The Capital One Playbook: Nigel Morris on Nubank, AI & the Future of Banking

What we're seeing now is a renaissance of fintechs that have been built outside of the US that have superb comparative advantage, who have now conquered their home geo, who are now saying audaciously, you know what? The biggest prize is not Sweden or Germany if you're Klana. It's not the UK if you're Monzo or Revolut. And it's not Brazil if you're Nubank. It's the US. If you spent time with David Velez, you wouldn't know that he had created a company that's worth, you know, what is it now, $100 billion? The most valuable digital bank. 140 million customers. Has a relationship with over 50% of every household in Brazil. Is in Mexico, is in Colombia, and just got a US banking license. There's a fork in the road that many companies that are successful have, and that is do I add a second product in my home geo or do I offer my primary product in another geo? Almost always the answer is offer a second product. If you are trying to go to market today and looking for growth equity, and you don't start with my business is stablecoin or native AI, it's going to be really hard. It doesn't matter if your unit economics are fantastic. Your net promoter scores start with an 80. You've got a grown-up management team. You're borderline profitable. You're growing at 40%. This market is intoxicated now by AI startups. Guys, if you enjoyed today's episode, please do me a quick favor. Subscribe to the Jay Corp Podcast on Spotify and YouTube and leave us a rating. It's a small thing, but it really helps us grow the show. Now, my guest today helped reinvent banking before fintech even had the name. Nigel Morris co-founded Capital One, pioneering a data-driven approach to consumer finance built around experimentation, risk-based pricing, and the idea that virtually every decision in banking could be tested. Today, Capital One serves more than 100 million customers and is worth around $140 billion. Nigel then went on to co-found QED Investors, a global venture capital firm specializing in financial services, backing the next generation of financial disruptors, from Nubank and Remitly to Creditas and Bitso. In this episode, we unpack the operating principles behind Capital One, QED's full 90-minute approach to venture, and why incumbent banks remain structurally bad at innovation. We talk about what Nigel saw in David Velez before Nubank even existed, whether Nubank can actually win in the United States, the biggest mistakes fintechs make when expanding internationally, and what today's obsession with AI is doing to the venture capital market. But before we dive in, I'm very excited to announce our newest partner, iFood Beneficios. In Brazil, companies spend billions every year providing food and meal benefits to their employees. But for such a massive market, the product experience was pretty terrible. Lots of bureaucracy for HR, clunky platforms, and employees often frustrated about where and how they could actually use those benefits. That created a pretty obvious opportunity for iFood. Take the technology, deep expertise in food, an enormous merchant ecosystem it had built over 15 years, and apply to a category that desperately needed a better product. That's iFood Beneficios, iFood's multi-benefit platform, bringing employee benefits into one card and one management platform. Today, it serves more than 58,000 companies and over 1.5 million employees, including Nubank, Embev, XP, Petrobras, and Carrefour. But scale aside, what I find most compelling is how iFood uses its existing ecosystem to change the economics of the benefit itself. Employees get access to iFood discounts, free clubby iFood membership, and exclusive offers that can give them up to 40% more value from the same food and meal benefit balance. So companies can make a benefit they're already paying for materially more valuable without spending more. And for HR, the proposition is equally attractive. Zero fees for joining, administration, card issuance, or delivery. And one simple platform to manage employees' balances, cards, payments, and reporting. So if you're a founder, CEO, or people leader operating in Brazil and want to use benefits to attract, motivate, and retain great people while making your HR team's life a whole lot easier, go to beneficios.ifood.com.br to learn more and request a demo. Nigel Morris, it's such a pleasure to have you as my guest. Welcome to The Jaker. Good to be here. Thank you for making time. So before we dive into fintechs and venture, I'd love to start with a little bit of your journey. And looking back, what were two or three key inflection points that fundamentally shaped how you approach building businesses, both as an operator and as an investor? Wow, that's a big question to kick off, isn't it? I will say this. Last holiday, I sat down, and I don't know what exactly prompted me to do this. But I wrote down the 10 people in my life that had been really axiomatic, really massively meaningful to me. And I've sworn that over the course of this year that I'm going to make sure I sit down with all of them and say, you know what, you might not know what an influence you had on me because I may have just some peon out there. But you made a magnificent impact on me, and you changed the course of my life. And the sad thing, Olga, to be honest with you, because you can see