David Vélez materializes on the eighth floor of Nubank’s headquarters in São Paulo at 9:53am, and greets me in Portuguese with a thick Spanish accent. “I’ll be with you in seven minutes,” he says. I set up in a conference room. At 10am, he takes his seat across from me and asks, in Portuguese, which language we’re doing this in; we settle on English. He is sporting a gift from his wife: a purple bracelet on his right wrist.

I grew up only four miles from here, and first remember hearing about Nubank in 2015 from a friend who boasted about her new credit card. She told me she’d been sent a link, signed up, and, a few days later, a purple card appeared at her house. To a teenage girl in Brazil hearing about it from older friends and cousins, the plastic, purple, no-fee card sounded cool. To my dad, it sounded like a scam. He worked at Itaú, one of Brazil’s largest banks and Nubank’s biggest competitors. I was reminded that we already had perfectly good credit cards, and that I already had an account at Itaú. There was even money in it.

In 2018, I moved to the U.S. Every time I came back to Brazil I’d notice more purple cards being pulled from pockets when a check arrived for dinner. It sounds quaint, but purple was a shocking color for a credit card or any consumer product in Brazil. It sparked questions, which its owners were eager to answer: There really were no fees, the customer service was unusually good, you could do all your banking from your phone, etc. They’d drone on, until at last, they’d exhale, “You should get one!”

I didn’t. But before my move back to Brazil in 2025, I needed a new bank account, a business account, and a credit card. I asked friends where I should go. Nubank, obviously. From an apartment in New York City, I downloaded the Nu app.

By then, Nubank had become the largest digital bank in Latin America and one of Brazil’s largest financial institutions. Today, it serves over 140 million customers across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, including 118 million in Brazil alone, where more than 60% of the adult population uses the app. In the second quarter of 2026, Nubank crossed $1 billion in quarterly net income, and nearly $6 billion in revenue. It has been publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange since December 2021, and is now worth more than $60 billion.

Part of what makes Nubank’s rise so compelling is how improbable it once seemed. From its first pitch deck, one analogy has been used again and again to tell Nubank’s story: David versus Goliath. Vélez, Nubank’s Colombian founder and CEO, has gone head-to-head with Brazil’s largest, most profitable, and most entrenched companies. He angered them by lowering fees and rates, by bringing more than 31 million previously unbanked people into the financial system and giving more than 18 million their first credit card, and by forcing legacy institutions to adapt to the consumer expectations that Nubank abruptly reset.

In New York, when I first used the app, I remember feeling oddly proud of my new bank account, similar to the feeling you get when one of your compatriots wins gold at the Olympics: You may have had nothing to do with their achievement, and you may have known nothing about the person before that moment, but suddenly you feel they represent the very best parts of you, or the things you aspire to. Brazil has produced its share of successful companies, but few have become global reference points, the kind people on other continents know and point to as world-class. Nubank is on the precipice of becoming one.

Whether it does depends largely on the success or failure of Vélez’s current challenge: taking Nubank to the United States, its first market outside Latin America. His task is no longer to prove that a Brazilian startup can beat the Goliaths at home or in its neighborhood, but that it can compete and win on a global stage.

In the course of reporting this story between São Paulo and Miami, I spoke with Doug Leone, the longtime partner at Sequoia Capital who backed Nubank in its earliest days. “There are the Elon Musks and Steve Jobses of the world, and they’re fantastic,” he told me. “But there are also these people who are still early enough in their careers that we don’t fully see what they might become. Bill Gates wasn’t Bill Gates for the first 20 years.”

“I think David is one of those guys,” Leone said. “He has vision. He executes. He’s tough as nails. He’s lovable. He’s nobody’s fool. And look, I haven’t sold a single share of the company stock. That doesn’t tell you everything. But it tells you something.”

Vélez was born in Medellín, Colombia in 1981. His parents were both entrepreneurs, as were all 15 of his aunts and uncles. “There was a lot of entrepreneurial DNA being served for breakfast, lunch, and dinner,” he told me. By age five, he was working at his father’s button factory.

On weekends, the Vélez family would drive to their finca, a small house in the Colombian countryside. He remembers riding horses, swimming in the pool, and spending time with his two younger sisters. Yet outside the finca, Medellín was at war. The Colombian government was fighting the major drug cartels, and bombs exploded often in the streets. It was not uncommon for people you knew to be kidnapped in broad daylight.

