The principles that uphold Nubank’s culture

The complexity of our operations has grown alongside Nubank. New products, new geographies, hundreds of teams and thousands of people have come to operate in different contexts, all of which require daily decisions that push us to never stop evolving.

In smaller companies, culture often happens implicitly. When the team works side by side every day, people absorb behaviors almost naturally. But when growth is exponential and the company gains scale, operating across multiple countries, disciplines and realities, this dynamic changes completely. 

At Nubank, we never wanted to turn our culture into a rigid set of rules. Our goal, in fact, has always been to preserve autonomy, speed and the capacity for judgment. That is why our values show up in a much more concrete way in everyday work: they are principles that help teams make decisions, set priorities and navigate complex trade-offs.

Because culture, in the end, is what guides how decisions will be made when trade-offs become hard.

Values only work when they can guide real decisions

These values have always been part of Nubank’s identity, but as the operation grew, we felt the need to make them more applicable to everyday life.

We knew that culture needed to show up in the way we set goals, build products and debate priorities. That is why our values unfold into more concrete principles, which help guide how to think, act and decide in different contexts.

The five values  of Nu’s culture are:

• We want our customers to love us fanatically;
• We are hungry and we challenge the status quo;
• We think and act with a sense of ownership;
• We build strong and diverse teams;
• We pursue high standards and smart efficiency.

What matters most, though, is not memorizing these phrases. The real goal is to empower our teams to use these values and its principles  as practical tools for judgment.

In a company the size of Nu, this matters, because not every decision will have an obvious answer and not every situation will come with an actionable instruction manual. Having shared references about how to think is precisely what helps us stay consistent.

Customer love as a discipline, not a slogan

At Nubank, we have never treated customer love as an automatic consequence of our growth or our branding. For us, a good relationship with customers must be earned continuously.

This means putting customers at the center of decisions, especially when trade-offs become hard. And it also means understanding that trust is built from small choices accumulated over time.

That is why we reject the logic of “good enough” for our products, and under no circumstances do we want them to be merely functional. Everything we create must be clear, intuitive, consistent and carefully built.

This view also changes how short-term decisions are evaluated. Not every immediate optimization is worth the cost of a gradual erosion of trust, because we understand that small frictions, hidden complexities or quick wins that compromise the experience can have a negative long-term impact.

Trust, therefore, is a structural asset here at Nu, and our standards keep evolving. After all, our expectation is always to improve the quality of the experience we offer to our customers.

Structured nonconformism

Questioning the status quo has always been part of Nubank’s identity, but there is an important nuance here: nonconformism does not mean random rebellion. On the contrary, it means building a culture that continually revisits certainties, processes and assumed limitations.

Here, the status quo, whether internal or external, is treated as a hypothesis rather than as a definitive truth.

This directly influences the way we set goals. At Nubank, there is a clear preference for ambitious projects, and we do this intentionally, to make it possible to build solutions that redefine standards.

This mindset also shows up in our relationship with innovation. Processes are not granted immunity simply because they worked in the past. In fact, they need to keep making sense as context, scale and technologies evolve.

At the same time, we care about sustainable growth. High-performance companies often preach continuous intensity, but we think with a slightly different logic. For us, what we build needs to work in the long run, and that means balancing speed with sustainability. After all, if everything is urgent, in a business context, nothing really is.

We are ambitious, but for us, high performance is not synonymous with burnout.

Ownership means thinking beyond your own deliverable

Ownership is one of the strongest concepts in Nubank’s culture. But inside Nu, it does not mean territorialism or individual control over projects.

Here, people are encouraged to think beyond their own role, considering systemic impact, interdependencies and long-term consequences. Owners need to think about the company as a whole, not just optimize their own deliverables. 

In addition, we believe that disagreeing with teammates is part of the process. Ideas need to be deeply questioned for us to be sure we are making the best possible decisions.

Once the direction is set, however, we advocate for collective alignment. Ownership, after all, is contributing so that the best decision happens and then working to make it succeed.

We also use this logic to understand the question of autonomy. At Nu, teams have autonomy to operate, but without ever losing sight of their responsibilities.

Acting like an owner means bringing solutions, not just pointing out problems.

Strong culture does not mean homogeneous thinking

Strong teams have to be built. At Nubank, that means hiring professionals, developing them and raising standards whenever possible, while keeping accountability in place. Team building, around here, is an ongoing part of the operation.

There is another important element in this building process: intellectual conviction. Nu values debate among colleagues and sees it as indispensable if the goal is to make decisions with context. We see debate as the most honest way to converge on a direction.

That is why we work hard to build strong and diverse teams, because this connects directly to our collective capacity to solve problems. After all, different perspectives expand the repertoire, broaden possibilities and help teams see risks and opportunities that would hardly emerge in homogeneous groups.

In the end, strong teams are defined by their ability to turn their differences into collective intelligence.

High performance requires focus

Scaling a company also means learning to operate with clarity of priorities. At Nubank, efficiency is tied to the ability to use limited resources, such as time, attention, energy or money, in an intentional way.

We believe that excellence comes before efficiency and, when we think about product, our first step is always to define the desired quality standard. Then we build the smartest path to get there, which prevents using pragmatism as an excuse to lower the quality of our deliverables.

At the same time, there is a constant concern with focus. Growing companies accumulate opportunities all the time, but doing everything at once dilutes the organization’s energy. That is why choosing where not to invest is also a strategic part of the operation.

At Nu, there is a clear logic of concentrating efforts: betting deeply on the opportunities that really matter. And scaling, in this context, is a consequence of knowing where to put energy.

Culture as an execution tool

At Nubank, culture does not show up separately from the operation: it takes part directly in how strategies are built, goals are evaluated and decisions are communicated.

This means that cultural principles do not only guide how Nubankers think and behave , but also structure execution itself.

When teams set priorities, for example, there is a constant concern with connecting decisions to the impact created for customers, to the level of excellence expected and to the trade-offs taken along the way, and this also applies when we evaluate whether we have succeeded.

Results matter, of course, but the path used to get there matters too. The discussion does not end with final metrics and includes questions about quality of execution, intellectual debate, collective building and sustainable impact.

This logic also influences our communication, because we treat transparency and clarity as fundamental elements so that people can have real autonomy.

As we continue to grow, we also care about preserving the coherence of our culture without creating rigid structures. We do this because we believe culture scales better when there is a shared language.

In the end, cultures are what they reinforce. And we reinforce our values repeatedly, through decisions, prioritization and everyday behaviors.