how old and gray I am, is that I think four of the 10 are not with us anymore. So I'm going to hunt down their children, and I'm going to tell their children just how important those people were. So there were 10 people, and people are the hinge point in those moments where you realize something. I'll touch on a couple of them. Now, I want to tell you about a company I've been excited to partner with, Jeeves. If you've ever scaled a company across multiple countries, you probably know this problem all too well. Every new market means another banking relationship, another currency, another set of payment rails, and regulations. Before long, your finance team is managing multiple banks, separate providers for cards and effects, different legal entities, and reconciliation, reconciliation, reconciliation. And here's the irony. The faster you grow globally, the more time, money, and expertise you end up spending on financial infrastructure that has nothing to do with your core business. That's exactly the problem Jeeves is solving for Nubank, BMW, Burger King, Lululemon, and many others. Thousands of enterprises across 25 countries. Jeeves is the stablecoin native financial operating system for global companies. It brings corporate cards, payments, effects, and treasury into one stack. So instead of having one corporate card provider in Mexico, another in the U.S., and a third payment rail in Brazil, and so on, you can run it all from one place on Jeeves. And the architecture behind it is pretty fascinating. Jeeves uses stablecoin rails to move money across borders faster and cheaper, and a generic infrastructure to automate more of what finance teams have historically had to do manually, from controls and approvals to reconciliation. So if you are a founder, CFO, or finance leader building across markets, stop building financial infrastructure country by country. Go to tryjeeves.com to see what a global financial OS can do for your company. I'd come out of strategy consulting where being good at arithmetic and being a good talker puts you in a position where you could keep up and do a good job. And we went, Rich Fairbank and I had left SPA, the consulting firm, and we'd gone to Signet Bank. And I realized that managing a small group of people who were rather like me was only going to help me so far in managing 200 people in customer service. And I sat down with some people who were really wonderful at people leadership and process leadership who probably didn't have the luxury of the schooling that I had. And I realized just how important authentic leadership was and how few people that have very strong consulting or quantitative backgrounds are able to make the leap into being real, bona fide general managers. And I saw that I needed to make that leap, and I worked really hard to do it. And mostly it worked out. So that was one real moment. What would be another one? I realized, no matter how good you think you are, that surrounding yourself with people that complement you, who you trust and care for and love, and have those people alongside you creates real 2 plus 2 equals 5 capability. In the Capital One days, it was myself and Rich. And I would say this, I hope he would reciprocate. There would have been no Capital One without Rich Fairbank, not a chance. And our skills were very complementary, and we went through this crucible together at QED. Myself, largely, and Frank Rotman. And Frank's very different to Rich, and I played a very different role there than I played with in Capital One. But having a real trusted thought partner is really, really important. And when I look at companies to invest in, and if you had two companies who were the same on every dimension, one of them has a standalone, charismatic, wonderful CEO person, and the other one has that same person, but also has a more technical, more inside-oriented, more process-focused person, but they are a dyad, a team. I'll go with the team any day of the week. Because life is, life will throw all kinds of curveballs at you. And I remember many times driving back from Richmond, which is where Capital One's headquarters were, or where the large processing plant was, driving back with Rich, when we used to drive ourselves in big old crankbaits, downtown Victoria cars that looked like police cars. I remember it's been a particularly horrendous day. And I said, Richard, I don't know. I don't know if it's going to work. I don't know if this is what we should be doing. Maybe we should go back to consulting. And I remember him saying to me, he said, Nigel, the darkest time is often just before the dawn. And it always struck me that having somebody who can put their arm around you and say, you know what, it's never as bad as you think it is at the worst time. And it's actually never as good as you think it is at the most euphoric time. Give me one more. Now you're going to challenge me. You know, one of the things I used to do in the Capital One days, because I found, especially in the later days, Olga, I found that the curiosity in me was no longer challenged in the way it was in the early days. And the entrepreneur that is in me, that is a monster, actually, and I find it very hard to control this thing. And even now at 67, I still get up every morning and try to control this thing. The drive to not necessarily to win, but the drive to create and build and make