“I remember needing to sleep on the floor,” Vélez said, “because Pablo Escobar said they were going to bomb the city, and I was worried about the windows of my bedroom shattering. One day I wore a bunch of sweaters because I thought that if I wore enough of them, the bullets wouldn’t hit me.” He was six years old.

When he was eight, the Vélez family moved to Costa Rica. His parents wanted their kids to sleep in their own beds and wander outside without fear of being shot. They left behind their home, friends, family, the kids’ school, Saturday lunches with grandparents, and weekends at the finca. “I wouldn’t necessarily use ‘traumatic’ as a word,” he told me. “But it was life-changing, obviously.” 

“My parents were able to create an environment where I felt safe. That gave me a sense of confidence that no matter what happens, no matter what the environment is like, we’re going to figure it out. We’ll be fine. We’ll know how to move forward, persevere, and succeed.”

“But I never really felt that I was fully local,” he said. “I never felt that I fit in. I always described myself as a Colombian, and there was always a sense of being an outsider. It’s a feeling that’s followed me and continues to be a part of my identity.” 

His father opened a button factory in Costa Rica, rebuilding the same business in a new country. Vélez spent summers there doing odd jobs, making leather patches for jeans, helping wherever he could, looking for ways to earn a little money. At 12, he talked his dad into selling him a cow. It seemed like the greatest investment ever. The cow had a calf, making teenage Vélez the proud owner of two cows. By the time he was 18, he had a herd of six. He sold them and took the money to Stanford University, which had become an improbable dream he managed to pull off. Nobody from his school in Costa Rica had ever gone to Stanford, and few Stanford students could trace their pocket change to a sale of six cows. The day the acceptance email hit his inbox remains one of the happiest in his life.

“He was a foreign-born kid who found his way to Stanford,” Leone said, when asked about the first time they met. “By the time you do that, you self-select.” 

Vélez graduated from Stanford in 2005 with a degree in management science and engineering and the bug to start a business, but no particularly good idea for what it should be. Instead he interned at Goldman Sachs for a summer, then joined Morgan Stanley for two years before moving into private equity at General Atlantic (GA).

His first deal at GA was an investment in Brazil’s commodities and futures exchange, BM&F. It was one of the largest investments the firm had ever made. Vélez, who was 26 and the closest thing GA had to a Brazilian, was asked if he’d like to open their first office in São Paulo, where he spent the next two years. Between the summers of 2008 and 2010, he spent more and more of his time and energy on financial services. By the fall of 2010, he decided to return to Stanford for business school, which he envisioned as a vacation during which he’d figure out what business to start. Then a classmate, David George, learned through Doug Leone that Sequoia was looking at Latin America, and introduced him to Vélez.

A couple weeks into his first quarter of business school, Vélez drove the two miles from Stanford to Sequoia’s Sand Hill Road office to meet with Leone. In the two minutes it took to walk from Leone’s office to his car in the parking lot after the meeting ended, Vélez received an email from Michael Moritz, Sequoia’s other major partner, telling him to come back inside. He wanted to meet Vélez, too.

“When we ran Sequoia, we were two different cats, but we saw a lot of business things the same way,” Leone said. “With David, we quickly saw him exactly the same way.”

“When we interview people at Sequoia, there’s an expression we sometimes use: someone is a half-pager. A half-pager is someone you meet, ask all the questions you want to ask, and 35 minutes later you only have half a page of notes. Then, once or twice a year, you meet someone and the whole hour flies by, and you have two or three pages of notes because they’re so interesting you don’t want to forget anything. David was one of those.”

At the time, the concept of BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) was still new. Sequoia had already expanded into India and China, and Brazil seemed like it might be next. Leone and Moritz needed someone to help them figure out whether it should be, and to potentially lead their efforts in Latin America as a whole. Vélez got an offer to join part-time while at Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB), with a mandate to help answer that question.

“Part-time” turned out to be a loose description of the arrangement. “He worked full-time in business school,” Leone said, “and he worked full-time at Sequoia.”

