one bathroom, all in the belief that their equity (both stock and sweat) would one day be worth it.

Velez would eventually stumble upon Cristina Junqueira, who was qualified to do all this, and much, much more.

“Once someone said I was the glue of the operation, and that someone else was the brains. And I said, ‘No, I’m the glue and the brains, and I bet my brain is even better than his,”’ Junqueira said.

Junqueira didn’t just lead Nubank’s drive into the Brazilian market, she also upended age-old notions of what it means to be a 21st-century bank. Her inspiration was nothing short of Disney, and her mission was to create a bank as popular as the magical kingdom itself.

A bank. As popular as Disney. Sounds like a fairy tale, frankly.

Raised to be a doer

Unlike her co-founders Velez and Wible, Junqueira grew up in Nubank’s home market of Brazil. The eldest of four sisters, she remembers her parents — both dentists — always assiduously working to maintain their practice.

Their work ethic trickled down, but so did responsibility. As the oldest at home, she was forced to grow up quickly and take on responsibilities from an early age. “I remember being 11 years old and doing grocery shopping for the month,” she said. “I did everything very young.”

Nubank co-founder Cristina Junqueira. Image Credits: Nubank

She would go on to study industrial engineering at the Universidade de São Paulo, earning her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, before working at the nearby Boston Consulting Group (BCG) office.

It was a grueling work environment — she recalls working on one project for six months straight without taking even one day off. “I told my boss one day that I just needed to take a nap — that I literally couldn’t continue — and so I made a pile out of paper on the floor to use as a pillow and he let me sleep for two hours,” she recalls. “My whole life has been training for a startup.”

Following her stint at BCG, she went to the U.S. to get her MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, returning to work in Brazil after graduation. She joined a succession of financial organizations including LuizaCred and Itaú Unibanco, one of the big five Brazilian banks, giving her a panoramic perspective on the country’s financial system.

The Itau bank logo seen at one of its bank branches in Dourados, Mato Grosso do Sul. Image Credits: Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket / Getty Images

As always, she just kept pushing forward. “I’m a doer, above all. I see a lot of value in conceptual strategy discussions to make sure we’re moving in the right direction, but what really gets me excited is when I see things materializing — getting shit done is what really gets me fired up,” Junqueira said.

It was this “get-stuff-done” mindset that made her quit her job at Itaú. While working there in the credit card division, she put together a presentation for her boss that would enable the bank to offer a better customer experience at a lower cost to the customer.

But her boss didn’t see a need for change, because the bank had a stronghold on their customers and the competition wasn’t offering anything better, either. “He told me, ‘No, we don’t need to do that. We can just tack on another fee for the customer so we don’t lose money,’” she recalls. “Eventually, I got very frustrated because I realized there was never going to be any change there.”

The birth of Nubank and Alice

By this point, Junqueira had been trying for years to change the industry from within. She recalls growing frustrated seeing the banks forcing people to use their products rather than focusing on improving them for customers.

“I had enough. I left without knowing what was next for me, but with the certainty that I should invest my time and my life in something that made people’s lives easier and better, not more complex,” she says.

And that’s when she ran into Velez through a mutual friend. “When I met David and we started discussing the idea of building Nubank, I said, ‘This is it.’ I was on board instantly.”

For Velez, Junqueira had just the experiences and temperament he needed in the third co-founder. “I knew that for Nubank to be successful we needed a founding team that was diverse and came from different backgrounds. I was a foreigner trying to start a bank in Brazil, so it was clear to me that I needed to partner with someone local who knew the industry inside and out, and also had the drive and the passion to really transform it. In Cris, I found all that.”

David Velez and Cristina Junqueira of Nubank. Image Credits: Rodrigo Capote/Bloomberg / Getty Images

Junqueira joined as co-founder just as the company was ramping up for an eight-month race to launch its first product. Later, she traveled with Velez to pitch investors in the Bay Area to raise Nubank’s $14.3 million Series A. She was several months pregnant at the time.

“My main goal was to try to distract the investors from my belly and have them focus on our pitch,” she says. “I think a lot of investors were surprised to see a pregnant woman knocking on their door asking them to invest in a Latin American startup.”

