Nu Way of Banking: Nubank Makes Its Mark in the U.S. and More

0:02Brett King: Welcome back to Breaking Banks. I'm your host, Brett King. This week, we have a delightful guest. As you're aware, we've been following the case of Nubank for quite some time, and Nubank has just made a big entry into the US market with some very interesting features. And no doubt this is going to challenge the American market, which has, you know, while there are some very good fintech operators in the market. We've seen a lot more competition offshore with the new banks market in LATAM, obviously with many of the wallet plays there in Europe with Monzo, Revolut and these sort of plays. The US does have obviously some players like Chime and Current, but an entry of the world's largest, you know, Western NIO Bank in the world, obviously is going to put some pressure on from a design and product perspective.

1:03Brett King: So we're very grateful to have with us today the Chief Product Officer of Nubank. He previously had a stint working as the Chief Design Officer for Shopify. He came to Shopify through an acquisition, which we can probably talk about a little bit. And it worked on the lending platform side as well there. But today leads the product capabilities of Nubank on a global basis. Carl Rivera, welcome to Breaking Banks. Great. I'm very honored to be here, Brett. So the honor is ours. So first of all, let's kick this off with, from a design perspective, how has it been for you transitioning from a company like Shopify to Nubank, which is sort of really trying to redefine what it means to be a bank in the modern mobile era?

2:05Yeah, in so many ways, the DNA of these companies are so similar. Shopify was all about reinventing entrepreneurship, enabling people to take a step in and pursue their dreams in ways they never could before. And in some ways, that's similar to what we're trying to do. We have customer obsession at our core. We're trying to create paths for people where there were none before. and it's this customer centricity combined with the technical lean that I think makes both of these companies so special and that has given these two companies so much success today.

2:46Brett King: From a design perspective, obviously there's a lot of things changing right now, particularly with artificial intelligence, also semantic capabilities and things like that. Nubank has built quite a fan base in Latin America. Your recent entrance into the Mexican market has been quite good in terms of getting some traction there. From a design perspective, what do you think differentiates Nubank from other platforms in the space? Yeah. Look, I think that Nubank is the most technologically advanced bank in the world. But the thing about technology is that that in itself isn't enough, right? Like as a customer, I don't choose my bank that much on their tech stack.

3:36I don't really want to care about the tech stack. And I think that's really where technology and design come together to form outstanding products. What NU does is to abstract all of that complexity away, such that what you're left with is a UI, a mobile interface, that literally any person anywhere in the world can immediately understand and navigate to accomplish tasks small and large. And so I think for us, it's constantly thinking about that meeting. How do we take the world's most advanced underwriting technologies? how do we consider how to take someone through a really tenuous flow like KYC or providing the right inputs for a global remittance, but making it in an experience that feels a lot like using a social network or any app that you're already familiar with.

4:26And all of this comes down to, I think, when I think about the product role at Nubank, is taking all of the right stakeholders and putting them in a room together and not have these sort of like corridors or verticals where, you know, technology has one mandate and objective and then you try to layer on some design on that afterwards and you have a different team thinking about, you know, underwriting over here. It's really taking all of the different inputs to the experience, bringing all of the stakeholders into a room and building the product together.

4:55Brett King: I mean, this is probably an interesting question. I mean, if we look at product design today, one thing that we've been exposed to over the last decade is the design competency of organizations like Apple. And the product design cycles are very long, very exhaustive in terms of testing. But in the fintech space, we're also seeing messaging from various players. You know, the product design process is compressing and it's happening a lot faster. And, you know, there's some really interesting pieces to this, which aligns with your comment. Henry Ma, who's the CIO of WeBank, of course, the largest digital bank in the world with 430 million plus customers.

5:44Brett King: He made a really simple comment on the show, which he said, if you need to see a human, we see that as a core design failure. So tell me about how the design process works in that context. You know, what are the product cycles look like compared with, you know, what we're used to seeing in traditional banking? And, you know, how does that, as you say, that technical agility allow you some design flexibility? Yeah, well, AI, if you think about that as a starting point, I think it's easy to kind of get stuck in how is that changing the customer experience? But also it's changing so much about what types of products are we able to provide to our consumers and how are we actually building those products, right?

6:32I think Nubank was the first digital bank to really pioneer introducing transformer models in our credit underwriting with the new former. And now we're looking at AI and how are we using it to completely transform our internal workflows, including how we build and design products. And I think what's happening inside of our company right now is, one, everyone's moving much faster. If you think about just the year-over-year delivery rate in engineering, design, or product, it's all going up and through the roof, up and to the right, right? And what it also is doing is that it's blurring all of the lines.

