Nubank’s Co-Founder on Winning 140M Customers & Expanding to the US

0:00Cristina Junqueira: Today we're in for a treat. I flew down to sunny Miami for a conversation with Cristina Junqueira, co-founder of NewBank, the largest digital bank in the world. We launched yesterday. What did I do the whole night? I was reading through all the transcripts from calls and chats that came in yesterday while I was here like a lay event. And I'm going to continue to do that until my arms fall off. Nubank was founded in 2013 and over the last 13 years they have grown from a small startup in a house in Sao Paulo to now serving over 140 million customers. Christina also leads Nubank's U.S. operation and in fact they had just launched the U.S.

0:53Cristina Junqueira: product a day before we recorded at the new stadium in Miami. So product-led growth is a necessity. It's a must. It's a must. There's no good marketing that resists bad products. What we really want to be tracking and like getting the polls and building towards is high NPS and high satisfaction rates. We'd rather have a smaller customer base that loves the products than buying our way through growth but having customers are indifferent. Christina is undoubtedly one of the most powerful women in financial services. Her story and Nubank's story are a testament to how great and enduring companies are built, deliver great products, and focus on one customer interaction at a time.

1:40We really are building new for, you know, 30, 40, 50, 100 years. And that makes things harder in some ways, but very easy in other ways.

1:56Cristina Junqueira: Christina, thank you for joining us. And thank you for the invitation to Miami to New Stadium. Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me and thanks for coming. I hope you appreciate it. Yeah, it was a fantastic event. huge milestone for new now that you've officially launched in the US. Yes. Before we talk about that, I understand you're a huge Disney fan. I am. And you're also a huge Bob Iger fan. True story. Why do you admire the company so much and specifically the CEO of Bob Iger? Of course. so first uh well it's very inspiring what walt disney was able to create out of thin air like i've always been amazed by how you take a whole franchise that is worth like tens of billions of dollars like on its own today like frozen for instance didn't exist 15 years ago like somebody wrote a script produced a movie and here we are 15 years later with producing uh frozen number three frozen four like billions and billions in franchise rights um and and frozen two was the largest uh animated movie ever when it came out so uh there's so much that they were able to build into the ecosystem starting with the ip but then translating that into merchandise parts and experiences all the storytelling like um in in the movie business in the ip is just a starting point you know like there's so much more that is interconnected and just how much that that brings out of people in terms of emotions um i i'm a big uh fan of the brand and i think storytelling and emotional connection is the way to build that and their disney is just a master class on that so so i'm i'm a big fan um both as a as a business person as well as a customer you You know, Bob Iger, on his book, he defines the core, like the bullseye target for Walt Disney Company's mothers of children under 12.

4:03I have four children under 12. So I'm a pretty view fan. I'm right there, like, as their core target. And Bob, I mean, he is a phenomenal executive. Like, his trajectory is so admirable. he was able to build so much has such great instincts with people with business the acquisitions that he's made i think his vision to continue to fuel the ip engine that would then you know be cascaded into all the different business models can you imagine what would have happened to disney if he hadn't acquired pixar or star wars like you know the holocaust film franchise or marvel like there's so much that they've been able to do with those ip so anyway i'm a big fan big fan

