New Bank

New Bank was born from a deep, emotionally-held pain point. Jack Dugle recalls walking past a bank branch in São Paulo in 1997 with a Brazilian client who casually remarked, "That's my bank and I hate them." That sentiment stuck with him for two decades. The large incumbent Brazilian banks were among the most profitable in the world—and among the most hated. When the founders (David, Ed, and Chris) approached Dugle to join as Chief Product Officer around 2019, this insight resonated deeply. The opportunity: millennial, middle-class, urban Brazilians who despised credit card fees and couldn't access credit due to lack of history. The solution: a branchless, digital bank with a cost structure that allowed disruptively low pricing, putting "a bank branch in your pocket" on the rising tide of smartphone adoption in Latin America.

From day one, New Bank embedded a radical commitment into its culture. The company's five core values, which 80-90% of employees can recite, center on making "customers love us fanatically." This wasn't a slogan on a wall—it was the true north for every decision. Dugle brought product discipline from his years at Google and Facebook, introducing frameworks like the Amazon mock press release technique (explain why customers should care before writing a single line of code) and product reviews that asked: "Is this fundamentally different for the customer? Does this redefine the category?"

The team operationalized their obsession through rigorous measurement. They adopted the Sean Ellis Score, a customer satisfaction metric that asks: "How disappointed would you be if this product went away?" While the standard threshold is 40%, New Bank raised it to 50% for the Brazilian market, accounting for cultural politeness. Dugle recalls: "We rarely scale a project until we know the Sean Ellis Score hit the threshold that we find really compelling." They also became obsessive about Net Promoter Score, targeting "world-beating" scores and alarming whenever NPS dipped even 1-2 points.

New Bank grew 80-90% through word-of-mouth—an extraordinary feat for a financial services company. Dugle attributes this entirely to product obsession. Rather than traditional marketing, the company invested heavily in making the product so good customers couldn't help but tell their friends. As Dugle puts it: "We don't have to invest as much in marketing to drive our growth" because "the customers you get, you retain." This required ruthless discipline: churn metrics were monitored obsessively to avoid a "leaky bucket" that would doom word-of-mouth growth.

One product exemplifying this approach was their high-income rewards credit card, "Ultra Violeta." Initial launches served many segments, but the Sean Ellis score revealed a critical insight: the bullseye cohort was customers who spent enough to waive the monthly fee. Rather than scaling to all segments, the team doubled down on refining the product for that cohort, iterating until the score hit their threshold. Similarly, their payments assistant ("Assistente de Pagamentos") struggled with a 40% Sean Ellis score until the team discovered that customers with 4+ bills across multiple payment rails (PIX and others) hit a 70% score. They then redesigned the entire product around multi-bill, multi-rail consolidation—a fundamentally different experience rather than incremental improvement.

New Bank's secret wasn't rocket science; it was discipline. Dugle emphasizes that product managers must say "no" and resist the enormous pressure to scale prematurely. "We are not going to take a small problem and scale it," he says, "because if we do that, we end up with a big mess." This requires culture: teams must feel empowered to deliver bad news. Dugle recalls a design review where an ex-Google, ex-Facebook designer challenged the team with the phrase "good enough isn't good enough. Is it great enough?" That framing stuck.

The company also pioneered a direct customer feedback loop. Rather than lengthy surveys or research reports, product managers are told to pick up the phone and call 10 customers directly. "By the time you've made your first call, you could predict what customer six, seven, eight, nine and 10 are going to tell you." Dugle references Jeff Bezos's insight: "If you have data and you have an anecdote, usually the anecdote is right." This generated surprising insights—like discovering that joint bank accounts, unchanged for 120-150 years, are fundamentally misaligned with modern financial relationships.

New Bank has become one of the most under-the-radar monster businesses in fintech. Operating in only three countries (Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia), it now serves more customers than Bank of America. The company holds playful records (like the largest simultaneous credit card unboxing and the first underwater credit card transaction) and maintains NPS scores in the 70s, 80s, and occasionally 90s—occasionally hitting 94-95 in Mexico. The payments assistant scaled from hundreds of thousands of monthly actives to 10+ million, driven by product iteration informed by the Sean Ellis Score.

Dugle stresses that this success comes from strategy clarity. New Bank isn't trying to be "the world's largest neobank"—that's an aspiration, not a strategy. The real strategy is specific, coherent, and locked in: serve millennial, middle-class, urban customers with a branchless, digital bank that uses its cost structure to offer fundamentally different pricing and experience. This clarity enables focus. As Dugle says, echoing Kevin Systrom: "We may not be right, but at least we are clear." And clarity allows rapid course correction when concentrated bets aren't working. New Bank proves that in fintech—and perhaps any business—the path to fanatical word-of-mouth growth is not marketing muscle but relentless, disciplined product obsession.