something out of nothing is very strong. But I found that as I was spending more of my time in things that I knew how to do quite well, because I'd done them for 10 years, earnings calls and meeting with regulators and a lot of things that didn't really tax you in the same way from a stimulus standpoint, I found that I needed to set up times and I used to call it playtime. And it was on a Friday afternoon. And I would say on a Friday afternoon, I don't want any meetings. I'm going to get in a room with the most creative, ingenious people that existed at Capital One, who were often many in the hierarchy, you know, massively technically subordinate and say to them, look, what's really cool, what you're really working on is fantastic. Let's go play with ideas. And I remember somebody once from the legal department saying, you know, Nigel, from a shareholder perspective, that's not a good use of your time because are any of these ideas ever, ever going to move the economic needle? And I said, probably not. But it's necessary for my sanity to actually do something different. And I think, so why point that out? Because we are all so driven, we're all so focused, and we can all burn out. How I've more recently invested in a football team, in a championship football team, soccer team, called Swansea City. But one of the things that when I talk to football players, some of them who are incredibly successful, some of them are not so, is how the intensity of the academy system is, and how easily we can burn out. And, you know, we look at Klarna, and we look at Revolut, and we look at, you know, these Monzo, we look at these great companies, Robinhood, and we think that they're overnight sensations. They took 10, 12, 15 years to build of a massive dedication and focus, and people burn out. So I think that part of the thing I learned is that looking after my own mental health by putting together things like playtime and my incredibly obsessional exercise regime is a way of keeping me sane in a world that often feels like a cacophony of insanity. And the venture capital and second general are the industry where it's so easy to go crazy, right, because of the level of uncertainty and the level of unpredictability and just everything that you cannot control that can go wrong. I mean, coping mechanism must be there or else you'll go mad. It's a great way of putting it. Yeah. I mean, look, I think that people who are entrepreneurs by nature are drawn to, like a moth to the flame, to uncertainty. And they are drawn to it. They don't want structured environments. They want that freedom, that ability to be able to express themselves. But with it, I think, comes a correlation with people who are a little less stable. And I can speak, you know, I'm sort of, you know, here's exhibit A. You know, as someone who does two-hour fitness routine per day and comes from athletic background, I totally get it. Like, two hours of my routine, it's my time. Obviously, it's not like, from the value creation perspective, it's not the optimal usage of time, but it gives me sanity. So I totally get what you're saying. Like, 100% get what you're saying. I want to touch a little bit on Capital One. As you already said, that you and Rich met at the consulting company, Strategic Planning Associates, right? And started working on what later became Capital One during your time there. But I'm curious, what were the key insights about the industry and the dynamics of the industry that you were seeing at the time that made you believe that there was an opportunity to build something radically different from what was existing in the market? Yeah. Thank you for that. So Rich and I met at Strategic Planning Associates. It was a BCG spinoff. And I remember somebody once saying that SPA is more BCG than BCG, in that it was everything was about first principles, very quantitative. It was full of very quirky, incredibly able individuals who've gone on to do all kinds of wonderful things. And I went there because I didn't know anything about business at all. I'd grown up in an environment at home where business was an anathema. And I thought that if it was about some basic arithmetic and quantitative skills, I could probably keep up a bit. And then I could learn business on the way and then I'd figure out what to do with my life. And I also, you know, had offers to go to, I was at London Business School and then at Wharton. And I thought that I would go back to the UK. And SPA said, you can come and work in Washington. And I thought, you know what, I'll do that for a couple of three years. And then I'll go back home again. And here I am now, 40 years later, and still living in the U.S. And it's been wonderful. I feel incredibly. You still have your beautiful British accent. Well, you know, it's the only thing I've got going for me, Olga, at this point, that people give me an extra 15 points of IQ because of the way I talk. Now it's, I think it's actually interesting when I go back home and people do say, oh, Nigel, you're sounding like you're an American. So maybe my accents become a little bit more transatlantic. Maybe it's like Bermuda now or something. But when I get, when I go back there and I spend time there, it becomes much, it becomes more clipped and becomes more English, I suppose. Anyway, so yeah, we met at SPA. And this is a time of generalists. Increasingly now, the