4:46Cristina Junqueira: The company's about a century old. Yeah. I don't know. They just turned 100. Yeah. Yes. In 2023. In my household, it's not a business family. So Walt Disney was always associated as a cartoonist, an entertainer for children, right? But if you think about it, and this is why you are admired, he was also a great businessman and probably visionary. do you think what the the structure of this is of disney and what he did a century ago set up the company for success do you think he would be surprised of how the company looks today or do you think he's like yeah that's how it should have gone i think some things would surprise him um but if you if you look back i think walt disney might have been the first human to articulate to like put out a diagram of a business ecosystem there's a very like you can look it up like and if you have like you can even put it on the screen like there's a um like a chart that walt disney produced like that has like the ip and the merchandise and the park like everything like kind of connected it was on the one of the very first if not like the first ever articulation of how different businesses kind of feed off of each other into a healthy like business ecosystem him in flight wheel so he was for sure a visionary one of the things when people ask me oh who would you like to have dinner with like dead or alive i always say walt disney because i would love to ask him that question you know if you were to look at a company today what would surprise him what wouldn't you know i think i don't think the the skill and the impact of the company would surprise him i think maybe like specific angles of it specific things that may have happened may surprise him but he was also a big believer in technology like there are so many quotes uh from wall that touched on technology one of my favorite is he used to say that the most advanced technology like the bleeding air technology is indistinguishable from magic you know and that's what he likes to produce magic that's amazing yeah i was going to save this question for later but you brought up organizational design how do you think about it at new because also i imagine it's your vision that new will be around in a century yeah right so sounds like that's also part of the inspiration right so how what have you learned and how do you think about news organizational design listen there's a lot of that that comes from David right like he's the founder and CEO and when we first started working together we shared this this very long-term perspective it right like we really are building new for you know 30 40 50 100 years and that makes things um harder in one in some ways but very easy in in other ways right like when you're thinking about the long term you don't need you don't even get distracted with short-term trade-offs or you you don't really doubt yourself when you know what the right thing to do is and i think org structure is one of those things because first like we're very committed to not serving an org structure like the structure should serve the company and not not the other way around you worked at big companies before you probably know how companies can be either addicted to a specific structure or enslaved by it we try really hard not to do that we try really hard to to be very pragmatic about how we organize ourselves in service of the business goals and the customers right so you probably have heard this from other people that you've talked to on your podcast about how hard it is to fight the inertia and the gravity of shipping your org design, right?

8:25So when we started NewBank, we only had one product, which was credit cards, and we only operated in one country, which was Brazil. But as we started spinning up different product teams to launch different products, at some point, we kind of found ourselves in a position that maybe we were shipping our org structure. And then we took a step back and we're like, no, no, no, no, no. We got to reorganize ourselves around customers and the customer segments and ensure that we're looking at what is being put out there for customers and have that made sense in the customer's eyes from the customer's perspective.

9:00So today, we are organized in marketing. So I'm currently leading the U.S. market, which we just launched. But before that, when we first put this together, I was leading all the three markets that we were in, right? Like Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. We built those teams to be like the customer perspective into the org. And then we have global product teams. They're building the foundation, like the core structure of those products that we're deploying across markets. And then behind that, we have global platforms. They're building the infrastructure that is cross products and cross markets, you see.

9:32But all that is in service of the customer and of the market that we're serving. You know, one of the internal jokes that I like to make is like, no global product team or global platform team is serving New Bank Mars. You know, like it's all for these markets that we're operating in. So it has to come, the demand has to come, the strategy has to come, the perspective, the point of view, the hypothesis, right? Like, you know, the angle needs to come from what we're seeing in those markets and those customers that we're trying to service there.

10:03Cristina Junqueira: so it's been about a year since you moved back to the u.s yes you did uh do your mba here and maybe and this year before yeah yeah so welcome back thank you what has surprised you over about the u.s market over the last year because this visit is different now you came with a very specific mission of launching the U.S. operation, which happened yesterday. What were some of the findings that surprised you the most over the last year? So many things that surprised me, because I mean, I've always lived a fairly international life. You know, I've been here for grad school, for business school. I worked in and out of the U.S.

10:47Like I worked for multinational companies, my husband too. So, and I've always traveled a lot. So, I kind of assumed I knew what I was going to find. And we've also been studying the U.S. market for a while, even before I came. So we greenlit the U.S. project about two years ago. I was pregnant with my fourth child. But we had been working on that business plan, like studying the market for even a year before that. So it might be three years in the making at this stage. and I'm still blown away by all the bureaucracy and all the bad experience and all the fees and all the inefficiencies. It's like insane.

11:28I don't know how much you caught like from what I shared on the event yesterday, but I think it's worth like telling the story again. So like I came here, I had good relationships with, you know, some of the best banks, like I'm, you know, on the private banking side even, right? You have no idea of the headache that it was for me to get a credit card here. And that was after I came, I had, you know, money on the bank. I had a mortgage already, right? Like I had relationships. It took them months to even underwrite a credit card. And after they did, they had the guts to look me in the face and say, well, we can't really issue it because we we don't have proof of your residency i'm like what did you have my more like what more proof do you want you know and it just blew my mind they're like no but that's the mortgage people where the credit card people like how how how in 2026 are those big big very successful fancy banks still operating that way and if i'm like a preferred customer and i'm getting that type of treatment can you imagine what millions of customers are going through yeah you know so that has really surprised me just how hard everything is like how expensive it is and it's fees everywhere it's just it's just so bad so we we had a good hypothesis that um our products were going to be you know better than what customers were going to be able to find and that we're pretty confident that no one likes to be paying fees and and people everywhere are going appreciate that their money isn't sitting idle but i don't know pain might be more acute than what we expected at least that's that's what i've been seeing help us understand how are you