Vélez would get to his desk at Sequoia by 5am. He’d talk to founders and source deals until 8–9am, then leave for classes at Stanford. When his classes were done, he’d return to Sequoia around 4–5pm and stay a few more hours before going home to do homework. On Wednesdays, the business school had no classes. On Tuesday evenings, Vélez would accompany Leone on a private jet to Brazil; they’d land in São Paulo Wednesday morning and spend the day in meetings before returning in time for Vélez’s Thursday classes.

During one such trip, in the span of 34 hours, Leone and Vélez had three meetings to sign term sheets for three different deals: an online travel agency, an agriculture technology company in Londrina, and a capital markets company (XP Investimentos). The last one still stings. They had a term sheet to invest in XP at a roughly $200 million valuation, and passed. “Horrible decision,” Vélez said, clearly still not over it. “XP is worth something like $10 billion now. It would have been a 50x investment.”

Leone’s memories of those trips are somewhat more esoteric. He remembers eating bacalhau (a salted cod dish most foreigners find disgusting), getting pitched on a petroleum investment by Eike Batista (whose $35 billion net worth soon became negative-$1 billion after he was prosecuted for bribing public officials and placed under house arrest), and of course the terrible traffic.

About a year and a half into the experiment, Leone started leaning negative on Brazil. He thought too many tech companies started their pitch the same way: “We are the so-and-so of Brazil,” as Leone described it. “Pick your favorite U.S. company. The Uber of Brazil. The DoorDash of Brazil. Every time you back those kinds of businesses, you may have an exit, but they’re not fundamental businesses. There’s no innovation.”

After some 40 company meetings and zero deals closed, Sequoia ditched its foray into Brazil. Leone called Vélez to give him the news. It came as a shock. Vélez had spent nearly two years trying to make the Brazil office work, in part because he believed that Sequoia could lead a meaningful reinvention of the entire Latin American tech ecosystem. Still, the decision wasn’t entirely surprising. 

Plus, there was a consolation prize: Sequoia offered Vélez a job in California on generous terms. By that point, they’d watched him work non-stop for two years, and they liked his nose for companies. The offer was to work with growth equity investments internationally. 

To the despair of Vélez’s mother, he turned it down. Instead, after he graduated from GSB, he showed up back at his family’s house in Costa Rica, unemployed.

Two months later, he was back at Sequoia; this time, he was standing in front of Leone and Moritz with a few slides.

“That’s what I’d wanted for a very long time,” Vélez told me. “I remember being at General Atlantic, even before [Sequoia], hearing the entrepreneurs and thinking, I want to be in that seat. They’re having all the fun. They’re making the hard calls, the tough decisions. As an investor, I just get to write checks and say, ‘Go do it.’ It felt too easy.”

He was pitching for a seed check to build a financial services company, starting with credit cards, in Brazil. Just a couple months earlier, Leone had told Vélez that Sequoia didn’t want to do anything in Brazil, period.

“I’ll tell you the truth,” Leone said of the check they did write. “Half of the investment was almost part of his package when he left [Sequoia]. I won’t call it severance, but you get the idea. We felt some guilt to do right by this young man. But I also argued—and other people who knew him felt the same way—the young man has game. He’s an outlier. Maybe he can do something.”

Sequoia gave him $1 million to start the company in exchange for 10% equity, but the investment came with one condition and one disclaimer. The condition was that Vélez had to find another $1 million from a local fund. The disclaimer was that this wasn’t a bet on Brazil or on financial services; it was a bet on him.

Vélez got the other million from Kaszek Ventures; by July 2013, he’d raised the $2 million seed round. Sequoia wouldn’t make another early stage investment in Brazil for more than a decade.

When Vélez first moved to Brazil, he endured what he still calls “the most painful experience of my life.” He’d tried to open a bank account.

As he stepped through the bulletproof doors of a São Paulo bank, the metal detectors went off. Two armed guards approached him. They soon realized he was not there to rob the bank; he had simply forgotten to take his phone out of his pocket. Still, they asked him to leave. Back outside the building, he put everything he owned in a locker, then came back through the doors. Once inside, he waited 40 minutes to see a branch manager.

He made two more visits over the next five months (plus multiple phone calls to the call center, including one while he was physically at the bank branch) before he was given a bank account that cost him $20 a month and came with a monthly credit card interest rate of over 16%. He says the whole experience made him feel like a criminal, or like a pauper begging for the right to become a customer.

