Invest Like the Best · Oct 13, 2026 · 1h 20m · 71m saved
With David Vélez, Founder and CEO of Nubank
Nubank has grown from 35 million customers to 140 million in the five years since its founder last spoke to Patrick O'Shaughnessy.
David Vélez, founder and CEO of Nubank, told Patrick on Invest Like the Best that the shift from incumbent banks to digital ones has barely started. All neobanks and fintechs together still hold less than 10% of a roughly $10 trillion industry, and David spent a decade hearing that his own company could not compete at all.
"For 10 years, all we heard again and again and again was that it was impossible to compete with any bank, that we were going to get crushed, and that we had no shot at being successful. Today, we have 140 million customers with 10,000 employees." — David Vélez
David has run Nubank for 13 years on a thesis he set out in 2013, and in Brazil it has passed the largest incumbent bank in scale. It also operates in Mexico and Colombia and is now pushing into the US.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 80 minutes of audio, 9 minutes of reading.
Here are the 11 insights that matter.
Key Takeaways
Digital banks hold about 10% of financial services, the way Netflix-like services would if most people still rented DVDs
Nubank serves a customer for about 3% of what an incumbent bank spends, before any gains from AI
US banks' near-zero deposit rates work as a wealth tax to pay for branches
AI, not financial education, can give everyone a private banker
Nubank built what it believes is the first proprietary foundation model in financial services for credit decisions
David expects about 190 currencies to consolidate to about 10 within 10 to 20 years
Rebuilding Nubank around AI took David from 1 direct report to 20 and cut management layers from 10 to 5
1. Banking's Blockbuster Moment
David argues the fintech transformation is early, not late. Global consumer financial services is a business of roughly $10 trillion, and about 90% of it still runs through incumbents' branches.
Digital banks have reached about where Netflix-like services would be if most people still rented videos
"It's still in financial services... almost as if 90% of the world was going to Blockbuster to get VHS and DVDs, and Netflix-like services still had something like 10% of that industry." — David Vélez
Brazil is where the comparison has already flipped. Nubank has close to 120 million Brazilian customers, roughly 65% of the country's adults, and about 60% of them use it as their main bank account rather than a secondary wallet. That makes it a rare neobank that has passed the largest incumbent in scale.
