Challenges to internationalize the largest digital bank in the world

Nubank is a national bank from Brazil with 12 million customers and an architecture with 300+ microservices that are totally cloud based. Luiz Hespanha and Lucas Cavalcanti outline the challenges of expanding to other countries and internationalizing all the bank's services.

It’s a challenge for a national company to launch products in different countries. The challenge is bigger when the company has more than 12 million customers and a core business with an architecture of more than 300 microservices. And the challenge is bigger still when the company is a bank with complex regulations that change for each country. That was the challenge faced by Nubank—the largest digital bank in the world, but until 2018 acting only in Brazil. Luiz Hespanha and Lucas Cavalcanti walk you through the problems the company had to solve, from the simplest but trickiest ones—supporting the translation of all the messages and communications—to the biggest ones that affected the whole company, like building local teams with local engineers in each country or defining an anticorruption layer between the services that are part of the Nubank core business and should be multicountry and the services that should be specific to each country. During Nubank’s journey (which hasn’t ended yet), the bank often needed to change direction and choose another approach. Luiz and Lucas reveal what allowed Nubank to learn what it should and shouldn’t do in a project like this and how to replicate it for as many countries as it wants.