big consulting firms, BCG, Oliver Wyman, McKinsey, Bain, they form into specialty groups because you can add more value to your client. And the client candidly has more, has skills anyway. So we started, I did work with insurance companies where we got to understand actuarial economics. You know, an insurance company takes a dollar from an individual or a small business and then agrees to pay money out in these following circumstances. And during the time that the insurance company has that money, it's investing it. So it's a complex series of cash flows. And we were using net value and internal rates of return measures to figure out, you know, is this a good customer or a bad customer? And we found in insurance that it was very sensible and very much de rigueur to risk-based price. So here I am at my age driving around in an SUV with a good driving record. You've got somebody who's 22, who's driving around in their red Maserati, who has drunk driving endorsements on their license, who pays the most for car insurance. We all understand that that's okay. Now, credit cards, circa 1986, any color you like so long as it is black. It was 19%, a 19.8% APR, $20 fee. So what that meant was that some of the people who had incredibly low risk were subsidizing people in the middle and people who had higher risk couldn't get access. So, you know, we started to delve into frameworks like that that said, look, these can be revolutionary frameworks in democratizing access to and pricing according to underlying economics using net present value. That was one thing. The second thing is I started undergrad believing that I was going to be a clinical psychologist. And very quickly, I became incredibly disillusioned with Freud and Jung and even the phenomenological psychologists. And because I felt like so much of what they were talking about was more philosophy than it was psychology. And it was, you know, often made up by people living in Vienna in the 1800s who had taken a little bit too much opium. So I found myself saying, this is hocus pocus. I don't really believe in this. It's not empirically based. And I retreated into experimental method and statistics where I felt safe. And it was that experimental design background plus this annuity economics that said, you know what, in a huge business where there's large N, any variable can be experimentally tested in A-B testing environments. You just need to set up the technology and the tracking systems to be able to do that. So I'm going back 30 years now, of course. Will people respond more to a yellow envelope or a red envelope? Will they respond to a bigger envelope or a smaller one? Will they respond to the annual fee being on the front of the envelope or the annual percentage rate? Do you call somebody to collect from them in one day after their delinquent or 30 days or 60 days or 90 days? What impact does it have? All these things were inherently testable. And we did thousands and thousands of tests driven by hypothesis. And, you know, Karl Popper tells us that hypothesis is something that you test or try to disprove, actually. And that the hypothesis comes from observation and from past testing. So we became we became observers and keen scholars of consumer behavior in and around financial services. And we were, Rich and I were inflamed by this framing. And we went to the banks. We went, I won't name them all, but we went, I must have sat in front of, I don't know, 15 or so senior management of the banks and saying, look, this is the future of consumer financial services. And they said, either we're already doing it, which they weren't, and still aren't. Today, to this day, and maybe a slight caveat, Capital One is the best at this on the planet. Closest rival, Nubank. But you know what, Capital One invented this and took it to industrial scale. Either we're already doing it, which they weren't, but I've got Susan over there, who's got a PhD in stats, and Bill over there knows how to do regression analysis, so we're doing what you do. No, that was, or actually, we think it can be done, but it's really clear that you two clowns, I think they're more looking at me rather than Rich, couldn't possibly pull it off. And actually, they were quite right about, I mean, the naivete that we thought we could pull this off was quite stunning. But we were massively inflamed and passionate about this approach. And we talked to all the banks, and they all said no, but they gave, we did consulting work with them, we got better, and it became very proficient at how banking works and the economics of banking. And then a little bank in Richmond, Virginia, said, okay, come and consult and tell us how we would execute this strategy. And we said, okay, yeah, we'll do that. And then somewhere halfway through that consulting study, they said, okay, we really believe in this, we think it can work. We need you to come and be employees of the bank. Now, this was a real come to Jesus moment, Algar, because up at this point, we are, you know, swanning around in our suits, feeling very self-important, making lots of cash and building this idea. All of a sudden, somebody says, you know, we want you to come and do it and execute on it. Now, what we learned in consulting was that if your idea doesn't work, it's because your client can't execute the brilliance of your idea, not because your idea isn't any good. So we