Which is what led to his simple idea. Look at the most valuable companies in Brazil, he thought: they’re banks. Financial services was one of the biggest and most profitable markets in the world and growing fast. In Brazil, it was an oligopoly: five banks controlled roughly 90% of the market. They were all located on the same street—Faria Lima, São Paulo’s Wall Street—hired the same people, and never changed. The cost of their complacency was borne by the customer through high fees, obscene interest rates, and terrible customer service. They succeeded almost in spite of themselves. Their options sucked, but customers were still desperate to make the best use of what options they had. Vélez’s idea was to build a new option, starting with a credit card. That was it.

The idea had come together during his two months of unemployment in Costa Rica, after Sequoia’s decision to give up on Brazil. Vélez spent time at his parents’ home looking at benchmarks. Capital One had gone after a similarly concentrated credit-card market in 1990s America. Its insight was that credit cards did not have to be a commodity; you could capture and use more data, build better credit models, segment customers by their credit risk (and price accordingly), start narrowly with one product, and earn the right to expand from there. (Nigel Morris, Capital One’s co-founder, would eventually become a Nubank investor.) Another inspiration was Tinkoff Bank, now T-Bank, the first digital-only bank in the world. It was founded in Russia in 2006 by Oleg Tinkov, who also studied Capital One and began with credit cards. At the same time, smartphone adoption was skyrocketing in Brazil, where one of the highest rates of mobile app usage in the world led The Wall Street Journal to call the country “the social media capital of the universe.” When he describes the experience of connecting the dots, an almost mystical look comes over Vélez’s face.

He was brought back to earth by Roelof Botha, a partner at Sequoia, who walked Vélez through everything he was unqualified to do: He was neither a Brazilian nor a native Portuguese speaker. He’d never worked at a Brazilian bank or at a credit card issuer. He’d never underwritten credit, dealt with Brazilian regulators, or built a technology company. He wasn’t even a computer scientist. Vélez assumed Botha was building toward the conclusion that, therefore, he shouldn’t pursue his idea. Instead, Botha’s conclusion was: you have to hire people who are all the things you aren’t.

Edward Wible came first. The American was not a conventional CTO candidate; he was a computer science undergraduate who wound up on the partner track in private equity, then moved to Buenos Aires after graduating from INSEAD to start a transportation startup because, as he told me, “Every time I met an entrepreneur, I wanted to be them instead of me.” His first attempt failed almost instantly. He piloted it with Scanntech, a retail-tech company Sequoia had invested in, but disagreed frequently with management, tried to change everything, and got fired. Vélez, who sat on Scanntech’s board, had been watching from the investor’s seat.

Now, Vélez got back in touch with him. “He said, ‘I liked that you were trying to change everything, and I liked how you went about it. I liked the energy, I liked the violence. I need someone who’s willing to put his hands on something, and I know you’re available,’” Wible recalled. “‘So why don’t you move to Brazil with me, and let’s start a bank?’”

“I think I thought about it for only a few hours,” he said. What attracted him wasn’t banking per se. He had what he describes as an almost desperate desire to prove he could pivot his career and build something beautiful: to solve a problem elegantly by making something objectively and undeniably better, faster, and cheaper.

Next was Cristina Junqueira, one of the roughly 100 people on Vélez’s co-founder speed-dating list. If he was the outsider who had identified the problem, and Wible the technical builder who wanted to solve it, Junqueira was the Brazilian industry veteran with knowledge and experience of Goliath. She’d spent five years at Itaú Unibanco, including running a major piece of its credit-card business. Frustrated by the pace of change at an incumbent bank, she quit and vowed never to work in financial services again. But she hadn’t left to start her own business. She just wanted to work on something that mattered to her, she said.

Her speed-date with Vélez went two and a half hours. That night, she couldn’t sleep. “I put my head on the pillow, and I remember turning to my husband and saying, ‘This is what I have to do. This is it.’”

One of Junqueira’s former bosses told Vélez that if she were a state of matter, she would be gas: she expanded to fill every empty space in a room. Even today, when you ask her what she does at Nubank, her answer is: “whatever needs doing.” Officially, Junqueira is chief growth officer and U.S. CEO; unofficially, she is also Nubank’s most visible spokesperson.

