Eighteen years before the board seat

Vélez moved to Brazil in 2008, and opening a bank account took him five months, as he told Stanford Graduate School of Business. A handful of financial institutions controlled 90% of the market, and by his description there was a bank on every corner with a line out the door. None of that describes the region today, which is the point. It describes the starting conditions of a problem somebody decided to work on.

Sequoia Capital hired him as a partner in 2011 to find opportunities in Latin America. A year later the firm stepped back from the region, pulling out, by Vélez's account, over a shortage of technology and entrepreneurial talent. Nine years later Sequoia wrote that it had "collectively agreed to take a step back" and was returning with renewed optimism.

Vélez stayed. In 2013 he co-founded Nubank in São Paulo with Cristina Junqueira, a Brazilian veteran of the financial sector, and Edward Wible, who built the engineering. Cross-cultural from the first week. He chose banking, he has said, because it was the hardest thing he could imagine. Sequoia had stepped away from the region as a strategy, and it still backed him at the seed round. The firm's judgment about the market and its judgment about the founder were two separate calls.

Building on ground that kept moving

The difficulty was never one product decision. Nubank had to earn trust from customers with little reason to hand their money to an app, operate without branches where a branch signaled legitimacy, and keep pace with rules that shifted as it grew large enough to matter to the regulator. It is now authorized to operate as a bank in Mexico and holds preliminary conditional approval for a US national bank. Each step is another rulebook.

The pandemic tested the same capability. Nubank closed 2021 with 53.9 million customers, up 61.9% in a year, from 4.4 million in mid-2018. It was spending more than it earned at the time, posting net losses of US$171.5 million in 2020 and US$165.3 million in 2021, which is the normal shape of a company paying for growth before the revenue from those customers arrives. The spending paid back. By 2025 Nu was reporting US$2.9 billion in annual net income. Growth in the year the world stopped came from a product that made a hard moment easier.

The objection worth making

There is a fair reading of all this that has nothing to do with Latin America. Vélez studied at Stanford, then spent years inside American investment banking, private equity and venture capital. A reader could reasonably conclude this is a story about credentials and access to capital, and that the region is incidental.

The record cuts the other way once you look at what it fails to explain. With that background he could have built in the United States, with cheaper capital and an easier market. The firm that trained him had already looked at the same market and moved on. He stayed. Plenty of people hold a comparable résumé, and none of them built a bank with 135 million customers in Brazil.

That combination is older and more common than one career. Professionals from the region have been training and working in the United States for decades, and what they learn travels back into the teams they join. Someone who has seen how a US organization defines quality, and who knows why a local process behaves the way it does, gets to a working answer faster. Vélez is the visible version of a mix that happens quietly every year, and one career shows where the ceiling is while saying nothing about the floor.

What crossed the border, in both directions

The exchange is older than most of the current conversation about it. NAFTA opened technology services trade between Mexico and the United States in 1994, and American companies have been building development centers across Latin America ever since. Nearly 500 startups in the region raised a first round of venture funding in an eighteen-month span, according to LAVCA's 2025 ecosystem report.

The market moved too. The share of Brazilian adults with a bank account rose from 68% in 2014 to 84% in 2021, and among the poorest Brazilians from 57% to 82% in four years. Brazil's central bank credits emergency transfers and Pix, the instant payment system the Bank for International Settlements now studies as a lesson for other central banks.

A generation that arrives ready

So far this has been a story about companies adapting to each other across a border. The people are the more useful part, and two conditions behind that exchange have improved quietly.

The first is language, raised by two separate systems. Colombia's 2013 bilingualism law requires schools to develop foreign language ability, so the first cohorts fully covered by it are entering the workforce now. Universities add their own bar: the Universidad Nacional de Colombia makes CEFR level B1 a graduation requirement, and Tec de Monterrey requires a TOEFL score of 520. A US team hiring from those cohorts is meeting people who cleared a language bar before they cleared a technical one.

The second condition is the clock. Language matters most in the moments that cannot wait: a design review, a production incident, a decision that needs a second opinion before the deploy. Bogotá and Dallas stay within an hour of each other all year, so those moments land inside the same working day.

A question worth asking in every interview

There is a simple test, and it works on almost any Latin American engineer you talk to. Ask them what they had to solve that was never their job, then listen to how they describe it.

The answer is revealing because of how the work happens in the region. On a small team with a tight budget, one engineer designs the architecture, runs the deployment, writes the tests and explains the tradeoff to the client. A large share of recent graduates and early-career engineers learn the job inside exactly that kind of company. They arrive with a wide set of skills and specialize later without losing the breadth. Companies that hire certified IT professionals often stop at the certification, the least informative part of any answer.

Cost is what usually starts the conversation, and inside Digitech it comes up constantly. This article has made no cost argument, for a simple reason: a lower rate is a reason to start looking, and it tells you nothing about whether the work will turn out well. That comes down to the person on the call, and to whether problems reach you early enough to fix them.

How Digitech makes it work

Digitech talent builds around that evaluation rather than a stack of résumés. Its process starts with the role, the timeline and the team culture, then introduces pre-vetted professionals screened for technical expertise, English communication and cultural fit, with the client keeping the hiring decision. Latin America nearshore staffing works when the match gets made against a specific team and a specific outcome.

Key points:

• Certified technical talent: evaluated on the stack, the tools and the problems the role will meet.
• Shared working hours: real-time collaboration with US teams across overlapping business hours.
• Flexible delivery: remote, hybrid and onsite staff augmentation shaped around how the client ships.