13:11Cristina Junqueira: positioning you in the u.s and maybe contrast it on how you positioned it back in brazil different reality different market yeah of course a lot of lessons though yeah of course and some similarities to your point um so listen it's easy to um especially for maybe your audience or executives or people in the industry to look at us and say you know but i i'm you know i'm pretty well treated by my bank and i have like a fancy credit card and you know i have access to a lot of like fancy investments that's all true but that's not the reality like the u.s is a huge country it's over 300 million people it's true that you know the higher income you are the better treated you are you know so we're not going to be trying to address that segment so for a lot of people watching they might say oh this isn't as interesting as as it could be for me we know you know we're not necessarily trying to address that segment but when you look at the mass market you know of the the u.s which is 150 million people maybe the top 20 25 percent of that market the mass affluent segment as we call it that's 56 million people you know those people are very poorly served because they're they're they they make a good living they have savings you know they they wish they were better treated but they're not they're really not they don't have access to the fancy metal cards they don't have access to all those benefits they're paying very high fees they don't have access to a good savings account to high yield on their accounts they're they're locked out of all that so maybe sure like they do have a bank account they do have a credit card but it's not as nearly as good as it could be and as it should be you know so with our technology and our cost structure we are able to serve them much better we're able to pass all those efficiencies, all that lean cost structure in the form of no fees.

15:15And we're going to be paying them for their money. We're not going to be making them a big favor of taking their money. We're actually going to work really hard to earn their business and we're going to offer them the best customer experience out there. So that is the starting point or the perspective of the broader customer segment that we're going to try to serve. But we also know at the same time that the first people that are going to come obviously are the people that know us. There are Brazilians, Mexicans, and Colombians that are in the West that grew up with us, uh, in, in those countries and then moved here for work, for school, for family.

15:52Uh, and then they're left with the bureaucracy that they find here. And they're like, oh my God, you know, like, why is it new here? And we've been hearing that for years now, you know, customers asking us to come we know that there's anywhere between oh my god it's pouring outside it's miami yeah i know um we have anywhere between half a million and three to five million people depending on how slice the data of new customers from rizzo mexico colombia here in the u.s that you've already gotten to know them that already know us and they're eager to you know to bank with us so let's see let's see how things evolve we know they're going to come first but they're not the only ones that we're hoping to attract.

16:35Cristina Junqueira: And that means it's a joint effort within your team to go after the customers that know you and the ones that are getting to know you. Yeah. What is your approach to building the brand? Because in Brazil, correct me if I'm wrong, but about 80 % of your customers have come from word of mouth with extremely low CAC. Yes. To this day we have very low cac yes including in brazil mexico colombia and and yeah go ahead yeah it's okay um and even to this day now now we're starting to do a little bit more marketing especially in brazil um because now first like um we're almost running out of brazilians to a degree you know we have 120 million people already 64 percent of the adult population in brazil is a customer um and we're still seeing a million about a million customers coming in every every other month.

17:30So there's a lot. There's a lot that we're still are seeing in terms of growth. But obviously, the bigger you get, you know, it gets a little harder at the margin. But the approach that we did in that we had in the beginning in Brazil is similar to what we're going to do here. So first and foremost, we want people to love the product, you know, because if they love the product, if we have very high NPS, they're just going to talk about it. They're going share it with their friends and their family so that's the best marketing that you can possibly do and much rather invest more on the product in the form of no fees in the form of a better a better experience and have that speak for itself uh and and customers do you know the word of mouth thing versus not invest enough in the product and then have to pay a lot of media and almost like bribe customers into trying the product so that's the first thing and that's a very that's very similar to our approach to what has been on all the three different markets so product lab growth is a necessity it's a must it's a must there's no good marketing that resists bad products you know so that's that's the foundation the second thing is we want to be super consistent so it's not just the products every single touch point that the customer has so customer support needs to be phenomenal so we launched yesterday what did i do the whole night i was reading through all the transcripts from calls and chats that came in yesterday while I was here like a lay event and I'm going to continue to do that until my arms fall off you know because I want to know what customers are saying I want to know how they're feeling I read through like all the social media comments you know I want to have that sensibility you know of reacting to the language that they're using and how they're experiencing the product and iterate very fast so caring a lot about the customer experience every touch point like how how they're being perceived how they're being answered on on phone on chat on social media that matters a lot as well and then of course like we were here at new stadium this is a this was a big investment that we made as well as the f1 team you know you saw the car that we have here on the on the pitch uh we're partners with the mercedes f1 team which has been having a phenomenal season that we're very grateful for.

