How does Nubank use Artificial Intelligence and other technologies?

Technology is present in everything Nubank does, and from the first day of the business, it was defined that the true measure of success would be customer satisfaction. It is their experiences that help Nubank define which technologies make sense and how they will be used, whether in customer service, in the app or in the creation of new solutions.

“It's not technology for its own sake. We don't believe in being precious about technology. What matters is the impact. Beautifully written code that doesn't impact the customer is worthless. We always start from the customer's needs and pains. And the elements that are important to them are embedded in our pillars, such as stability and security. It's what we call security and stability by design” says Vitor Olivier, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Nubank.

“We will always define success as our ability to delight the customer. This means that we create, develop and adapt our technology to the customer's needs”, he says. Based on this premise, Nubank wants to take a new step in the experience: offering increasingly personalized solutions.

itor Olivier, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Nubank: we're on our way to being AI first.

Impact technologies: solutions created from data

Nubank was born with the mission of simplifying people's financial lives and, to this end, it uses technology to create solutions that make their relationship with money easier.

But in order not to lose its way in the face of so many technological innovations, Nubank keeps its focus on the problem. “Focusing on problems and not on solutions is always the way to go”, says Olivier. In other words, the first step is to understand the root of the customer's problems and detail the causes of these problems, only to then focus on the solution. In this way, he explains, it becomes easier to separate hype technologies from fundamentals. In other words, to distinguish between technologies that have a real impact and those that are just speculative.

Based on this premise, Nubank has evolved its range of solutions. “Nubank's first step was to democratize. It looked at agility and simplicity. Simplification is very powerful, but as you establish a relationship with the customer, it starts to become more complex and demands completely personalized decisions,” explains Olivier.

To meet these new demands, Nubank uses advanced Artificial Intelligence models that are fed by a database of grouped data - and a large part of this database, shared by customers, is accessed via Open Finance. “Open Finance together with Artificial Intelligence are tools that help us offer an increasingly assertive suggestion within a context that is consistent with what that customer expects”, Olivier says.

"Money Platform": a private banker in every customer’s pocket

If in recent years the popularization of smartphones has put a bank in people's pockets, Artificial Intelligence opens the way for a private banker – a personal advisor – in everyone's pocket, says Olivier.

To achieve this goal, Nubank has been working on a range of products and services to bring together increasingly complete and personalized solutions to manage finances in a single place. One example is the Payment Assistant, which finds, centralizes and notifies customers about due bills, in addition to helping to organize expected expenses for the month. This evolution is the premise of the "Money Platform": the customers practically have a private advisor, according to Olivier.

"'Money Platform' starts with elements such as the possibility of automating payments, concentrating them in one place, and organizing your money. These solutions generate data that, together with that data from Open Finance, allow us to create a combo of action suggestions that make sense for a specific customer at a specific moment", says Olivier.

In this way, says the executive, the benefits go beyond financial life: Nubank helps to decompress people's lives, taking away the mental burden generated by bureaucracies linked to money, and frees up time for customers to use with what really matters to them.

“We know that Brazilians' main concerns are security and finances. When we can help optimize financial decisions as much as possible, guaranteeing security in the process, we reduce this stress. Our vision is that, with the 'Money Platform', we can change people's relationship with money and increase the feeling of security they have when dealing with it”, he says.

Technology that guarantees layers and layers of security

Street mode, passwords, facial recognition. The tools you access through the app are not the only defenses that guarantee the protection of your account and your data. You can't see it, but Nubank uses hundreds of controls that increase your security - these are called Smart Defenses. And this is only possible with a lot of embedded technology.

The first layers of protection are related to access to the app. There are controls that map, for example, which device the customer has used to access the app, how many times they have tried the same password, whether they are on or off their home wi-fi network. The technology embedded in the app can also identify whether facial recognition is being done with a real photo or a deep fake.

Once in the application, Nubank invests in controls that analyze customer actions and identify whether that behavior is within the standard. "We use thousands and thousands of variables to evaluate this. And depending on the type of usage pattern, we will have different types of friction to confirm that you are you", Olivier says. In other words, the application may ask for your password more than once, for example.

In addition to fraud protection mechanisms, Nu also invests in preventing scams, which involve the unconscious participation of the victim, such as misleading phone calls that manipulate people into handing over their own data to criminals. The company runs frequent awareness campaigns to warn customers, but it also creates innovative mechanisms to stay ahead of criminals, investing in predictive technologies to anticipate more and more accurately when a customer might make a decision that leads them to fall for a scam.

"This is a much more difficult problem because it is not a problem of identification or third-party usage of the app. The customer can be convinced to take an action that they believe is beneficial to them, even when it is a harmful action, such as buying from a fake website created to steal your data and money. So this is another chapter in which we are investing, to try to guarantee alerts and create a little friction in situations that may be fraudulent", explains Olivier.

And for these predictive security models, and also to create an increasingly personalized experience, Artificial Intelligence is one of the main tools.

"Artificial Intelligence first": Nubank's path to ensuring unique experiences for customers

“We see opportunities, with the advances in Artificial Intelligence, to become ‘AI first’. This means that we want to embed AI in as many solutions as we believe makes sense, because we believe it will bring productivity, leverage, speed, adaptability and customization to the customer. So we're increasingly putting AI at the center of how we think about delivering value to the customer”, Olivier says.

Even before it became a topic of conversation, Artificial Intelligence was already a reality at Nubank. But like all technology, it is used when it results in something that makes sense for the customer.

“We believe that everyone needs some AI to help them make some decisions, and we know that many companies will do this with a focus on optimizing profit, which is the most common path. But this is not a long-term vision, because it will become obvious to the customer what kind of 'advice' this AI is giving. It's like that friend who gives you a tip, but every time you follow it, it's him who does well and not you”, he says.

That's why, at Nubank, AI and any other technology work in the customer's favor to ensure the best suggestions according to their life moments - this is what guarantees a long-term relationship based on interactions that really matter.