Before Nubank came along, five legacy banks controlled over 80% of Brazil’s financial system. As they had virtually zero competition, they did not give a f*ck about the customer.
In many Brazilian bank branches, the first thing you meet is a revolving security door that would trap you with everyday items like belt buckles or keys, humiliating you before you even set foot inside. Nubank named a meeting room after this common bank-visit-experience: “Adeus Porta Giratória”. Goodbye, Revolving Door.
That joke is basically the whole brand.
Where it started. In 2012 David Vélez, a Colombian who had just moved to Brazil, spent months trying to open a bank account. Long queues, red tape, fees nobody could explain. In May 2013 he founded Nubank with Cristina Junqueira and Edward Wible, in a rented house in São Paulo.
The first product came in 2014. A credit card with no annual fee, run from an app. And it was purple. Vélez later called the name and the colour “unorthodox decisions” for a new company in conservative financial services. “Nu” means naked in Portuguese. Nothing hidden.
The turn: let customers do the talking. Nubank made early access to their product invite-only. Existing users were given only a handful of invites to share with their friends and as you can imagine it worked like gangbusters - an entirely free banking product that felt like an exclusive VIP club in a sector that has extortionate fees and routinely humiliated everyone. By 2016 it had a million card customers, with almost zero spend on traditional advertising.
Service did a lot of the work too. After a good conversation with support, customers sometimes got a gift, internally called a “WOW”. In Colombia a customer called Santiago mentioned his two cats in a chat. Nubank sent cat toys, a cat box and a handwritten letter. He posted about it, saying he’d never had an experience like that with a financial company.
Customers gave the card a nickname, “roxinho”, the little purple one. Nubank played along. In 2016 it made a carnival samba about the card and handed out purple glasses at São Paulo street parties. In October 2018 it launched a new card design with the world’s largest simultaneous unboxing, more than 500 people, a Guinness record. Its own blog calls the community the “Nação Roxa”. The Purple Nation.
The love shows up in the numbers too. In a JPMorgan survey reported by Forbes in 2021, Nubank’s net promoter score was 86. Itaú scored 53, Bradesco 43.
What changed, and what stayed. The bank grew up. In March 2026 it signed sponsorships with Inter Miami and the Mercedes F1 team, and on 10 September it launched in the US. The Brazilian homepage now invites you to join “the 130 million who have already chosen Nu”.
The purple stayed. So did the enemy. The homepage footer still says it: “Somos incansáveis pra você não precisar ser.” We’re tireless so you don’t have to be. And Junqueira still talks like it’s 2014: “a satisfied customer is the best form of growth.”
Why it worked
It picked an enemy every Brazilian already knew: the queue, the door, the fee nobody could explain. Each product choice argued against it, so the brand barely needed slogans.
One odd colour, kept for over a decade. When customers give your card a pet name, they’ve basically adopted it.
Service was the marketing. A handwritten letter and some cat toys turn into a story the customer tells for you, probably one reason the first million came almost entirely through referrals.
It gave the tribe things to do, and they were fun. A samba, carnival glasses, an unboxing record. The mood was always joy at escaping the old way, never fear of it.
My take
Just as Monzo chose hot coral, Nubank chose a vibrant purple that clearly stood out next to the dark blues, reds, and grays of legacy banks. It wasn’t subtle and that’s the point; pulling it out at a restaurant immediately told everyone you were part of the modern, fee-free revolution. Their killer move was coupling this card (o roxinho) with an invite-only scarcity loop and a human-first customer support ("WOW moments").
In a country where the big banks actively humiliated customers through armed security barriers and punitive fees, Nubank reframed fee-free banking as an act of self-respect, triggering an overwhelming eighty-percent organic word-of-mouth engine. There’s a universal playbook here, and a question worth asking in any market. What do the incumbents do to customers that everyone has quietly accepted? Find that friction, make your rejection of it visible, and treat customer empathy as the acquisition channel it is.
AI in brand work: the enemy finder
Nubank never had to explain itself, everyone already hated the door. Most brands write values instead of naming an enemy. Try this, about 45 minutes.
Collect 50 to 100 complaints about your category, not your brand. App store reviews of the big incumbents, Reddit threads, Trustpilot. Strip out names and personal data.
Paste them into your AI tool. Ask it to group them into frustrations, with a count, one exact quote each, and a name for each group in the customer’s words, not marketing words.
Give it a plain list of what your product actually does. Ask which of the top five frustrations you provably remove, and tell it to reject any it can’t tie to a real feature.
Take the winner. Ask for 10 small places to show the fight that aren’t ads: a welcome email, an error message, a card design, the name of a meeting room. Then ask it to argue back: could your biggest competitor claim the same enemy? If yes, get more specific.
If every frustration comes back as “too expensive”, dig deeper. Price is rarely the thing people tell their friends about.
That’s issue #5.
Next time: another fintech, another look at why it grew. If someone on your team should read this, forward it. Got a brand you want analysed? Hit reply.
Imo
Sources
“Nubank turns 13 as one of the most influential financial institutions in the world”, Nubank, 19 May 2026: link
“Nubank 10 years, by David Vélez”, Nubank, 11 May 2023: link
“20 curiosidades sobre o Nubank”, Nubank blog, 21 Jan 2020 (updated 28 Aug 2026): link
“The Friendly Assassin”, Forbes, 8 Apr 2021: link
“Nu Game Changers #2: humanized customer service and WOWs”, Building Nubank, 25 Oct 2021: link
“New logo Nubank”, Building Nubank, 17 May 2021: link
“Nubank invests in global brand presence to support international expansion”, Nubank, 11 Mar 2026: link
“Brazil’s Nubank launches in the US”, Banking Dive, 15 Sep 2026: link
Nubank homepage, accessed 26 Oct 2026: link