7:09And so what we've done extensively inside of Nubank is to consider what are all of the different parts of the platform that we can platformize, that we can turn into building blocks and components that we can put together in new and novel ways. And what that allows us to do is that we're going beyond not just the technical architecture, but also how the app is composed, the building blocks of the app, the design system of the app. And what all of this allows us to do is to say that we can move from this world where you had a designer do all of the design or a product person do all of the product briefs into more of this new profile in the R &D group called a builder, really, where someone that comes from a completely different background can explain the problem they're trying to solve.

7:49And very quickly, we have internal systems that pulls together the actual design components of new into really production-ready artifacts that visualize this experience and bring it to life for internal or possibly external testing. And so a lot of this comes down now to saying, okay, we're going to invest a lot in our systems, the design systems, the platforms, the AI harness that we kind of use internally, such that anyone can iterate through the science and experiences much faster. And ultimately, you know, Apple perhaps is the foremost example of great design in the world, but they're a hardware company.

8:32And so their cycles will look completely different than what they do inside of a software business. For us, we believe that speed of iteration is directly correlated with the quality that we put into the hands of our customers. And so what we're seeing right now is just a complete acceleration of how quickly we can iterate on our products to go from version one to version 10 in a matter of weeks.

8:55Brett King: Awesome. You know, it's interesting. You know, you talk about AI being sort of part of the generative process and the building process internally. And of course, there was the hyperplane acquisition a couple of years ago, but let's just keep it simple. How has it changed your job from what you used to do a couple of years ago? How has it changed the way you work on a daily basis as the chief product officer? Well, in one word, completely, right? And it goes from how you track work, how you understand where we have issues, to have agents that surface to me every morning that I start my day. What are the key objectives that I need to look at?

9:34Which teams require more attention? Where do I need to go deep? to then going into the actual projects of teams, where from having teams that needed to be, say a team previously, a squad previously needed to be 30 people, it can now be five people. And you bring it down to much smaller teams that can be much more nimble and own end-to-end experiences. And then that leads to a much higher sort of iteration pace. And so really from planning to scoping to understanding where the problems are and where I need to look closer to actually executing projects or how we organize teams, there's literally not a single step of the stack that AI hasn't completely transformed inside of new today.

10:22Okay.

10:23Brett King: That's great to hear that because, you know, this is, you know, when I often get asked when I'm speaking to bank boards and I'm here this week in Greece, working with the National Bank of Greece, and one of the classic questions I get is, you know, which is the best bank at the world in this? And they expect me to answer with one of the big banks out of China or maybe JPMC. But of course, I'm always going to be referencing someone like Nubank because, you know, the technical agility and cultural agility that you have allow you to do more things with AI. But I want to just take a step back and jump into the US launch, because that's fresh on everyone's minds from the perspective of Nubank.

11:05Brett King: And tell me a bit more about the decision you made in terms of the product design for the US launch in particular, the multi-currency account, the high yield savings feature, but I'm really interested in the stable coin angle that you took with the product as well. Yes, just take a step back. We actually made two huge announcements last week. One was the US launch, which of course happened faster and perhaps in a more ambitious way than anyone had expected. And the second was the introduction of New Global, which is this thin layer product that we're bringing to over 35 markets that allows you to have a multi-currency account backed by stablecoin that offer free fast remittances to all of the markets that matter to you, as well as an investment product that allows you to, once you receive money, hold it, invest it, see it grow, and a virtual card that allows you to use it for your day-to-day spend.

12:10And so we went from having Brazil to having Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, to having the US, and to go into 35 plus markets in one single go, in one single step. And so in a way, I think it's not a step forward for the company, it's a leap. And it changes completely how we can consider the global network effects of the business, how we can tie these markets together. Because obviously, you know, today in the world, there are so many global citizens, over 300 million people that live their lives away from their home country, that earn abroad, that send money home to their families, that are global freelancers and all of these things.

12:54And so really, I think what we're doing is to not just launch more markets, but to build up the density of the network that is Nubank.

13:02Brett King: And are those rails, particularly the payment rails, is this you guys getting ready for agentic payments and agentic capabilities to transfer money around the world? I assume so. Well, look, we're going to be where the market goes. And we think of us as a company that helps lead the way. Clearly, AI, not just in terms of first-party agentic experiences, but people having their own agents is becoming ubiquitous. And we think we have a really important and large role to play in how that transformation happens. And so every design decision that we are taking today, whether it's in payments or how people hold their accounts, we're building those with AI in mind.

