BRAVO Symposium 2025: Shaping the Future of Finance through Innovation

Speakers:

• Cristina Junqueira, Co-Founder & Chief Growth Officer, Nubank
• Luis Alberto Moreno, Managing Director, Allen & Co, and former president of the Inter-American Development Bank (moderator)

"Think about the enormous disruption that this generation is creating," posed Luis Alberto Moreno as he introduced Cristina Junqueira of Nubank, which has become Latin America's largest financial services provider by market capitalization in just 11 years of operations. The former IDB president spoke with the fintech executive in a leadership conversation at the 2025 Council of the Americas Symposium that covered the bank's impressive rise and future prospects.

Junqueira detailed how frustration with the customer experience at traditional financial institutions led and her two co-founders to "challenge the financial sector ... companies that had been around for over a decade." She shared that they held a "deep belief that if we built something dramatically better—using technology, using design—people would just come." From day one, she added, Nubank's founders established a "technology-first" company culture and a mission of "fighting complexity so that we could empower people and give them back the control over their financial lives."

Responding to Moreno's question about Nubank's dynamic with Brazil's financial regulators, Junqueira affirmed that a well thought-out financial regulatory system can help facilitate safe, cheap, and fast digital payments, formalize the economy, and crack down on illicit activity, to the benefit of the whole economy.

Like many of the speakers at the day's event, Junqueira highlighted how Nubank is incorporating AI into its operations in various ways. These include assisting with credit underwriting, as well building predictive models for customer support and marketing.

From its origins in Brazil to its expansion to Mexico and Colombia, Nubank is now looking to break into the U.S. market. "We set out to be the primary banking relationship of our customers everywhere we go," said Junqueira. She noted that customers in the United States have to manage a lot of "complexity in the financial system," often juggling several bank accounts and paying high transaction fees. Nubank's pitch to consumers, she said, is to leverage "economies of scale that we can pass on to customers as better value proposition. And we believe customers everywhere are going to want that."