Cristina Junqueira

Co-Founder and VP of Branding and Business Development at Nubank Brasil

São Paulo, Brazil

@nubankbrasil | LinkedIn Profile

Your early love was writing; in fact, you wanted to be a journalist. Do you still have this passion for writing?

I do! Throughout the years I have always found some way to keep writing something. When I was in high school and college, for example, it was
the school papers to which I regularly contributed. I even had a few articles published after winning a student literature national contest in Brazil. More recently, I have put a lot of effort and wrote much of the copy you’ll see in Nubank’s external communication, which was also very fun. And just last year I actually wrote and published a book in honor of my grandmother that had just passed away. It is a curated compilation of her best and dearest recipes, collected from almost 20 handwritten notebooks she wrote throughout her life. It brought me a lot of joy to go over all that material as I wrote and developed the project with my editors.

I also wrote some pieces that I’m very proud of as part of a series of personal updates my Kellogg classmates and I send out to our group every year since we graduated. When it’s my turn to write, I always take the time to reflect on what I have learned and accomplished to then produce something meaningful. Entrepreneurship and motherhood, not surprisingly, have proven to be very inspiring topics.

“I quit my job (at the bank) the day I received the biggest bonus of my life.” What led to this decision? Were you already considering founding NuBank at the time?

I was with this company (bank) for roughly 5 years and I am still very grateful for that time. I was extremely lucky to have had the opportunity to lead interesting businesses during challenging times with relatively high autonomy, which is something very rare within their structure. That’s what allowed me to learn and do so much during my time there. However, as I looked ahead, the odds of continuing to have a meaningful impact there were very slim - as you evolve into more senior roles, you get further and further away from the actual business you’re leading. It starts to be less about the value you add and more about the internal political agenda. And although I had already trained myself to be pretty good at it, that was just not what I wanted to do anymore.

The perspective of spending my most productive years, when I was already experienced but still had a lot of energy and drive, fighting an organization to allow me to add value was just too depressing. What I really wanted, and frankly, what most people want, is to be able to make meaningful contributions. And I knew that as long as I stayed there, that wasn’t going to happen. Therefore, there was nothing left to do but to quit my job, regardless of how big that year’s bonus was. So I did, that very same day.

There’s a famous quote (wrongfully attributed to Socrates) that says “The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old but on building the new.” As I thought about how to spend the next 5 to 10 years of my life, that quote stuck with me. I had given myself some time to take a step back and reassess my preferences and priorities. Over the course of 8 weeks I read 10 books, countless articles, watched 50+ TED talks and had coffee/lunch/dinner with almost everyone on my professional network. By the end of that period I had 4 very interesting job offers, and I didn’t think entrepreneurship was really an option, but it was only when I met my partner David Vélez (Nubank’s CEO), who was already working on the concept of what would become Nubank, that I realized I had to go “build the new”. And we did.

“This is a boring product. We couldn’t imagine a world where people were excited about a credit card. But we pulled it off.” What do you believe has been the key to the success of Nubank in the Brazilian market?

This is something that still amazes me. I remember telling my partners in the early days that we’d need to make large marketing investments to grow, because credit cards aren’t a “sexy” product. In Brazil, where credit card APRs average 435% currently, they’re actually (and rightfully) seen as a big villain. I remember saying: “nobody wakes up in the morning saying: today is going to be a great day, because I’m getting a credit card!” So you can imagine our surprise when we started to see hundreds of thousands of people on our waitlist for the Nubank card. On the last 18 months, over 3 million people have already applied for our card, and another 400 thousand are currently on our waitlist, with hundreds of those emailing and calling us everyday to check their statuses.

One of our investors once said: “I don’t know what you guys are doing down there, but just don’t mess it up!” In fact, nowhere in the world have they seen this type of viral growth in financial services, with customers constantly referring their friends and family to us with no incentive to do so other than good karma. It is hard to pinpoint 1 or 2 reasons why customers are so excited about our product - ultimately, we believe it’s the overall experience that drives this engagement. Since the beginning, we’ve obsessed over every detail, from the UX and design of all our features to the tone of voice we use in every single communication and customer service interaction. Banks aren’t famous for a great customer experience anywhere in the world, but in Brazil they are specially bad and expensive. So when customers were presented with an alternative that had a much superior experience across the board and on top of that with no fees, it just became a no brainer for most people within our target.

Brazil is well known for its complex regulatory environment. What has your experience been like from a regulatory standpoint with starting a Financial Services company in this market?

It is very challenging, to say the least. Brazil ranks 116 out of 189 economies in “ease of doing business” according to the World Bank. That alone already makes our environment significantly more challenging than in the US or in any other country in Europe. The so-called “Brazil cost” severely impacts all startups with a heavy tax burden, a very complex and inefficient legislation system, super strict labor laws and a lot of excessive bureaucracy everywhere. This means that a significant amount of effort and resources is often required to merely keep the business running without breaking any laws.

And being in the financial services spectrum adds another layer of complexity, with the Central Bank overseeing and regulating most of what we do. However, on this side, it’s been extremely positive so far. It does help that we’re not Uber - as innovative as our product is, we’re still very much within the regulation framework, and did not require any change or flexibility from the regulator to build or grow our business. So far, we have seen the Brazilian Central Bank be cautiously optimistic about how technology can help foster competition and ultimately benefit consumers, which can eventually lead to more modern and flexible norms that are more appropriate to what the market is currently offering.

You stated NuBank has had an article published once every 8 hours globally in 2016. How much pressure does this equate to in ensuring the company is successful and not a flash-in-the-pan?

This is such an interesting question! We have always been aware of the big responsibility we carry, having raised US$100M in equity from our investors so far and being the first investment in Brazil for lead VC firms like Sequoia Capital and Founders Fund. We also employ over 350 people in our São Paulo headquarters and currently serve hundreds of thousands of customers, which makes the stakes even higher. We’re very mindful of the impact we’re already having in consumer relations as a whole in Brazil, with a few companies already setting out to be the “Nubank” of their sectors. But we had never thought about it from the angle of all the media exposure we’re having.

What’s unique about this coverage is that a relevant part of it comes from non-traditional vehicles like blogs and technology forums, and we also see a lot of user generated content. Until we started to produce video content, you’d search for Nubank on YouTube and you’d find tens of videos from customers that were in love with the product and eager to share their experience and insights with their friends and followers, some of them with tens of thousands of views.

Enjoying this level of support, whether that comes from customers, bloggers or journalists, definitely adds to the weight on our shoulders. Personally, I believe a lot of this attention comes from a deep and beautiful place where people have hope. They hope that companies can be more efficient and human and genuinely work on their behalf to solve relevant pain they experience everyday, instead of pushing them whatever product is paying the biggest commision today. People are tired of feeling used and tricked by big companies and their small print, especially within the financial services space. I believe to them (and, frankly, to me as well), the success of Nubank proves that companies can act differently, and that consumers don’t need to settle for poor services and products. So I guess I’m lucky that we’re all in this together.