had to face up to, okay, we've been talking about doing this stuff for quite a long time. Now you're going to be accountable to pull it off. And that led me to, that brings me right back to the first question you asked about learning journeys. And that was the gap between an idea, no matter how brilliant it is, no matter how well thought through it is, and the execution of it. So the yawning, yawning gap. And we both, Rich Fairbank and I, at that point, I'd been there four years, Rich had been there a bit longer, he was older than me. And we said, okay, we're going to go and do this. And that was really terrific. And we really, I mean, then it was a whole nother journey that emerged. But, you know, it was a signet bank, it was a chap called David Hunt, who ran the card business and other businesses. And the CEO's name was Rick Dean. And I remember Rick Dean, he was a Harvard guy, a Harvard MBA. And I remember him pointing at me, and I felt, he pointed at me and said, now you make sure that you can pull this off. And I felt like his index finger was about 18 inches long when he pointed at me, I was frozen in fear. But, and we jumped into it and it was amazing. What were the early decisions that you think you got right that served the premise to the success that Capital One has been enjoying since then? Well, look, we went in there and said, okay, we need all the data that you ever have on anything. Because data is oil, you know that, and it's going to allow us to build all these models. And we found that certain parts of Signet Bank had been throwing out data tapes because it cost them $5 a month to store them. Immediately, we said, nobody's throwing anything away. That was, that was the moratorium on chucking stuff out. That was one. Two, we said, look, Signet, the people we need to execute this strategy are different to the people that you bring in as part of your normal programs to bring young talent in. The people that we need are going to be people with hard science backgrounds. They're likely to be top of their classes. And they're likely to be people who have gone to the top schools. And we will put them through a, make them run the gauntlet of, I mean, this is actually true, not apocryphal at all. The people who came to join us here went through six or eight or 10 case studies. The people that we brought in at that time were magical talent. And then Rich and I, and you know, Rich's charisma was incredible here in getting these people not to go to BCG or Goldman Sachs, to come to this little old bank called Signet Bank in Richmond, Virginia. But we got them to come and we got them to join us on the journey. So the second big thing was do not ever compromise on sheer talent. Talent is everything. And then building a culture that we had seen, we'd seen more candidly, Olga, of how not to do a culture with big banks, hierarchical, political, power oriented, not empirical. And we very quickly said, look, the culture has got to be about everybody being very comfortable speaking truth to power. We make decisions based on empirical data. Just because the voice is coming from somebody who's more junior doesn't mean that the idea is any worth. So we very, very quickly said, look, in order for us to be able to pull this off, we have to have a culture where people feel really good. comfortable, where people feel really safe and where they can, we can unleash this talent, where people who were in their early 20s were making one year into this tens of million dollar decisions. Cignet, bless their hearts, would look at that and go, that's bonkers. How long has this person been here? Well, 18 months and they're pressing buttons to make big decisions. Third one is we said, look, credit and marketing are the same thing. Many of the advanced lending platforms have now adopted that heuristic. But it comes out, so I'll give you a couple of examples. So I'm going to touch on behavioral economics in a second because it's very relevant here. But we would say, look, so two people who look exactly the same, Olga, make a decision to apply for a credit card at different times of the day. They're the same age, the same income, the same job, the same time. FICO score is exactly the same. One of them applies at midday. One of them applies at midnight. Marketing know that data. Credit people don't know that data. Credit people are in the business of building a metal detector where people come in. But one of the biggest drivers of managing credit risk is positive and adverse selection. People who make applications at midnight are desperate. People who are doing it at midday are doing it during their lunch hours when they're working. Those two people know something that you don't know, and it's embedded in the time of day. So I used to do that as an example of how you have to integrate marketing data and credit data to make integrated decisions, which meant that these very talented quantitative people that we were hiring were at the strategic fulcrum of the business, which meant that we had to tip up upside down the organizational design that was typical functional in a bank because these be these people. And if you look around financial services now, it's replete with people who came through that channel now 30 years ago. The CEO of Zopa in the UK, Jai Dave Giardana, the CEO of ClearScore in the UK is Justin Bessini. I mean, they're just two that