Ultimately, their pitch worked, and since they were facing a tight deadline, Velez brought Junqueira the funding documents to sign while she was in the hospital to deliver her eldest daughter, Alice.

“Today, we see a lot of VC funds investing in LatAm and the ecosystem growing rapidly. But back in the day, our region was pretty much unknown territory for many. [ … ] We were the first LatAm investment for many funds that keep investing in the region to this date. That’s something we are really proud of,” she recalls.

Nubank and Alice were both born in May of 2014. “I joke that Alice and Nubank are twins,” Junqueira says.

Building the Disney of banking

Junqueira loves Disney. But it wasn’t until our interview that I realized just how much she loves the magical kingdom.

Unable to travel to Brazil because of the pandemic, I interviewed Junqueira over a Zoom video call. She was working from home and gave me an impromptu virtual tour of her apartment in São Paulo. While impeccably decorated, the apartment was littered with Disney mementos, from a Cinderella Castle made of Legos that looked to be about two-feet tall, to baby-pink sequined pillows in the shape of Minnie Mouse’s head in the living room.

The tour and our subsequent conversation helped me realize that Junqueira’s experiences with Disney were so magical that they left a lasting impression. In fact, she even named both her daughters after Disney princesses — Alice is named for the eponymous lead from “Alice in Wonderland,” and Bella is named for Belle in “Beauty and the Beast.”

Junqueira very much knows she’s in love with Disney, and it was this level of obsession that she wanted to bring to Nubank’s own brand and customers. To deliver on her and Velez’s vision, they chose a bright color palette for Nubank’s brand to help it stand out from the existing banks. They also pushed for extremely fast decision-making on credit cards and Junqeira was instrumental in Nubank’s move to open up the financial system to millions of Brazilians who had no access to banking.

Nubank’s credit card and branding. Image Credits: Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket / Getty Images

Given the occasionally hostile reaction of most incumbent banks to their customers in Brazil, Nubank’s starkly contrasting openness and transparency has garnered a huge following (whether Nubank can literally compete with Mickey Mouse remains to be seen — don’t expect a Nuworld or Nuland anytime soon).

“I’ve always been obsessed with serving our customers well, and that’s something I borrowed heavily from Disney,” Junqueira says.

And she has succeeded to an extent. Nubank today has many customers who are, to put it mildly, fanatical. The company is so loved, it’s not unusual to see tweets and Instagram posts with customers proposing marriage to Nubank.

The tweet translates to: “If I could marry a company, I’d marry @nubank, ugh, I love a bank.”

Think about it: This is people tweeting about how much they love a bank.

Infinite jobs, one leader

Since the day she joined Nubank, Junqueira’s “get stuff done” attitude has led her to pick up whatever needs doing. Over the years, this has meant that her official title at Nubank has been a constantly moving target. She now prefers to just be acknowledged as a co-founder. That way, her responsibilities can shift depending on the current needs of the company.

“When we started, Ed [Wible] was running the developers, and I did just about everything else — from wireframes to meetings with the Central Bank,” she said.

And she continued doing everything else. For the first several years of Nubank’s existence, Junqueira led teams including legal, operations, business development, corporate strategy, M&A, real estate and facilities, marketing and branding, as well as PR and communications.

Today, she says she leads any team where they haven’t found someone better than her for the job. “I just take care of all the leftover work. Today I’m in charge of branding, marketing, social media, content, communications, CRM, consumer insights — everything to do with marketing,” she says. “There must be other responsibilities that I’m not remembering.”

Her role continues to evolve to this day. Two weeks ago, on June 2, the company announced its first chief marketing officer, Arturo Nunez. He is the former head of marketing for Apple Latin America and has worked in other capacities with Nike and the NBA.

While Nunez may reduce Junqueira’s responsibilities a little, she’ll still have a plate filled with lots of variety. That seems a perfect scenario for a self-described doer and generalist who wants to see Disney become the de facto banking experience in Brazil and more widely across Latin America.

Junqueira’s addition was instrumental in getting Nubank off the ground, and as we’ll see in the third part of this EC-1, the company’s product strategy, launch and scaling would become the key to its enduring success.


Nubank EC-1 Table of Contents

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