19:49We had Kimi and George wear purple suits on the Miami Grand Prix earlier this year.

19:53Cristina Junqueira: And new right in the middle. We have new on their collar, new on their helmet, new on the car. So we're doing really well on brand exposure there. And this just builds the foundation for the brand to grow. Because if you start too direct with the paid marketing bottom funnel type of stuff like conversion, that doesn't build a brand. That can buy your growth. but it's often like also a little bit of adverse selection because you're going to get people that are like credit hungry, like people are kind of desperate. Whereas if you build the brand, like through storytelling, through content, through some of those nice partnerships, you're building a lot of equity, you know, and that is the thing that compounds over time.

20:36Cristina Junqueira: Why not wait until the full banking charter approval? We debated. I would love nothing more than having that bank charter already. but we just wanted to get this into the hands of customers. We wanted to start learning. We wanted to start iterating on the product, see how they were going to react and improve the product. And there's only so much that you can do when you can talk about the product. We've been testing. We've had maybe 500 people testing the product, like the account and the credit card until yesterday. But there's only so much that you can do when you're kind of hiding, when you're in stealth mode.

21:13You know, so being able to launch allows us to iterate much faster and learn a lot more from customers. But we absolutely want to get to our charter as quickly as we can. But it takes time.

21:26Cristina Junqueira: What are you've publicly said that you're going to invest a bit, I believe, no more than 100 basis points of your efficiency ratio. And that's on all internationalization. It's not just the U.S. Not just U.S. Yes. That includes new global, too. Interesting. and you're going to give it 12 to 30 months, what are the KPIs that you're going to be tracking most closely during this period? Great question. So, of course, there'll be a lot of eyes on just growth in size of our customer base. We're going to be tracking that, but I would argue that's less important. What we really want to be tracking and getting the pulse and building towards is high NPS and high satisfaction rates.

22:10We'd rather have a smaller customer base that loves the product than buying our way through growth. But having customers that are indifferent, you know, that don't really use the product, definitely don't love the product. So we want to make sure that we get the foundation right on that customer love. Because if you get there, then growing is a matter of time. Then you can invest and accelerate. But if you don't, then it's a little bit of an empty shell, you know, around growth. Yeah.

22:43Cristina Junqueira: We'll talk about the 35 countries, but Mexico is your second largest market right now. Yeah. And I think if you look at the average revenue per account, it's twice as high as it was in Brazil at the same period, right? Yeah. So what does that tell us about Mexico? So Mexico is a very different market than Brazil is. like let's start with credit cards i think that's probably where the most like the biggest part of the difference comes from uh in brazil very few people actually revolve on credit cards because interest rates are very high um and that's a little bit of a doom loop because delinquency rates are high then interest rates have to be high because the losses are high and people don't get out of that cycle you know and they they have a hard time coming out of like revolving anyway like there's all the specificities of the credit card market in mexico it's much closer to what we see in the u.s whereas like 60 70 percent of people actually use credit cards for financing so that allows a much healthier profile of that type of credit so interest rates are much lower delinquency rates are also lower um so that allows us to have a much higher um interest in bearing balances in mexico versus the u.s we've all when we came into mexico we knew the economics unit economics in mexico were going to be better than brazil because of that reason right um and you add to that the fact that Mexico was much much more under penetrated on the credit side than Brazil was right in Brazil maybe 20 % of the people didn't have a credit card when we started out of 100 customers that we would approve 20 % of them didn't have a credit card the other 80 already had in Mexico that number is closer to 50-50 so there's a much bigger opportunity for us to grow the pie to grow the whole of the market and to bring people into the into the industry that didn't have access before.

24:37So all that kind of like adds up and compounds to revenue and margins per customers being better. Is underwriting easier or harder in Mexico as compared to Brazil? Easier in some ways, harder in different ways. So in Brazil, it was a much more developed market. So there was more data on a number of customers because they already had more access. In Mexico, that was not true. On the other hand, again, if the economics are better, you can underwrite deeper. You can approve more people because the usage of the product allows for better economics. So I think it goes both ways. But one thing that is important to say is there's a lot of learnings from Brazil that transfers to Mexico and vice versa.

