New CFO signals disciplined ambition for Nubank’s next phase of growth

São Paulo, August 6, 2026 — Nubank, the largest digital bank in Latin America, released a new episode of its Nu Videocast, featuring its new Chief Financial Officer, Rob Livingston, in his first public conversation with Founder and Global CEO David Vélez. His message is one of continuity: the same credit discipline and growth playbook that built Nu, will carry it into a next phase of expansion.

Why Nu, and why Rob

Livingston joins Nu with a track record of building at scale: 18 years at Capital One, most of it in the core credit business, and 12 years at Visa across general management and finance, ending as CFO of North America, its largest business unit. 

Along the way, he built Capital One’s Canadian operation and stood up Visa’s domestic business in China from the ground up. He says he had admired Nu’s growth story from his years at Visa, and joined a company that has served more than 135 million customers across Brazil, Mexico and Colombia while remaining international since its first ten employees.

“We look for people who have seen the kind of scale we are beginning to reach, but who also have an entrepreneurial bent inside organizations and have worked across multiple countries,” said David Vélez, founder and CEO of Nubank.

“The first priority here is continuity. Nu has been a great success story for 13 years, and there’s no turning of the ship that needs to happen right away. My mandate is to continue that story, but also to prepare us for the next stages of our growth,” said Rob Livingston, CFO of Nubank.

A credit model built for any cycle

At Nu, credit decisions integrate revenue and risk and pass through three lines of defense, and every decision must remain profitable even if losses double, so growth is never a switch a CFO or CEO can simply flip. 

Rather than time the market, Nu underwrites with a deliberate “pessimist bias,” says Vélez, assuming the future will be worse than the past, an approach the model has carried through four Brazilian credit cycles in its first 12 years, including the deepest recession in living memory, intact. 

Artificial intelligence is sharpening that edge rather than loosening it: the company’s proprietary nuFormer foundation models let Nu extend more credit at the same expected loss, or the same credit at a lower loss, and have cut model development from roughly three months to about seven days, with a human still reviewing every outcome.

“While the U.S. goes through one cycle, we see several in Brazil. Financial services companies have to be antifragile: they have to have a profitable business model in every single cycle, with high or low inflation, high or low interest rates. That’s exactly what we’ve demonstrated over 13 years,” said Vélez.

A disciplined path to expansion

On expansion beyond Latin America, the message from Livingston was discipline over ambition. The United States is the world’s largest financial services market, and Nu does not need a large share for it to matter.

The company has committed to spend no more than 100 basis points of its efficiency ratio on U.S. entry over two years, treating the period as foundational as it builds its brand, tests product-market fit and refines its underwriting, on the multi-country technology platform it has always owned. With conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to establish a national bank, expected within 18 months, Nu frames the move as a bounded bet.