CorpDigest
Nu Holdings Ltd.
Leadership History
3 leaders · Full leadership timeline
Last reviewed: 2025-07-15 · By Swet Parvadiya
Nubank's monthly cost to serve each active customer is $0.80. The average Brazilian bank spends somewhere between $8 and $16 per customer per month on branch operations, compliance overhead, and legacy technology maintenance. That 10-to-20x cost differential is not a marginal efficiency gain — it is a structural reimagining of what a bank's cost base can look like when built on modern software infrastructure without the accumulated weight of fifty years of legacy systems and physical real estate. Nu Holdings generated $11.5 billion in FY2024 revenue and $1.97 billion in net income from 114.2 million customers across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, achieving all of it with 10,027 employees. David Vélez, Cristina Junqueira, and Edward Wible founded Nubank in São Paulo in 2013 after Vélez — a Colombian-born investor who had moved to Brazil from Silicon Valley — spent his first weeks in Brazil trying to open a bank account. The process required him to visit a branch, wait, provide extensive documentation, wait more, and repeat the cycle. Five Brazilian banks controlled 80% of the market, charged among the highest credit card interest rates in the world, and were generating enormous profits while providing a customer experience that Vélez described as universally despised. The constraint was not product — it was access to capital and the regulatory licensing required to operate as a bank in Brazil. The purple credit card launched in 2014 with no annual fee, managed entirely through a smartphone app, and backed by Sequoia and Kaszek Ventures' funding, attracted customers through word of mouth at a rate that no advertising budget could replicate. By 2017 Nubank had launched NuConta, a digital savings account. By 2019 it had expanded to Mexico. The NuInvest brokerage, launched in 2020, added investment products. The Ultravioleta premium tier, serving approximately 700,000 customers in 2024 with an NPS of 84 and $1.8 billion in quarterly purchase volume, demonstrated that the customer relationship could extend well beyond a no-fee credit card into a comprehensive financial services platform. 70% of new Nubank customers arrive through organic word-of-mouth referrals. No bank in Latin America has that acquisition metric. It reflects the degree to which Nubank's product quality has differentiated from the incumbent experience — customers tell each other about it without being asked.
Founder, Chairman, and CEO
Vélez founded Nubank in 2013 after Sequoia Capital abandoned its Brazil expansion. He recruited co-founders Junqueira and Wible, raised capital from Sequoia and Kaszek, and led the company through its 2021 IPO and transformation to profitability. Under his leadership, Nubank grew from zero to 114+ million customers and achieved a 28% ROE. He signed the Giving Pledge in 2021 with his wife Mariel Reyes.
Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer
Junqueira brought deep Brazilian banking expertise from Itaú Unibanco, where she ran the largest credit card division. She designed Nubank's customer-centric product strategy and go-to-market approach. She became one of only two self-made female billionaires in Brazil following the 2021 IPO. She is expected to lead Nubank's future US banking operations.
Co-Founder and CTO
Wible built Nubank's cloud-native, microservices-based technology platform from scratch using unconventional choices including Clojure and AWS. His architecture enables the company to serve 114+ million customers with 99.99% uptime and a $0.80 cost to serve. He established the engineering culture that makes Nubank a technology company rather than a traditional bank.
The competitive landscape has intensified as incumbents have responded to Nubank's threat. Global fintechs represent a longer-term competitive threat. Brazil's macroeconomic environment poses specific risks. Regulatory risk is substantial.
David Vélez has been CEO of Nubank continuously since founding the company in May 2013 — twelve consecutive years through 2025. He is the only CEO Nubank has had. The lack of succession reflects three factors. First, the supervoting Class B share structure gives Vélez roughly 75% of voting power, making board-driven CEO change effectively impossible without his consent. Second, the company is still in the middle of the founder-led growth phase: revenue grew 43.7% in 2024 and the company is actively expanding into Mexico, Colombia, and through the 2025 Tyme Group investment into Africa and Southeast Asia, all of which favor founder continuity over a managerial transition. Third, Vélez has built a deep operating bench — including Cristina Junqueira as Chief Growth Officer, Youssef Lahrech as President and COO, and a CFO bench led by Guilherme Lago — which lets him focus on strategy and capital allocation while operations are delegated. Public statements suggest Vélez intends to remain CEO at least through the next phase of regional expansion.
Five Vélez-driven decisions shaped Nubank's path. First, choosing in 2013 to attack credit cards specifically — the highest-margin and most-hated product of Brazilian incumbents — rather than digital checking accounts. Second, holding the 2014-2017 product roadmap to a single product (the purple card) until cohort economics proved profitable, against pressure to expand sooner. Third, the 2017 launch of NuConta as a deposit account, which reframed Nubank from credit-card issuer to primary bank. Fourth, the 2019-2020 expansion into Mexico and Colombia despite the Brazil business still being unprofitable — an unusually aggressive sequencing call. Fifth, the December 2021 NYSE listing at the top of the fintech market, which raised $2.6 billion of growth capital ahead of the 2022 multiple compression and gave Nubank balance sheet to fund Mexico through breakeven. The 2025 investment in Tyme Group is the most recent strategic call: a signal that Vélez sees the next decade requiring optionality outside Latin America.
Nubank operates with a relatively flat senior team built around functional rather than geographic ownership, with the exception of Mexico and Colombia which have country-level general managers. Vélez serves as CEO, with co-founder Cristina Junqueira as Chief Growth Officer responsible for product, marketing, and customer experience. Youssef Lahrech, formerly of Capital One, has served as President and Chief Operating Officer, leading day-to-day operations and the country expansions. Edward Wible stepped back from CTO duties as the company scaled and has remained connected as a co-founder and board member. Guilherme Lago serves as Chief Financial Officer, having joined from Credit Suisse, and has led Nubank's investor relations posture since the IPO. The board includes external directors with backgrounds at Sequoia, Berkshire Hathaway alumni, and senior Brazilian financial-services figures. The structure is intentionally lean — Nubank operates with roughly 10,000 employees against more than 100 million customers, a ratio orders of magnitude more efficient than incumbent banks of comparable customer scale.
Vélez's economic compensation has been heavily equity-based since founding, consistent with founder-led companies. At the 2021 IPO, Vélez held a substantial stake in Nubank common stock that made him a multi-billionaire on paper, alongside his control via Class B supervoting shares. His annual cash compensation has historically been modest by US large-cap CEO standards, with the bulk of incentive compensation coming through long-term equity grants and the appreciation of his founder stake. The dual-class structure — Class A at one vote and Class B at 20 votes, concentrated with Vélez — gives him approximately 75% of voting power and forms the practical mechanism of control rather than direct economic ownership. The structure has been disclosed in Nubank's 20-F filings since the IPO. Vélez has periodically sold small portions of his stake for personal liquidity but has retained the majority of his Class B holdings, signaling continued long-term alignment with public shareholders. Berkshire Hathaway exited its $500 million pre-IPO position in 2023-2024.