How He Built the World’s Largest Digital Bank with 140 Million Customers

The guest attributes New Bank’s ability to offer lower fees and products to a cost-to-serve about 3% of a traditional bank’s, and says it has close to 120 million Brazilian customers, reaching more than 65% of adults. He also reports a return on equity two to three times that of large incumbent banks despite having less revenue and charging no fees.

New Bank’s data advantage, in the guest’s account, depends on systems and organizational culture as well as scale: it has 20,000 to 30,000 data points per customer across 13 years and built a financial-services foundation model for credit and collections. The bank also uses its model for fraud decisions in Mexico and Colombia, while the guest contrasts its digital-native systems with traditional banks spread across many legacy systems.

The guest sees AI combined with open banking as a way to make account information and fees more actionable for customers, potentially pressuring profit pools that depend on customers not optimizing their finances. New Bank already alerts about 15 million Brazilian customers a day to potentially costly payment charges and can offer money or refinancing as alternatives.

The guest argues that better data, underwriting, digital systems, and real-time payment networks such as Pix and UPI could expand access to credit for people currently underserved; he cites 13% credit-card penetration in Mexico and Colombia. New Bank has offered first credit cards to 30 million people in Latin America, sometimes starting with a $20 limit that can grow as customers build credit history.

Digitized transactions can give lenders cash-flow records for small businesses that previously could not document their activity, the guest says, using a taco seller seeking financing to expand as an example. He links this opportunity to broader access to banking and credit, which he predicts could boost global GDP.

The guest describes a roughly $10 trillion global consumer-finance industry in which about 90% still flows through branches and incumbent banks, and expects digitally native companies to gain share over 10 to 20 years. He also argues that open banking can reduce data-related inertia and that greater competition could lower fees and costs in markets where a handful of banks hold most assets.

The guest’s global growth ambition is to expand New Bank from about 100 million customers to one billion and from three countries to 100, and he describes a U.S. launch and a stablecoin-backed account available in more than 35 countries. He expects digitally native banks to take share from incumbents over the next two to three decades, supported by real-time payments, open finance, and AI.