On Ep. 1 of Brainfood, Simon Taylor, Head of Market Development @ Tempo is joined by David Vélez, CEO @ Nubank to discuss Nubank's US launch, strategy, Hispanic customers, AI banking agents and more!

Timestamps:

• 00:00 Introduction
• 0:11 Nubank’s scale, efficiency, US launch, tokenization and AI
• 2:14 Chuck Feeney’s philanthropy and influence on David Vélez
• 4:13 Smart efficiency culture and Nubank’s branchless cost advantage
• 7:10 Hidden US banking costs and the underbanked opportunity
• 9:44 Nubank’s US strategy, Hispanic customers and incumbent competition
• 12:13 Customer obsession, NPS and long term loyalty economics
• 16:48 Nubank Global, stablecoin savings and international money movement
• 22:00 NuFormer foundation models for credit decisioning and financial AI
• 27:20 AI banking agents, financial guidance and cautious customer rollout
• 30:34 AI driven workflow reinvention and Nubank’s flatter organization

In this episode Simon Taylor, GTM @ Tempo sits down with Increase CEO, Darragh Buckley to explore long-term infrastructure thinking, compliance as code, stablecoins vs. traditional rails, and what’s actually broken in payments.

Timestamps:

• 00:00 Introduction
• 01:19 The motivation for Increase: addressing payment disbursement failures
• 03:04 Technical and business challenges in international financial expansion
• 05:00 Viewing compliance as an engineering problem to be solved
• 07:31 Admiration for legacy financial systems built with constraints
• 09:10 The simplicity curve: abstraction, complexity, and underlying simplicity
• 12:45 The philosophy of building "lovingly boring" financial infrastructure
• 14:30 The necessity of early partnerships and gatekept features in fintech
• 16:50 Stablecoins as parallel infrastructure versus replacement for traditional systems
• 19:58 The existing strengths of US deposit rails and last-mile delivery

After speaking to the CEOs of Ramp, Brex, and Mercury, my first instinct is to find other nerds with whom to share my thoughts.

Immediately, I thought of Alex, and then I needed to bring some class to proceedings. I called my old friend Cokie (an OG and still my favorite Fintech content writer).

This is the most fun, relaxed, and engaging conversation I’ve had about Fintech in a long time.

I’m not even going to try and sell it to you.

Just take a listen.

Who knows if or when I’ll do season 2, but this has been a fun side project.

Get in touch if you want to know more about me, my day job at Sardine, or you have any feedback on season 1.

Now back to your regular scheduled newslettering.

ST.