25:22So today we have our AI core team working on NuFormer, which is our AI-driven credit and writing model. and that is a model that leverages god knows how many you know features um and and a lot of unstructured data everywhere so that is a capability that more and more has no barriers you know and that we're able to deploy across markets and soon enough we're going to be able

25:46Cristina Junqueira: to deploy here in the us actually before we talk about ai staying on credit underwriting the U.S. is a market that has a lot of data, but it has more data restrictions than, say, Brazil, right? How does that change your underwriting approach for the U.S. operation? So first, like, we always got to start from the hard lines, right? So there are regulations, there's, you know, the Fair Lending Act, there's a bunch of, like, specific regulations with regards to the military. And anyway, all those are the hard boundaries that we got to abide for. Like, Like we operate multiple regulated entities across multiple jurisdictions and compliance is non-negotiable.

26:28So anyway, like that's a hard line. Having said that, that's something else that just blows my mind about the U.S. How so many financial institutions just rely on FICO scores. That's all they do. They're like, oh, if you have a FICO score above like X, here you go. Oh my God. How? Like there's so, at the same time, like two things are true. there's a lot of data and there's a lot of like just very simplistic underwriting so that's the opportunity for a company like us right because of course like we're going to have access to the fico scores but we have not just the technology and the data infrastructure but also the experience like 13 years of experience and the talent and the culture to be able to leverage all that data into way better models so that is an opportunity that is so exciting for us you know yeah i always

27:17Cristina Junqueira: say the US is definitely the deepest and biggest market, but it's not necessarily the most sophisticated. To a certain degree, it's very lazy in some ways. Speaking of AI, your agents on the customer service side are handling about 60 % of your planes, roughly. David has joined the board of OpenAI, which is a huge deal. Yesterday, I didn't hear much. about ai somebody mentioned i was like we've been it's the first event that i've been going like for over a year that nobody mentioned ai yeah so but it doesn't mean you're not no anything on it so uh what else can we expect from new on the ai front it's a great question uh so listen we are probably on the top 10 if not higher in terms of companies are leaning into ai very heavily, right?

28:15I think the difference is where we're deploying those resources. So we have extremely strong AI capabilities in the company. We are hiring a lot of talent. We made an acquisition in California of this company called Hyperplane that has been like the center of like our AR core team. And we've been like growing and acquiring talent everywhere. But we chose to deploy those capabilities where we saw the highest leverage. So first it was credit underwriting. What we were able to do initially in Brazil, and now we're exporting that into Maxwell and to other lines of the business, was phenomenal. We're able to usually, in credit underwriting, when you improve a model, you've got to make a choice.

28:57Either you reduce the delinquency rates, you reduce the losses, or you approve more people. We've been able to consistently do a lot of both, which is unheard of. And that was the highest leverage where we could deploy those resources. So this was first. The second thing is like our biggest bottleneck for our continued expansion is internal capacity, is execution capacity. So the second place in which we deployed a lot of like AI resources was on accelerating product development. And for the product that we're launching here in the West, many features were deployed without any engineers touching a line of code.

29:36It was all AI. So we're experimenting a lot. All our engineers are heavy users of any tool that you like in its cursors and its cloud code, like you name it. Even the design teams and product teams, even research, like we're leveraging AI very heavily. So that has accelerated product development by a lot. That's the reason why we're able to deploy so many products. If you think about it, like there's debt count, there's debit cards, there's remittances, there's credit card, there's a whole new app. Like all that was built in record time with a much smaller team. And that's because we've been leveraging AI everywhere to increase productivity on the product side and on engineering side.

30:19So those were the two highest leverage teams. Now, AI in Brazil, because we have such a long history of data and a way to train our models, we were testing in a smaller scale. And only when we saw results from AI that had higher satisfaction levels and higher accuracy levels than humans, that was when we started to deploy. Because a lot of people look at AI on customer-facing applications, and they have cost savings in mind. But guess what? We were already very efficient on the cost side. We didn't have a cost structure problem. So we are really looking into AI as a way to improve quality in a way to answer our customers faster, more accurately, because humans make mistakes too, you know.

