जगत उद्यम The Startup Atlas › दक्षिण अमेरिका South America

Nubank

São Paulo, Brazil · Founded 2013 · Fintech · Digital bank · Founders: David Vélez, Cristina Junqueira, Edward Wible

The one lesson

Remove the fee the incumbents live on, and the customers come to you.

Brazil’s five big banks held about 90 per cent of the market and charged for nearly everything. Nubank started with a purple card that charged nothing and a phone that replaced the branch.

  • 139 M Customers — Brazil, Mexico and Colombia. Q2 2026.
  • $1 bn Net income in one quarter — Q2 2026, up 49% on the year.
  • $5.9 bn Revenue in the quarter — Up 39% on the year.
  • 33% Return on equity — Annualised, Q2 2026.

The story

Before he started Nubank, David Vélez, a Colombian investor living in São Paulo, spent two hours in a bank branch trying to open an account. It took five more months to get one. He said later that he had never left a meeting as frustrated.

In 2013 he rented a house in São Paulo with Cristina Junqueira and Edward Wible and started a bank that had no branches at all. The first product was a credit card with no annual fee, opened and managed entirely from a phone. The card was purple, so that it would look as unlike a bank as possible.

Brazil’s five largest banks were reported to control about 90 per cent of the market. Their fees were not a side line. They were the business. A bank that removed them was not competing on a feature. It was competing on the incumbents’ income.

Thirteen years later Nubank serves 139 million customers across Brazil, Mexico and Colombia and in its second quarter of 2026 earned a billion dollars in a single quarter for the first time.

Why it worked

  1. The fee was the pain every customer already felt. Removing it needed no explanation.
  2. No branches meant a cost base the incumbents could not match without dismantling themselves.
  3. Customers who came for the free card stayed for loans, accounts and insurance, where Nubank does earn.

What a founder in India can take

Find the charge in your category that customers resent and incumbents depend on. If your costs let you remove it and still earn elsewhere, that charge is your marketing budget. Indian categories full of convenience fees, processing fees and hidden charges are waiting for this move.

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