What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

Our team has been supporting Nubank’s incredible growth in the past years. We have successfully led the company through its IPO last December, with a remarkable direct share program in Brazil that had more than 800,000 retail investors joining the offering. Because of that, we launched NuEnsina an educational program, free and available in our app to our more than 60 million customers, to help them on their financial inclusion journey, and preparing them for entering the investments space.

We have also grown our base and products for SMEs in Brazil, a clear underserved group in the traditional financial sector. We have extended the offering of Nu Pay, our buy now pay later product, to big merchants and started to offer it as mean of payment for our SME clients, alongside other payment features that are done through their phones. In the ESG arena, we launched Instituto Nu that embodies that topic across Nubank, selecting projects that will promote entrepreneurship and innovation in slum and peripheral spaces. On D&I, we grew a very diverse team in 2022, focusing on affirmative hiring for black and brown legal professionals, which has been amazing in terms of developing a high-performance team. We have also led the launch of project Equalizar, which is gathering legal leaders from many companies in the sector, to jointly discuss measures to foster racial diversity on the legal community. In the institutional side, we have also supported Nubank’s banking and treasury team in very sophisticated funding and derivatives transactions cross border, to strengthen our capital base so we can be well positioned to explore new markets and products.

Lastly, on the innovation and efficient space we have invested in tools that will support lawyers to management their tasks, be more efficient and have data to make strategic decisions on how to allocate resources through a streamlining project for contracts with procurement, that aims to significantly reduce the number of agreements that need to be reviewed by our team.

How important is choosing to work with external lawyers who align with your company’s values? Are you likely to reconsider what firms you work with based on this?

There is a movement in the industry that Nubank is co-leadings that refers to hiring diverse outside legal teams, that also demonstrates a strong culture of a healthy internal environment. For instance, we want to make sure that interns are not overload with work and have their school schedule respected. We are still at the beginning of this journey, but I am positive that we will promote change in the law firms by prioritising and rewarding those who shows an alignment of values.

As we live in a fast-paced world today, what skills will a corporate legal team need to succeed in the modern in-house industry?

We need to be resilient, not work in silos, be ready to take new challenges and topics out of your comfort zone. Have clear and objective communication but most importantly, be seen and act as a trusted advisor to the business instead of just pointing out risks, going beyond pure legal matters.