“There was a bit of a rebellious angle to them,” Vélez said of his co-founders. “Cris rebelling against the banking establishment, Ed against the conventional way of building a technology company.” Each had developed an aversion to the way things were being done in Brazil, which manifested itself in nearly everything they touched.

Starting with the office. Brazilian banking was embodied in glass towers on Faria Lima. Vélez, Wible, and Junqueira’s first office, by contrast, was a small rented house in a residential neighborhood called, of all things, Brooklin. It was two floors and had a dog. The team called it the Casinha, the little house. What sold them on it was the name of the street: Rua Califórnia. The Casinha became an effective recruiting filter. Some people looked at the dingy little house and laughed trying to imagine it as a national bank, while others saw the discrepancy between the current reality and the ultimate goal as mad but inspiring.

For Wible—who had arrived in Brazil with a backpack, slept on Vélez’s couch for a few days, and spent the earliest weeks working out of coffee shops—the Casinha had a luxurious amount of space and privacy. He lived on the second floor and worked downstairs for eight months. “We needed the space,” he said, when asked what finally made him move out. “It was like, ‘Ed, get out!’” The next day, his floor was packed with desks.

Then there was purple. “It looked like something that arrived from outer space,” Junqueira said of the very first card. Today the company’s purple is so recognizable in Latin America that it’s hard to appreciate how strange it was at the time. “You have to give David credit for that,” she said. “He had a lot of conviction about the purple, and he was completely right.” The card started conversations simply by existing.

Increasingly, the same was true of the core technology. Most banks bought their core banking tech from the same handful of legacy vendors and stitched the pieces together, making their services virtually indistinguishable. Nubank swore off vendors and decided to build its own core. This was, according to Wible, much harder to do than he initially understood. But he has no regrets. “I think it’s the engine that powers our efficiency ratio,” he said. “[The company] is really innovative down to the core, in ways sometimes you can only see by touching the product. There are no vendors at the core. It’s very efficient, and we have the ability to always make it more efficient.”

Clojure, the programming language he chose, was by banking standards similarly unorthodox. It was less radical than it sounded: Clojure runs on top of Java, which banks already used, allowing Nubank’s system to draw on the mature ecosystem of Java tools and libraries. What appealed to Wible was that Clojure imposed more guardrails on how software was written. Certain low-level technical choices were pre-decided, which meant the team could spend more time focused on the consumer problems the company wanted to solve.

Most banks bought their core banking tech from the same handful of legacy vendors and stitched the pieces together, making their services virtually indistinguishable. Nubank swore off vendors and decided to build its own core.

“There are a lot of technical reasons, too, but most of the really important reasons for me are business related,” Wible said. “It’s about focus and consistency. Maybe some people don’t like it, but everybody moves faster when you don’t have to constantly relitigate those decisions.”

Between the Casinha, the purple, and the decision to build the technology from scratch, Nubank was already putting out the signal of an anti-bank: If you come work here, you don’t do it the way you did it at your last job; you do it our way. The sentiment was reinforced by the company’s name: Nu.

In Portuguese, nu means naked. Like in English, it can be used to convey simplicity, transparency, or having nothing to hide. It also worked as an ambigram: turn the card upside down, and nu still reads as rightside up. And when spoken, of course, nu is identical to the English new, which is what the startup was. (Today, the company primarily goes by “Nubank” in Brazil, and “Nu” internationally. For the sake of simplicity, it will be referred to henceforth by its historical and still most recognizable name, Nubank.)

On April 1, 2014, just over a year after the company was founded, Nubank’s first transaction went through—on the third try—at a bakery in Brooklin, where the team ordered pão na chapa (bread grilled with butter) and beer. It was R$33. The receipt is framed on a wall at headquarters today.

Over the following year, the business developed two simple revenue streams: At every swipe, Nubank earned a slice of the interchange fee generated by the transaction; if a customer carried or financed a balance, Nubank also earned interest. Interchange was the main source of revenue, and by operating entirely digitally—with no branch network and a much lighter cost base—it could live on those two streams while eliminating fees and charging lower interest rates than incumbent banks. Their bet was that by making the product cheaper and the experience better, customers would market Nubank themselves. 

