David Vélez: The Latino Who Reinvented Banking
There are entrepreneurs who start companies because they see an opportunity.
And then there are entrepreneurs who encounter a problem so frustrating that they decide the problem itself needs to be eliminated.
David Vélez belongs to the second group.
The Colombian-born entrepreneur is the co-founder and CEO of Nubank, the digital financial company that went from a tiny startup in São Paulo to one of the largest digital banking platforms in the world. By the end of 2025, Nubank had 131 million customers across Brazil, Mexico and Colombia. By May 2026, the company said that number had reached 135 million.
But Vélez’s story did not begin in a glass office overlooking São Paulo.
It began in Colombia, with a family of entrepreneurs, a childhood shaped by instability, a father who owned a button factory, and a young boy who learned surprisingly early that money could multiply.
Growing Up in Colombia
David Vélez was born in Medellín, Colombia, and spent his early childhood there during a particularly turbulent period in the country’s history.
He has described growing up amid violence and the presence of drug cartels during the 1980s and early 1990s. When Vélez was eight, his family left Colombia and eventually settled in Costa Rica after a kidnapping involving one of his uncles made the family reconsider its future.
Leaving Colombia meant leaving behind a familiar world, but Vélez did not leave entrepreneurship behind.
It was practically part of the family DNA.
His father owned a button factory, and his father’s 11 siblings were entrepreneurs who had built businesses of their own. Vélez has recalled spending summers working in his father’s factory, gaining an early look at what it meant to build and operate a business.
The lesson was not simply about making money.
It was about independence.
Vélez grew up hearing that there was something powerful about being your own boss, creating something yourself and having the freedom to make decisions.
That idea stayed with him.
His First Lesson in Compound Interest Came From a Cow
Long before spreadsheets, venture capital and billion-dollar valuations, Vélez was already experimenting with an extremely low-tech investment strategy.
Cows.
When he was 12, Vélez used money from birthdays and summer jobs to buy a cow. That cow eventually became several cows, and by the time he was ready to attend Stanford, he had accumulated six.
He ultimately sold the animals to help finance his education.
It may sound like a colorful childhood story, but Vélez has described the experience as an early lesson in compounding.
The cow produced another cow.
The asset multiplied.
The young entrepreneur was learning that money could be put to work rather than simply spent.
Years later, that same fascination with growth, technology and entrepreneurship would take him to Silicon Valley.
Stanford Was the Dream
Vélez became fascinated with Stanford and the entrepreneurial culture surrounding Silicon Valley.
For a young man growing up in Costa Rica, Stanford seemed almost impossibly far away. He has recalled that nobody from his school had previously gone there, but he made getting to Stanford a personal goal.
He got there.
Vélez earned a bachelor’s degree in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University in 2005. He later returned to Stanford Graduate School of Business, earning his MBA in 2012.
But there was an interesting problem.
He wanted to become an entrepreneur.
He just wasn’t sure what company he was supposed to build.
Wall Street Before Fintech
Instead of immediately launching a startup, Vélez went into finance.
He worked in investment banking at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs and later moved into growth equity and private equity at General Atlantic.
It was a valuable education.
Rather than learning entrepreneurship solely from the founder’s chair, Vélez was learning how investors evaluated companies, how businesses raised capital, how markets worked and how large companies were built.
He also got an up-close look at what separated promising companies from ordinary ones.
Still, the entrepreneurial itch remained.
While attending Stanford’s business school, Vélez was thinking seriously about starting a company. Then an unexpected opportunity arrived.
Sequoia Came Calling
During his MBA studies, Vélez was recruited by Sequoia Capital to help the legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm evaluate the possibility of expanding into Brazil and Latin America.
Instead of immediately becoming a startup founder, he became the person searching for the next generation of founders.
That experience proved crucial.
Vélez eventually became a partner at Sequoia and focused on Latin American investments, including Brazil.
Then came the experience that changed everything.
Brazil’s banking system.