31:07And especially when you have peaks of demand, you can have like SLAs that stretch a little longer. So the way that I like to think about it in customer facing applications is how can AI make the experience better, not just its cost lower. So on the US, we are not starting with any AI agents answering customers. We don't have any data to train them on. So it's all human in the beginning and all very heavily monitored. All the team that we have answering customers today, they know I'm watching. They know I'm reading every line that they write. And I'm like, you shouldn't have said that. You know, you used too many emojis on this chat.

31:46And that's the level of feedback that we're giving them on tone, on answers. we're also heavily leveraging that to improve our faqs and even even product screens so that people so that products can be more intuitive and people can find the answers faster themselves so um ai will continue to play a very important role for us but we're going to be very smart about how to

32:08Cristina Junqueira: leverage it i'm curious on the brazilian front where you do have a lot of data and your sounds like you're training your own model yeah are you also going to acquire your own gpus and build your own data centers would you go to that extent oh that's a great question for our ai core team i wouldn't i wouldn't try to answer that what i can tell you is like we're going to be smart about it that's that's all everything that we've ever done um we know that there are very smart people building specific tools for specific uses. We're not going to try to reinvent or to build our own cloud code. So many companies are trying to do that.

32:48Let's just use the best of them and negotiate like really well so that we're not like overspending. But in areas in which we're going to be well positioned to actually do better, sure, why not? You know, we should lean into it.

33:01Cristina Junqueira: And essentially when David joined the board of AI, I looked at it, who's in it? I believe it's 10 people. and if I'm not mistaken, four, at least four of them, come from financial services. Oh, really? Oh, great. That's interesting. So there's no question that AI is coming for financial services, which AI, I think, is very interesting. Yeah. That's true. Although I would argue in on boards, you have people with finance background because you have like the audit committees and, you know, especially if you need them, especially if you're going to IPO. So, but it's true. I mean, AI is coming for everything, for everything.

33:37And we already have in Brazil today specific applications that our customer is facing, that customers are benefiting from. And I think it's a matter of time for us to have the data and to be able to deploy that here too.

33:49Cristina Junqueira: So, Cristina, what have you learned about hiring? I mean, New Today has thousands of employees all over the world. I know you have your hubs, but you also have people all over the world. what have you heard about bringing top talent or the talent that you need on board yeah so first i think it's important to to note that we i know you could you could think i'm biased but like i was a consultant before i worked with bcg for many years i have lots of friends in different companies i worked at other companies before starting new bank with david um so we know what the world out there looks like. I have never seen a company that has a higher talent density than Newbank.

34:34Like seriously, it's just, it's not just the product team or the tech team that is really going to finance him. It's everywhere. It's like, or people in culture team or collection team, like our internal auditors. It's like everywhere. People are just so, so, so freaking good. and i i think that that comes from a variety of things first is the right culture and we were talking about this earlier like you were sharing your own experience the right culture will either attract the best people or will repel the best people so if you if you don't run a company that great people would be um attracted to would be uh engaged to work with you're not gonna you're not at them they're just gonna go great people have options you need to be the the people that the company that those great people want to work for you know because there's no money in the world they'll buy phenomenal talent to come and work for a shitty company you know so the first thing is it's like a relationship right like people will struggle to find somebody that is great but if they're not great why would they expect that someone great would settle for them you see what i mean yeah it's the same thing so this is the first thing the second thing is um i've made the mistake painfully not just once not just twice too many times but i've learned my lesson on not giving it a shot with that person that you know did well but you're not really sure like it never paid off never i'm yet to see one example of that being off because sometimes you have a role and the world's been open for months and you've interviewed 60 70 80 candidates and you're yet to find somebody great and then you're kind of looking back and think well maybe that person wasn't that bad maybe we should give them a shot it never works you know you really gotta have a very very very high bar um as you hire you know because it never works out and the third thing is like you you really gotta test you get a really gotta think about your hiring process a lot of people hire on intuition still and for us two things have really paid off so first having the case interviews in which like we have an opportunity to see the person to role play a little bit and see how they work how they think how they react you know we try to simulate um a work meeting with a topic that we gotta adjust and we have we ask them to prepare something just to get the conversation started and then we we learn about how they think how they approach problem how they how creative they are how they react to feedback you know how they push back or or don't so that's something that is really useful for us and the other thing is like try to look for evidence of values alignment because you can teach people almost anything but you can't teach them to care you know to care about what you care about you know so if a person comes into a new bank and they don't care a lot about customers they're like okay fine you know like customers are the thing that get in the way of what we do it's not gonna work you know you're not gonna teach them how to care they gotta care they gotta give them you know i was watching an interview um jf bezos and