It worked. In May 2015, Leone pitched a follow-on investment in a Sequoia growth meeting; the vote was unanimous in favor. By June 2015, the purple card had a waitlist of 100,000 people. By December 2017, Nubank had three million customers, nearly all of them by word of mouth, without a dollar spent on customer acquisition. (To this day, the company has no sales team, and 85% of its customers have been acquired organically.) 

“It wasn’t just a few people. It was this phenomenon of people trying to invite other people, completely unincentivized,” Wible recalled of the phenomenon I’d observed from afar in New York: People recommending the purple card to their friends, not for points or referral bonuses, but because they just wanted them to have it.

“I remember thinking, ‘What’s going on here?’” he said. “None of the stories I knew about building banks had a virality component.”

On Thursday, December 15, 2016, Vélez was traveling in the U.S. when he woke up to the news that the Central Bank of Brazil had decided to shorten the settlement period for credit-card purchases (i.e., how quickly merchants must get paid) from roughly 30 days to two.

The proposal, part of an economic stimulus package from President Michel Temer and finance minister Henrique Meirelles, was rough news for every card issuer. If someone bought a TV with a credit card, the bank had almost a month before it had to pay the store for the TV. The Central Bank’s new rule would compress that window, overnight, to 48 hours.

Nubank suddenly needed a lot more working capital which, only a bit over two years since its founding, it simply didn’t have. Vélez flew back to São Paulo that day.

The founding team met to figure out what to do. Vélez remembers Nubank’s CFO, Gabriel Haddad Silva, running the numbers and concluding that they would need $600 million in additional working capital, essentially overnight.

It wasn’t just a financing problem. Nubank had one product: a credit card. There was no savings account, no debit product, no deposit base underneath it. It was still a startup living off the capital it raised, nowhere near breakeven. If approved, the Central Bank’s new rule could put the company out of business, or force it into a fire sale.

That Friday was Nubank’s end-of-year party. They’d had t-shirts made to celebrate, but no one felt festive now. Vélez remembers standing in front of the company, which by then had 350 employees, all of whom knew there was a sword hanging over them. “We were very anxious, thinking, is the company even going to be here on Monday? I decided to be very open with everyone… I told them, ‘I don’t have the answers. We don’t know how we’re going to survive this. But we’re going to fight like hell and figure out how to stop it.’”

They decided to fight publicly, and not to sugarcoat their position: The Central Bank was out to kill competition. Just as new entrants were finally chipping away at a hated oligopoly, the state was seeking to crush them with impossible capital requirements. 

Over that weekend, the story spread. Newspapers began covering what the change could mean for Nubank and other small entrants. By Sunday, December 18, the story was everywhere: the purple card was being forced out of business.

By Monday morning, hundreds of thousands of Nubank customers made its cause viral on social media, flooding the Central Bank’s Facebook page with pro-Nubank hashtags. By around 11am, Vélez received a message from Ilan Goldfajn, president of the Central Bank, summoning him for a talk.

Vélez and Junqueira both went. Vélez remembers walking into the room tense and concerned, expecting a fight.

“Relax,” Goldfajn told them as soon as they walked in. “There are no changes happening.” The proposal would linger for a while, he explained, but the two-day rule wouldn’t be imposed; Nubank’s customers had made sure of that. The next day, December 20, the Central Bank announced it wouldn’t impose the rule. The response on social media was ecstatic.

Back at headquarters, the team finally donned the shirts they’d made for the end-of-year party, which were emblazoned with the words, “The future is purple.”

The new 26,700-seat Inter Miami stadium at Miami Freedom Park is all white, with two exceptions. There are the giant posters of Lionel Messi, Casemiro, and other players in pink jerseys wrapping the building, and there is the purple logo over the entrance: Nu Stadium.

The stadium opened in April as part of a multiyear partnership between Nubank and Inter Miami, which also includes a Nu Plaza outside, a Nu Club inside, the ‘nu’ logo on the back of the team’s jerseys and, on this particular Thursday morning, pretty much everywhere else. Every screen in the empty stadium glows purple, rotating between the words “Welcome to the Nu Era” and “Trusted by over 140M people.” Out of the 300 or so people invited to this event, about 60 of us are reporters.