13:51Cool.

13:51Brett King: I want to get a bit sci-fi, if that's okay. Sure, go for it. Not sci-fi, but I want to talk about sort of next generation design. One of the things I wrote about in the new book, Bank 5.0, is the concept of going from semantic interactions in an app interface to liquid interfaces. So generative interfaces that sort of form on an outcome or intent basis based on the query that's handled on the semantic layer. rather than designing the way we have traditionally, which is a whole information architecture and these different screens. And while there'll be some design patterns there, the ability to have sort of this very responsive interface.

14:36Brett King: So let's talk about, you know, where Nubank could go in five or 10 years in terms of what that experience might look like. Because I think, you know, app design in itself is about to be rethought in terms of those types of interactions, particularly if we start thinking about smart glasses as an interface as well. Yeah, absolutely. I think of the future of AI in experiences, whether they're in your phone or in a different device, to be omnipresent and context aware. And what I mean by that is that whatever you're doing, wherever you are in the experience, there's an access point to the AI that's there to help you.

15:18and wherever you're accessing it from, it's context aware. So it knows where you're coming in from. It understands what you've done to date in that customer journey. And of course, it has a memory of all of the things you've done before that, such that it picks up right where you kind of left off and is able to guide you along the way. But then going beyond that, I think that the future of these interfaces will be multimodality. Right now, in this early incarnation of AI, It's all chat-based and it's very text forward, very text heavy. And you kind of have to choose. Either I have this sort of deterministic interface where I have buttons and a very sort of linear flow, or I have to get through everything through text and I kind of have to explain my way into what I'm trying to do.

16:02And sometimes one is better and sometimes the other is better, but really I think the future is of them coming together and actually adding even more modalities. I think voice is going to be key. And especially, you know, for a large part of our audience, where we're really catering to the true mass market, where reading and writing comprehension is lower, to enable those customers to really use voice as a leading form factor, but to be able to move between these in a really seamless way, to be able to type a little bit, to be able to speak a little bit, to be able to click on big buttons and have interfaces compose themselves on the spot for you.

16:40I think it's going to be really fluid in this way, and the customers will not have to choose in the way they have to choose today. Oh, am I going to do this all through AI or all through clicks and buttons? You'll be able to move between these different modalities in one session. And I think we're extremely well set up to do this. We spoke a little bit already about how we have platformized every aspect of our business, not just the technical architecture, but the design system and the design components themselves. This also means that you can recompose experiences in real time for our customers in these sort of AI interfaces, such that, to your point, depending on what I need to do, we can create a UI that's unique to that specific task right when the customer needs it the most.

17:23Brett King: And in that environment, does the product itself tend to disappear and just sort of turn into pure utility, you know, sort of embedded in the experience? Like, you know, like one of the simplest examples is Nubank has done very well with credit card acquisition in LATAM to date. You know, it's been a big part of your growth. But does the credit card itself disappear as a product and it just become the pure utility of credit? Or is it more about sort of real-time positioning of products from an experiential perspective? Yeah, I don't think those things will disappear anytime soon. so much of the physical world will remain in the rails of today, let's call it.

18:10And I think NewBank's job is to create those bridges where you take the experiences, the touch points of the world around us, but bring it into a sci-fi-like interface, to an interface that is leading the way of customer experiences. And I think that's the role we stand to play, such that how you spend with your credit card or what you do with your money in the outside world maps back into this sort of AI-powered new universe that makes sense of it all and helps guide you along the way and help make you better decisions.

18:46Brett King: I get it. And in that end, we're obviously seeing some fairly rapid advancements in personal AI. We have obviously Muse, Meta's app that's just been launched We have ChatGPT doing integration of financial analysis with, you know, over 100 million people using that capability on a monthly basis. So, you know, there's some interesting action there. But moving forward and getting ready for sort of these personal AI, you know, in the engagement layer in respect to interactions. How do you think about creating products for agents from a design perspective? Yeah, look, I think that the capabilities of Nu will be super powerful to bring into this sort of new agentic future that we're heading into.

19:44But then I think that there are really important things that we can never lose track of, which is trust and control. And so I think as we head into sort of this new agentic world and we want to bring some of the capabilities of Nu to outside agents, and we're considering what that might look like and how we'll go about this, we're also paying very, very close attention to saying, okay, where do you manage your permissions? And how do you control and govern what different third-party agents do for you? And what are the actions that you always come back to new to sort of control and review? And so I think we're looking very closely at this industry and at this category and are trying to sort of come up with the right frameworks before we take premature steps into an industry that's changing so quickly?