37:55Cristina Junqueira: talking about this topic and he said that he's been fortunate because of the success of amazon He's been fortunate to hire some of his mentors or some of his idols. Have you experienced all of this? Well, I have a personal philosophy that I think we should learn from absolutely everyone. I don't let anyone pass in front of me without me learning something from them. And I really appreciate what you shared before we started the recording about your own journey. because sure I think some brilliant people have joined new bank over the years some are still there some have moved on and I've learned a great deal from them but we're all human and we're all imperfect and we have different beliefs and we may disagree on certain topics and I see a little bit of a problem when people idolize too much like somebody and they're like oh my god so and so is wonderful and they're smart and they're like this and that and then they they found out about something that they disagree or something that they did that maybe was a mistake like something that they got wrong and then they completely discard everything else they throw everything away and the world isn't binary humans are not binary you know they're not either 100 perfect and are going to agree with them with 100 of the things they do and say or nothing at all you know so what i i try to keep more of a balanced perspective you know i try to learn from everyone and be very understanding that we're all human or there are going to be things that i'll admire about somebody there'll be things that i won't like about them and that's all fine you know that's fair walk me through your typical weekday weekday okay so i usually i'm up um before six because I try to work out very early in the morning at six.

39:52So my husband and I will work out together with a trainer. Then it's a quick shower because I want to be with my kids, help them with breakfast, take them to school. So I usually drive them to school, my husband and I do. And then we're back. Then that's when the day starts about 830. And then it's like I try to be super efficient during the day meeting meeting meeting uh if i have work that that is like deep work then it's like a lot of thoughtfulness like if it's so the work for this event for instance i try to like block like some some some blocks of time some windows for me to like do deep work i usually try to do that in the morning um and then i try to pile all my meetings and not have like idle time between them because that just get lost and it piles up if i have like 15 minutes between a meeting here 30 minutes between a meeting there like at the end of the day you've just wasted two hours you know um i try to be very efficient during the day because by 5 30 ish you know i try to you know be with the kids for dinner and then it's like you know shower and bedtime and i read for them and i put them to bed and then when it's around like 7 7 15 they're asleep that's when i open my computer and do you know another run until like at least nine or ten you know um but it is what it is uh we work really hard we have to um but i those two windows in the morning and in the evenings i try to protect because i'm a mom of four you know i have four small children that really need me and i need them frankly you know i love being a mom it's my favorite thing in the world um so i really try i try to be very disciplined about protecting those hours.

41:36I can work. I can pull an all-nighter if I have to. But I really want to be there for the kids in those moments.

41:43Cristina Junqueira: Is it true that you rebuild your calendar every six months? It is true. How does that work? Sometimes even sooner. So here's the thing. It's very easy for meetings to pile up, especially recurrent ones. Oh, let's set up like a recurrent 101. Let's set up like a check in on this project or that initiative or whatever. And those things can be necessary at that moment. But then a couple of months in, things have progressed, they're going well, and you don't need those anymore. But if you're not disciplined about it, half of your calendar is taken by those. So what I try to do at least once every six months, but it often comes sooner, is like I just delete everything and do a zero-based calendar.

42:29I'm like, okay, so what are my priorities now? Who has joined the organization? Who is new on my team? Who's struggling? Who isn't? What are the priorities? What should I be spending time on? You know, which meetings I cannot join anymore? So one big shift was when I started like working focused on the U.S., when I went on my last, when my last baby was born, I handed over Mexico, Colombia, like to the other executives. And I was like only focused on the U.S. but I was still like on the board of Mexico right like or whatever I was like no I want out of everything because I want to be able to focus on this thing that I need to build you know so it's very easy to lose sight of those things and you also like that used to be my team and they they they also kind of wanted me around and I wanted to be there for them too but you you got to make choices you know being being focused is isn't about like saying yes harder yes to some things It's about saying no to a lot of other things.

43:29So I try to be very disciplined about that.

43:32Cristina Junqueira: And do you reach email zero every day? Not every day. At a certain point, you just delete everything. Not every day. But I try to keep a very lean inbox. So today it isn't zero for obvious reasons, because I was on the event yesterday. But I may have gone to bed last night with five. Wow. So I try to keep it very lean. the video is the same you know um i try to reply to people very fast you know and but zeroing is maybe once a week you know that's still impressive still very impressive i know and and you keep your mind clear right you don't watch horror movies or things that might upset you yeah i mean i wouldn't say i keep my mind clear my mind is probably like one of those browsers with 57 camps open, including like one that has Bluey, another one that has, you know, F1 and the race.

