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Cristina Junqueira knew she had to make a change.
He left management consulting to obtain an MBA at Northwestern University and ended up in banking, overseeing a credit card portfolio at Brazil’s Itaú Unibanco Holding. She rose for four years until 2013, when she resigned, tired of selling people products that she said they didn’t really want.
Soon after, he met David Vélez, a Colombian private equity executive who was trying to create a digital bank to compete with the giant moneylenders of Brazil. But he needed someone with inside knowledge.
“I knew the industry and I saw the perfect opportunity to prove them wrong, to build something that people really wanted,” Junqueira said in a 2019 interview.
Eight years later, the 39-year-old Brazilian has just joined an extremely small group of self-made global billionaire bankers.
Now Holdings, the digital bank they created together, went public on Wednesday, valuing Junqueira’s stake at $ 1.1 billion.
Complicated moment
Nubank’s IPO will cap a record year of more than $ 600 billion in global IPOs, a frenzy that has fueled one of the fastest periods of wealth creation in modern history. However, it comes at a difficult time. Nubank goes public in the United States just as Brazilian companies withdraw their planned offerings on the local stock market amid mediocre growth, the consequences of the more than 616,000 deaths related to Covid and a political situation that scares some investors.
IPOs on US exchanges have performed better. The price of the operation, of 9 dollars per share, was located in the upper end of the indicated range.
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