20:35Because for us, ultimately, trust and control comes first.

20:39Brett King: No, I think that's true. And after all, we are a regulated industry. So we have to think in those terms as well. And I'm not sure that the regulators are fully ready yet for regulation of agentic at scale, moving supervision into the agentic layer as well. Yeah, it's interesting. You know, there's been a really interesting debate amongst some of the fintech influences that I work with and communicate with on LinkedIn this week. And it kicked off with an FT article about another neobank out of Europe, you know, talking about their position on risk. And one of the debates was really about what it means to be a bank today.

21:22Brett King: So as the Chief Product Officer of Nubank, how do you think Nubank is redefining what it means to be a bank? And where have you seen that put pressure on your competitors, particularly in Latin America? And where might we see pressure put on traditional banks in the US based on some of the design choices you've made? Yeah, the answer is simple in that Nubank was started around this cultural value mission to build the first bank that customers love fanatically. And that simple statement kind of runs through every decision that we make in this company. It is what drove us to obsess about our cost to serve, such that we can pass over most of the value that we generate back to the customer.

22:11It defined how we think about the design process and the UI of the mobile experience and becoming so mobile first as we've been. And really, it's the reason I joined this company. Because for me, it's so interesting. Like when I think about banks and I think about the relationship we have to our banks, we go to them for the most important decisions that we make in our lives. Whether we're going to buy a new home, whether we're going to quit our job to start something else, whether we're going to maybe have kids and start a family, we go to our banks to make these decisions. But for almost everyone, the relationship we have to our banks is pure utility.

22:48There's not a single part of it being like an emotional relationship, a relationship you care about. And I think that we stand to play such a differentiated role in continuing to make that relationship be one that matters. And I think AI will play an instrumental role in that, right? Because you're going to go from being an interface that enables you to take actions quickly to being an interface that provides advice and help guide you along the way, that provides that level of continuity and personal relationship that frankly I think is impossible to create in any other way. And so I think that core statement, that core mission is what's going to keep driving us forward and that will inform all of the decisions that we make.

23:31Brett King: I mean, clearly your low cost of operation, your cost to income ratio is something that you know, other traditional banks would have great difficulty achieving. And it's one of the reasons you've been able to attack the unbanked and underbanked market so successfully to grow. And, you know, these are customers that previously would have been considered unprofitable or unattractive for traditional players. And you've shown Nubank and, you know, WeBank in China, know, likewise have shown that these customers can be really core, you know, strategic, you know, target. I'm conscious of the time, Carl.

24:15Brett King: So in sort of wrapping with this, you know, what do you want to leave people with in terms of their thoughts about NewBank and how can people find out more about, you know, what you guys are doing and, you know, what are the What other key messages do you have for the Breaking Banks audience? Well, what I would leave us with is to say that for all of the things that we have achieved, what's most exciting about new is that it still feels like day one. And I think, you know, the recent announcement with the launch of the new U.S. and new global goes to show that for all of the success we've had to date, we've only scratched the surface of the opportunity that we're going after.

24:56And the values that have made us successful, the low cost to serve, the better underwriting, the super intuitive and simple interface, those are core values that travel across borders. And so we anticipate, expect, and look forward to realizing the new potential for many, many, many more markets over the next few years to come.

25:22Brett King: Fantastic. Where's the best place for people to keep up with what you're doing at NewBank, at New? Yeah, so I'm active on LinkedIn and on x.com. And so you can find me, it's my name, Carl Rivera. And also just send a note online. I try to be fast to respond. Fantastic. Well, Carl, thanks for joining us on Breaking Banks. Appreciate the insights into the process and keep doing what you're doing because obviously something's working, right? Thank you so much for your time. It was exciting to be here. That's it for another week of the world's number one fintech podcast and radio show, Breaking Banks.

25:58Brett King: This episode was produced by our US-based production team, including producer Elizabeth Severins, audio engineer Kevin Hirsham. If you like this episode, don't forget to tweet it out or post it on your favorite social media. Or leave us a five-star review on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Facebook, or wherever it is that you listen to our show. those actions help other people find our podcast and in return that helps us build an audience that can be supported by sponsorship so we can continue to provide you with our award-winning content every week thanks again for joining us we'll see you on breaking banks next week