Five Months to Open a Bank Account
In 2008, Vélez moved to Brazil to open a regional office for a private equity fund.
He needed a bank account.
Simple, right?
Not exactly.
Vélez has said that opening a Brazilian bank account took five months. The experience exposed him to the bureaucracy, paperwork, fees and customer-service problems that ordinary consumers encountered when dealing with traditional financial institutions.
To most people, it was an aggravating administrative experience.
To Vélez, it looked like a business opportunity.
Brazil had a huge population, rapidly increasing smartphone adoption and a banking industry dominated by a relatively small number of large institutions.
Stanford’s account of Nubank’s origins notes that Brazil’s five largest banks controlled roughly 80 percent of banking assets at the time, while customers faced high fees and expensive credit.
Vélez began asking a deceptively simple question:
What if banking did not need branches?
The Birth of Nubank
By 2013, Vélez had a much bigger idea.
He wanted to build a financial institution from the ground up, designed around technology rather than branches, paperwork and traditional banking infrastructure.
There was one obvious problem.
Almost everyone told him it was a bad idea.
Brazil’s banking industry was enormous. Established international banks had struggled there. Vélez was a Colombian attempting to challenge powerful Brazilian financial institutions.
The conventional wisdom was that it could not be done.
That apparently made the idea even more interesting.
In May 2013, Vélez joined Brazilian entrepreneur Cristina Junqueira and American engineer Edward Wible to launch Nubank. The company received early backing from Sequoia Capital and Kaszek Ventures.
The name would soon become synonymous with a new kind of banking.
The Anti-Bank
Nubank’s early pitch was remarkably straightforward.
Make banking simpler.
The company’s first major product was a no-fee credit card that customers could manage through a smartphone app. Instead of visiting a branch, customers could apply digitally and interact with the company through digital customer service.
It was a radically different experience for consumers accustomed to traditional banks.
No marble lobby.
No waiting room.
No taking a number.
No wondering whether the bank was open.
The smartphone became the branch.
And that changed the economics of the business.
A digital-first bank could potentially serve customers at a much lower cost than a traditional branch-based institution, while using technology and data to personalize products and manage risk.
Nubank wasn’t simply trying to create another bank.
It was trying to rethink what a bank was supposed to be.
From Credit Card to Financial Ecosystem
The credit card was only the beginning.
Nubank gradually expanded into a broader financial platform, offering products including digital accounts, personal loans, investments, insurance and other financial services.
The company also expanded beyond Brazil.
Mexico became an important growth market, followed by Colombia.
The strategy was increasingly clear, build a digital financial relationship with customers and then give them more reasons to keep their financial lives inside the Nubank ecosystem.
That transformed Nubank from a digital credit-card company into something much larger.
The Growth Became Hard to Ignore
The numbers tell the story.
By the end of 2025, Nu Holdings, Nubank’s publicly traded parent company, reported 131 million customers globally, after adding 17 million customers during the year.
Brazil accounted for the overwhelming majority.
Nubank had 113 million customers in Brazil by the end of 2025 and had become the country’s largest private financial institution by number of customers, according to Brazilian Central Bank data cited by the company.
Mexico and Colombia were also expanding rapidly.
And the growth continued into 2026.
In May 2026, Nubank announced that it had surpassed 135 million customers across Latin America, including approximately 115 million in Brazil, 15 million in Mexico and 5 million in Colombia. The company said it added four million customers during the first quarter of 2026 alone.
For a company founded only in 2013, the scale is extraordinary.
Nubank Became a Public Company
Nubank’s transformation from startup to major financial institution reached another milestone in December 2021, when Nu Holdings went public on the New York Stock Exchange.
The IPO gave investors a way to participate in the growth of a company that had challenged some of the most established financial institutions in Latin America.
But Vélez’s challenge was no longer simply getting people to download an app.
Now the challenge was maintaining growth while building a profitable financial institution at enormous scale.
The Money Finally Started Talking
For years, fintech startups were often valued primarily on growth.