Ever since Nubank received conditional approval to establish a national bank in the United States on January 29, 2026, the U.S. launch had been intensely anticipated by those of us who follow the company. The approval meant that by mid-2027, at the latest, Nubank would need to have a U.S. bank up and running.

My invitation came a few weeks after another record quarter for the company, with net income reaching $1 billion for the first time, but the event itself was mysterious and open-ended. Surely it was to officially launch their U.S. venture, but perhaps something else was in store for us, too?

We’re steered into one of the stadium’s VIP rooms, where we’re offered a choice between coffee, smoothies, and alcohol, all of which somehow seem equally appropriate here before noon. A stadium voice announces that the keynote is about to begin, and directs us to an auditorium downstairs. The music is clubbier than anyone needs at 11am, but that, too, seems appropriate. Purple lights sweep the room and the stage. The event is being streamed live, which adds a certain tension among the staff.

The lights go down and a hype video begins: the three co-founders intercut with an animation of the company’s story. One million customers in two years; ten million in five; one hundred million in ten. A world map made of white dots appears; one turns purple, around São Paulo. Then another and another. The camera pulls back until the whole map is visible and, eventually, every dot turns purple.

When it ends, the crowd claps as Vélez walks onstage in what appears to be the same dark purple polo sweater he was wearing in the video. I can’t tell whether this was carefully planned or an honest wardrobe mistake. Either seems plausible.

He gives the founding story, then moves through what happened next: Nubank conquered Brazil, where it is now the largest private financial institution in the country by customer count. Mexico, Nubank’s second-largest market, grew at an even faster rate, becoming the country’s largest digital bank in under seven years. The growth rate has been faster still in Colombia, where in under six years it became the fourth-largest financial institution by deposits, and leads the market in growth and credit card issuance. The central point Vélez wants to make is that the product travels because “people everywhere want to be treated well. The problems we are solving are global.”

This is Junqueira’s cue. She takes the stage in a white striped dress and impossibly thin heels, hair and makeup immaculate. She is a natural performer. Junqueira moved to Miami earlier this year to run the U.S. business, recently enough to experience American banking as a foreigner herself. For someone new to the country, as I can attest, getting established can be quite burdensome. No credit history often means waiting months to get approved for a card; proving your identity or address can mean repeated trips to a branch; and different parts of the same bank (in her case, mortgage and credit) often don’t share the information they already have about you. Such challenges are faced by millions of underbanked Americans, of course, in addition to foreigners.

To purple lights, loud music, and applause, Junqueira makes the expected announcement: Nu is launching in the U.S. She describes the product: a high-yield savings account, a no-fee credit card with cashback, and fast, fee-free domestic and international transfers, starting with Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, all backed by the 24/7 customer support they like to brag about. 

As his coup de grâce, Vélez reappears onstage to introduce Nu Global, a feeless multi-currency account that moves money across 35-plus countries and lets customers hold and trade a selection of digital assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum. By the end of the keynote, it’s clear what the “Nu Era” means, at least to the company: that its ambitions are no longer Brazilian, Latin American, or even Western Hemispheric, but global.

After the keynote, reporters wait to be called into a room where Vélez and Junqueira take questions. Most have their laptops open; some sit on the floor typing furiously, trying to publish their story before someone a foot away does. Others rehearse the one question they may or may not get to ask. Notes are exchanged between bursts of work. 

We’re called in. Vélez enters first and goes up to every reporter in the room with a handshake, a smile, and some version of “thank you for coming.”

The questions start flying. What’s the actual strategy for the U.S.? Who is the target customer? Why will it work here? What about competition? The United States has thousands of banks and a long list of fintech challengers that have died, been sold, or are fighting over a small slice of the pie. And what about Revolut? Did you see they just got their conditional approval too? Nu Global puts you in direct competition with them now. A comment? One more word? Please?

Vélez’s answers are calm and firm. Whatever the question, he replies with what he wants, which is just enough to count as an answer, then redirects toward the point or statistic he wants you to write down.

On competition: 95% of global financial services are still controlled by incumbents, he says. Nubank’s fintech competitors may compete with each other for the remaining 5%, but Nubank’s eyes are now on the 95%.

In the U.S., he explains, that prize is enormous: American retail banking generates roughly $1.2 trillion in annual revenue; even a small slice is a huge business. True, 82% of American adults already have a credit card, and 96% have a bank account. But they are paying $75 billion in fees each year and navigating, in Nubank’s view, an inefficient system that has much room for improvement. 

