Economics and psychology are inextricably related one to another. As contemporary human matters evolve, Nubank creates new answers. So for that, a new team is born: the Personal Financial Management team. What does a software engineer have to do with that?
It’s no surprise to Brazilians that financial education is not part of our formal education, nor is it commonly discussed openly amongst friends and families. Talking about money is often seen as a taboo.
Other than the classic advice “you have got a good job so you can have money and a retirement plan”, we lack the ability to teach the young the value of money and how to use it once they earn it. And part of the problem is that Brazilians still avoid talking openly about things that worry them, and financial problems are one of them.
Brazil is the most anxious country in the world. According to the WHO, 9.3% of the population (18.6 million people) live with anxiety disorder. In São Paulo 19.9% of the population suffer from anxiety, a rate similar to wartimes in other countries).
It is known that financial worries are a major driver of Brazilian anxiety. 54.8% of Brazilians have trouble sleeping because of overdue bills; 69% of the indebted population suffer from anxiety, including symptoms such as loss of appetite, shame and low self esteem. And it is no wonder why, because, according to PoderData, 55% of the population doesn’t even have R$200,00 (USD 37) saved for an emergency.
Team goal: optimize customers finances
So how can a fintech and its software engineering approach help address an issue that is primarily structural?
For this challenge, we are building a team of creative and innovative technologists that will create Personal Financial Management tools for our customers to understand, organize and optimize their finances.
The Personal Financial Management team will help us respond to questions that we don’t have the answers for. Changing customer behavior in a sustainable way is extremely hard.
We aim to transform customer’s relationship with money by improving their emotional and financial health. To get there we need to create a diverse team of Software Engineers, Designers, Data Scientists, Product Marketing Managers, UX Writers, and Machine Learning Engineers.
Key principles of the Personal Financial Management team
Here are the key principles that govern our product development process and the experience we aspire to build:
1. Positive Consumption
Use people’s natural and healthy desires as the reward to motivate customers to balance their consumption.
2. Reflective, Not Judgemental
Ask customers to reflect on their past decisions, and channel that emotion to drive change.
3. Our Guidance, Your Decision
Our goal is to present customers options to make change, but they’re always the one who is empowered to make the decisions.
4. Down to Earth
Help customers feel like that progress is attainable to them
Nubank’s engineering way
Technology is at the heart of everything we do — which is why software engineering is a core competence for Nubank.
Nubank has enjoyed significant benefits from embracing functional programming concepts to build our business. These concepts play an essential role in the clarity and consistency of our codebase, and we put a lot of effort into making sure engineers understand them when they join the company.
These are a few examples of practices and techniques we adopt:
- Horizontally scalable microservices written mostly in Clojure, leveraging functional programming techniques and hexagonal architecture (more on that in this video)
- Building great mobile experiences using Flutter
- High throughput jobs and inter-service communication using Kafka
- Continuous Integration and Deployment on AWS
- Storing data in Datomic and DynamoDB
- Monitoring and observability with Prometheus
- Running as much as possible on Kubernetes
Reduce complexity
“Nubank’s mission is to reduce complexity in our customer’s lives. Brazilians tell us that financial organization is tedious, complicated and intimidating. We are changing that by creating tools that can make this process intuitive, simple and even fun! This is a bold bet, and when we succeed we will have a game-changing product for our customers.”
Abhi Muchhal – Senior Product Manager
Walk along with game-changers! Work in a brand new product and explore where it can take us.