Nubank

Nubank is a digital bank founded in São Paulo in 2013 by David Vélez, a Colombian, together with Cristina Junqueira and Edward Wible. It has no branches: you open an account, get a card and handle everything from an app. Its first product was a purple credit card with no annual fee, aimed at a country where banking was dominated by a few big banks known for high fees and slow service.

Being built as software rather than as a network of branches lets it run with far lower costs per customer. Sign-up takes minutes on a phone, support happens in chat, and decisions such as how much credit to give someone are made by models trained on data. From the card it grew into accounts, Pix instant transfers, personal loans, insurance and investments.

It became one of the largest digital banks in the world by number of customers, and expanded to Mexico and Colombia. The parent company, Nu Holdings, has been listed on the New York Stock Exchange since 2021. Nubank is the best-known example of the Latin American fintech wave: tech companies competing with traditional banks by making financial services simpler and cheaper to use.