The company’s first advantage—cost—is the same one it had 13 years ago in Brazil, he says. It costs Nubank roughly $1 a month to serve a customer; for a traditional U.S. bank, the number is closer to $20. That difference alone, Vélez argues, is structural: no branches, no vendors, core technology built from scratch, a low cost to serve, and savings returned to customers as better yields, better service, and no fees.

Another advantage, he says, is credit. The company started as a credit-card business, which meant learning early how to get good at credit underwriting. Over the following 13 years, that became one of Nubank’s core capabilities. More than 28 million people across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia have since obtained their first credit card through Nubank. Along the way, it’s developed increasingly sophisticated ways to assess credit risk, including for customers with limited traditional credit histories.

One question near the end finally turns to AI. Vélez joined OpenAI’s board in July, but AI is less a new chapter for Nubank than an acceleration of one it has been building toward for years, he says. The company now sits on an enormous store of financial data from a customer base it has served for years. NuFormer, its proprietary foundation model for predicting financial behavior and assessing borrower risk, has already allowed the company to raise credit limits in Brazil without raising the risk it takes on, and its AI systems now reach nearly every part of the business, from underwriting to customer service. All of which may turn out to matter as much as anything announced onstage that morning.

“Every major industry around the world has been reinvented by technology companies except banking,” Vélez told me in a one-on-one interview. “Ninety-five percent of the world’s financial services still sit with large incumbents. It’s almost like saying 95% of the world’s video delivery is still owned by Blockbuster, or JCPenney instead of Amazon, or taxis instead of Uber. That will change. It might take another decade, it might take two decades. But the biggest providers of financial services in the world will be technology companies. And we have a shot at that.”

It made me think of something Leone told me.

“Early on, when there is nothing, you have to come up with these dreams for yourself,” he said. “Imagine when they had 10 people, saying they would become the most valuable financial services company in Latin America. Well, they became that. Now, what about if they can become the most valuable financial services company in the world? That is the dream. You don’t need any more motivation if you’ve got that.”

Then he turned to his computer and started typing.

“I’m looking for J.P. Morgan’s market cap, just for the fun of it,” Leone said, and paused to look over his glasses at the result.

“$792 billion. We’re shooting for nothing less than that.”

“One of the things that makes me the most proud,” Vélez told me, “is how, in an environment like Latin America and Brazil, where there has been so much corruption and unethical behavior, we’ve been able to build one of the continent’s largest financial institutions while always acting ethically, being very straight about what we do, and always sticking to that.” He credits his mother, who he says had a very strict sense of right and wrong.

Vélez’s favorite book is Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Partly it’s the writing; partly it’s that there’s so much Colombia in it. He loves the families, the way parents behave with their children, the love stories, the culture. “Colombia is my origin. Those are the roots that I left,” he said. “Maybe when the storm removes the Buendías’ house, and they lose their roots, there’s something of me losing my roots, too. It’s the way García Márquez writes and how engaging it is, but also the entire story and how much it touches my own identity as somebody who was born in Colombia.”

“Do the moves get easier with time?” I asked, now that he’s planning to move back to the U.S., another world again.

“I think they get… I don’t know. Logistically, yes. It’s one more move. You pack your bags and go.” He paused. “But emotionally, it gets harder. Every move is an additional disappointment: failed again at putting down roots, failed again at finding a place where I feel like I belong. And now I worry about the kids, because they’re going to go through the same process.

“So maybe rationally and logistically, it gets easier. Emotionally, it feels a bit like another disappointment. Another failure.”

“So where is home?” I asked.

“That’s the big question,” he said. “We are unrooted. There is no home, and that’s the sad part about it. Since I left Colombia and went to Costa Rica, there’s been a little bit of longing to find home, to find roots. So far, I haven’t found it.

“I’ve been an outsider everywhere. An outsider in Costa Rica, an outsider in California, an outsider in New York, an outsider in Brazil. Potentially back to California. Maybe California is interesting because there are a lot of outsiders there.”

He thought for a second.

“Home ends up being family more than a physical place,” he said, before adding: “And Nubank.”

Gabi Marques is the creative director of Colossus.