Analyzing the Nubank Workforce: What Does a Billion Pound Workforce Look Like?

Nubank is one of the most successful fintechs in Latin America, it’s grown from humble origins to employ over 8,000 people. At the micro level each of these employees plays a key role in ensuring the continued success of the company. At the macro level, senior executives strategize and decide how they will develop the workforce.

The company’s capacity for growth and success in a crowded market is predicated upon the workforce developing in the right areas. Osterus’ analysis can show what Nubanks strategy for developing their workforce is. It can point to key strengths, differentiators and weaknesses in existing team structures.

Where Does Nubank Focus its Hiring Efforts?

At Nubank the majority of employees work in engineering, customer service and finance. For a fintech startup this is pretty usual. These three tenets provide the basis for Nubanks success. Engineers build great products, customer service teams keep customers happy, and finance teams ensure that everything is running smoothly from a regulatory perspective.

Nubank’s workforce profile shows that unlike fintechs such as Revolut, Nubank have not outsourced their customer service operations. There is a conscious choice among brands today on whether they should keep customer service in house or outsource it. While outsourcing CS operations might save the company money, in the long term it could do more harm than good. An external CS team may not care about the company or brand as much as an internal team which could lead to a bad experience for customers. Let’s face it — there’s nothing worse for your brand than bad customer service.

The focus on engineering and finance is unsurprising. Nubank works across multiple financial verticals and in multiple countries. This means that not only does the technology Nubank employs needs to be flexible, adaptable and flawless to keep customers across its geographies happy but their finance departments need to be second to none. Working across multiple geographies in finance is a difficult endeavor. You need to understand and keep up with various different pieces of legislation and you need to understand the difference in financial markets and customer behavior across various countries.

Nubank Expansion and Market Impulse

The latest data seen above shows how Nubank has grown in the past five years. In addition, it is now associated with powerful upcoming firms, such as London startup Seon, which also counts the likes of Revolut, and Afterpay. Incidentally, Seon recently received an investment of $94 million, saying their tech makes it easier for firms (big and small) to combat fraud.

Additionally, Nubank joins the list of neobanks that offer subscription or membership plans in exchange for services and reward programs. From a customer’s perspective, these are optional, which is why such banks still market their services as fee-free.

As Nubank continues to expand and may enter additional new markets these employment sections will only grow.

Nubank generally employs people who have experience in multiple companies before working for them. On average Nubank employees have worked at 4.6 different companies prior to joining. These employees all tend to be reasonably experienced with an average experience length of 9.1 years. It’s clear from the list of previous companies Nubank employees have worked at that Nubank hires its employees from companies established in their fields. There are a number of heavy hitting names that dominate the list of previous companies such as IBM, Accenture and Itau Unibanco. These names make even more sense given that the majority of hiring is done across three main areas (finance, engineering and customer service). There are a number of employees from startup & tech firms such as Uber and Thoughtworks but it’s the traditional leaders that dominate this list.

The Most Experienced Employees Are Not in Finance or Engineering

Whilst the majority of Nubank employees work across the three core areas of their business Osterus’ analysis shows that the most experienced employees don’t work in these departments. On the contrary, the most experienced employees work in the fields of Project Management, Corporate Affairs and Media. These sections of the business are smaller than others, some of the smallest in the business in fact. This indicates that for these business functions, Nubank relies on a small number of highly experienced employees.

For a company that works across multiple geographies the small number of media/corporate affairs employees signals to me that this company runs a very tight ship when it comes to communications. Having a small, central crack team executing their communications shows a desire for pinpoint precision and continuity across all Burbank entities. This stands for both internal and external communications.

What Weaknesses are Showing?

The most obvious data point in this analysis that could indicate a weakness is the high amount of employee turnover experienced in Nubank. Employees at Nubank kept a job for an average of 2.2 years before starting at Nubank. However, the duration of employment at Nubank is half that (1.1 years). This clearly shows that there’s a high turnover in the company and that it’s fairly pronounced.

This turnover concern is especially highlighted in the Project Management and Business Administration roles. Employees in these positions last less than a year at Nubank.

Does Nubank Have an Equal Gender Split?

Nubank’s diversity statistics show it is ahead of some other fintechs in its hiring of women across the business. There is a 60–40 male to female ratio across the company. This gender split is especially skewed across the fields of software development (90% male), engineering (75% male) and IT (74% male). This is not unusual in fintech, or in the tech industry more generally. This is reflective of an industry wide problem that all tech companies need to help solve and work with programmes that help to get women into tech fields.

Women dominate the fields of supply chain management (70% female), general management (43% female) in addition to Nubank’s legal and HR teams (67% and 70% respectively). Nubank has a 60–40 female to male split amongst its intern job titles. This indicates that Nubank is sensing an unequal gender split within the company and is working on employing more women and training them from the ground up. This should be looked at in a very positive light as it demonstrated definitive action to improve a problem.

How International is Nubank’s Team?

Nubank employees appear to be very diverse and International. Their employees come from 382 different universities, the largest graduate contingent come from the University of Sao Paulo (16% of all employees). The employees also speak over 30 languages with employees speaking on average 2 languages. These factors indicate a high level of diversity and internationalization. On the one hand, this isn’t surprising for an employer that spans multiple countries, however we have seen tech companies fail to diversity despite international expansion.

Analyze and Unlock More M&A Opportunities

Traditionally, sifting through an ocean of data is a pain. To gain tremendously valuable workforce insights you need to take a more automated approach to analyzing companies. Osterus, in that respect, can be your way of pinpointing prolific Merger and Acquisition opportunities.

Whether it’s powerful data such as education, previous work experience, diversity scores, retention rates, you’ll be able to grab truly important data with both hands and incorporate that into your business strategy.

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