Nubank increasingly began demonstrating that growth and profitability could coexist.
For full-year 2025, Nu Holdings reported $4.9 billion in fourth-quarter revenue, $895 million in quarterly net income and a 33 percent annualized return on equity. The company ended the year with 131 million customers.
Those figures matter because Nubank’s original proposition was not simply that technology could make banking cooler.
It was that technology could make banking more efficient.
The company’s reported cost to serve customers remained below $1 per active customer in the fourth quarter of 2025, according to Nubank’s results materials.
That is a very different business model from maintaining thousands of physical branches.
What Nubank Actually Does Today
Nubank has evolved into a broad digital financial services platform.
Depending on the market, its products include:
- Digital banking accounts
- Credit cards
- Personal loans
- Savings and investment products
- Insurance
- Payment services
- Business banking
- Financial management tools
- International financial products
The company has also continued experimenting with services outside traditional banking.
Its 2025 filings, for example, describe the introduction of NuCel, a mobile virtual network operator service launched in partnership with Claro.
That expansion illustrates an important part of Nubank’s strategy.
The company is no longer thinking only about bank accounts.
It is building a broader digital ecosystem around the consumer.
The Culture Behind the Company
Vélez has also emphasized that technology alone did not build Nubank.
Culture mattered.
At the beginning, he created what he called a culture deck, essentially a set of principles describing how the company would operate.
The philosophy emphasized ownership, autonomy and a relatively flat organization. Vélez has said that the first 10 to 15 employees were particularly important because they helped establish the DNA of the company.
That idea reflects his experience as an investor.
At Sequoia, Vélez had watched entrepreneurs build companies from the outside.
At Nubank, he finally got to build one himself.
From Outsider to Insider
There is something particularly interesting about Vélez’s story.
He wasn’t born into Brazil’s banking establishment.
He was a Colombian immigrant who moved to Brazil for work.
He wasn’t a lifelong banker.
His career had taken him through Stanford, Wall Street, private equity and venture capital.
And he wasn’t initially a technology entrepreneur.
He was an investor looking for entrepreneurs.
Then he encountered a problem personally.
Instead of simply complaining about it, he decided to build the solution.
That outsider perspective became one of Nubank’s greatest advantages.
Vélez saw what traditional financial institutions had become accustomed to overlooking.
The customer experience.
The Bigger Idea
The most important part of the Nubank story may not be the number of customers.
It is the original insight.
Banking is an industry that can become so accustomed to its own rules that those rules start looking inevitable.
Branches become inevitable.
Paperwork becomes inevitable.
Fees become inevitable.
Waiting becomes inevitable.
Complexity becomes inevitable.
Vélez looked at that system and essentially asked, why?
That question became Nubank.
And Nubank’s growth suggests that millions of consumers were willing to ask the same question.
From Medellín to Millions
David Vélez’s journey is a remarkably Latin American entrepreneurial story.
A boy leaves Colombia because his family is forced to confront instability.
He grows up in Costa Rica.
He works in his father’s factory.
He buys a cow with his savings and discovers the magic of compounding.
He sells cattle to help get himself to Stanford.
He works on Wall Street.
He enters the world of venture capital.
He moves to Brazil.
He spends months trying to open a bank account.
And then, instead of accepting the system as it is, he decides to rebuild it.
More than a decade later, the little digital bank founded in São Paulo has become a financial platform serving more than 130 million people across Latin America.
That is quite a journey for a kid who started by sorting buttons and investing in cows.
And perhaps the most interesting chapter is still being written.
Nubank has spent its first 13 years proving that a bank can be built differently.
Now Vélez is attempting something even bigger, turning that Latin American success story into a global digital banking platform. The company said in its 2025 results that its long-term ambition is to build the capabilities needed to evolve into a global digital banking platform over time.
The boy from Colombia who dreamed of Silicon Valley eventually built his own version of the Silicon Valley story, not in California, but in Latin America.
And this time, he wasn’t investing in somebody else’s company.
He was building the company himself.