44:30There's Madrid, like this weekend is the first time on that circuit in like 30 years. And it's very scary. Let's see how that's going to go. So there's a lot always like kind of going on in my mind. But what I try to do is protect myself emotionally, you know, being a mom, and also like dealing with everything that we got to deal with professionally, I try to not to waste unnecessary emotional energy on things that I don't have to. So I think entertainment and social media has a way of pulling us, dragging us into like holes. And I don't want to do that. So I try to stay away from any of the news.

45:09There's a big like for the people in the UAS, you may have seen something about this murder trial like with this woman you know i've been dodging that like the plague you know because i don't want to hear anything about it you know um i i don't watch it's not just horror movie like any drama movie you know like anything that is like anything that involves like children and cancer patients and people getting sick and people like i'm just not i'm not interested i don't have the emotional energy to spend in that you know So just all I watch when I can, which is very rarely, is Hallmark Christmas movies.

45:48That's all I do.

45:49Cristina Junqueira: So before I let you go, because we're running out of time, just go through quick rapid fire. Sure. In university, you researched digital television in Brazil. I did. And business ecosystems and dental services. Any lessons from that into New Bank? That was a long time ago. So listen, I had to, when I graduated college, I was also my last year taking the master's degrees classes. So one of those projects was for a master's degree and the other one was for graduating in engineering. And I think those things taught me that first I can do a lot. I remember my last year in college, I was working for BCG.

46:31I was graduating like the hardest engineering college in Brazil. I was taking all like seven out of six master courses, master degree courses on that last year. And I was writing a thesis. So that just allowed me to just realize how much I could do at the same time. I had this hunger. I wanted to eat the world and I wanted to do so much. And that kept me going when I was in business school. I also worked part time while enrolled in business school. and I don't know how it was in Wharton, but at Kellogg, you could do up to four classes in every period. But most people did four. The minimum was three.

47:16Some people did three. I did five and a half at some point, you know, because I just wanted, while I was working, because I just wanted to do so much. So I think that taught me a lot about, you know, how much we can do when we put ourselves into it. Humans are more capable than we are. Oh, so much more.

47:33Cristina Junqueira: so much more um a leader you admire i guess outside of new and disney already because we talked about disney oh that's a tough one uh bye bye for sure um well i have a lot of admiration for what bezos built with amazon like such a phenomenal company we borrow a lot from what amazon did like this whole day one like mindset is something that we're very fond of um i'm a very a big admirer of uh apple and its attention to detail like the fandom that steve jobs were able to create you know like that's something that we've borrowed from as well so yeah um the best product decision you made at new bank so many good ones um but i think what i was telling you about like the attention to detail of the experience like investing a lot on customer support, you know, which was always seen at a cost center.

48:34And we're like, no, like this is part of the product experience. It's not enough to have a great app, but if customers need you, you got to treat them extremely well. So I think like treating customers extremely well, best product decision.

48:47Cristina Junqueira: And finally, a book you recommend often or go back to often? Oh, so many good ones. You can tell us more than one. yeah so play bigger is a great one i don't know if you read that one it's phenomenal it's about like um redefining categories and owning categories i had my whole team read it for the u.s launch uh we love it um i love the hard thing about hard things it's a great one um there's a book that changed my life which is how you measure life it's a great book uh by claiborne christensen so many good ones recently everyone that would breathe I would tell to read Clear Thinking from Shane Parrish it's a great book on so many things a lot of emotional intelligence into that book great book for anyone people should not graduate high school without reading the book that's a lot of homework Christina I can't thank you enough for doing this And also, thank you for inspiring countless of generations of not just entrepreneurs, but builders and dreamers.

50:02Oh, of course. We've got to thank our customers that have given us enough trust to be here and to be able to build this business. We wouldn't be here without them.

50:10Cristina Junqueira: Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for tuning in. And I hope you enjoyed this fantastic episode with Christina Junqueda from NewBank. If you want more interviews, please subscribe, follow and leave a review on Spotify, Apple, YouTube or wherever you get your shows. And if you have any suggestions or thoughts about the show, just drop me a line on LinkedIn. See you next time.