I've been talking to over, you know, very recently. There's dozens of people who started there. I mean, the new CEO of Revolut for the US came through this system was 15 years at Capital One. So that was amazing. Now, a lot of these things that we've developed hypotheses, Olga, but what we were not good at in those very early days was behaviorally economic heuristics. We found things that worked and developed a kind of a micro hypothesis. But, you know, all the frameworks that we read in Nudge, for example, we didn't have those then. And we were over 20 years ago doing this. But we now I now look back on all these things that we found with the hindsight benefit of the IP body that is in behavioral economics and say, ah, that's why that worked. And that's why that didn't work. There were times when we bless their hearts. We had conflict situations with Cigna. No, we need to pay this person X to get them to come because they're a 4-0 average coming out of Wharton undergrad. And the bank would say, well, that's going to be twice as much as we will pay this person who's going to come and play a different role. And but we would say, look, if we're going to pull this off, we need that. And that was sine qua non. Now, having that talent, having the culture, all those things lining up is necessary, but not sufficient. A lot of luck. And there's a lot of right place, right time. And at this time, I think we were on the leading edge of doing that. I'm curious about how much of that DNA and of those decision-making processes that you got right in Capital One, you wanted to transfer to QED. And what are those? Let me take a half step back. So I left Capital One in 2004. It had been four or five years at Cignet. Take Capital One public. And I think 10 or 11 years of Capital One being public. We'd grown at, we had a compound growth rate in earnings had been 26% per year. We'd gone from, I think, a market cap of about a billion to nigh on 20 billion. We had gone from credit cards to installment loans to mortgages to home equities. We'd gone from checking accounts, deposit accounts to CDs. to wealth management products. We'd gone from the US to Canada, to the UK, to France, to Italy, to Spain, to South Africa, all in 10 years. We'd been, you know, Forbes' best place to work. It had been an amazing journey. And, you know, to think when Rich and I spun out of Signet Bank in 94, we'd never run a public company, never really faced off to regulators, never really talked to securities analysts. It was all amazing learning. But in my middle 40s, I started to wake up and say, you know, this just was not, my curiosity was not the same. And I think running something big was not satisfying, you know, the entrepreneurism and the energy and the curiosity in me. I felt kind of bad about it because this, this had been, this is my child. I love this thing. The people there were amazing. And it treated me so incredibly well. I was so blessed. But I was saying, look, I'm just not sure if I want to keep doing this all my life. I remember sitting down with one of the board members where I started to express this. And he said, Nigel, you know, we all kind of go through this, you know, you should get yourself that red sports car. And, you know, maybe you need to spend a bit more time in, you know, places like New York or London. I, you're going through, this is a midlife crisis you're going through early perhaps, but going through it. But I was changing and, and Capital One was changing. And I saw the growth late slowing. I saw this is a big company happening in real time. And I used to say to culturally, I was the, you know, to the extent I was a beacon carrier for the culture. I would say, look, I want to get the best of bigness and the best of smallness. I want bigness. I want scale. I want brand. I want great, you know, a market power. But I also want energy and entrepreneurism and verve and ingenuity and agility. And you know what? People will tell you, you can only have one or the other. Small companies have that. Big companies have this. I say, look, I know there's this thing called gravity and gravity will make us bigger and slower and more political and hierarchical with each passing day, unless we all get up every day and fight back against it. And that's what we have to do. And I think I very much wanted to champion that. But there's an inevitability about big companies getting big and spitting off talent. And so I went back to the UK, back to London. I put my four wonderful kiddies into the American school in North London. Great for them, by the way. Their exposure was very different than it was in Northern Virginia. And I joined the board of the Economist, Brookings, the think tank, National Geographic, because I really believed in what they were doing, and London Business School. Who had treated me so well. And a behavioral economic think tank called Ideas 42. If you know the Douglas books, the Deep Thought is asked, what's the meaning of life? And after it's gone away for generations, it comes back and says the answer is 42. That was Ideas 42. I had a blast doing it because I'd been very narrow and very, very focused during the Signet days and the Capital One days, what's that, 15 years to get to that point. Interesting. We talk about that 12, 15-year time frame it takes to build a Revolut or a Klarna. And I said, but this is not satisfying. I'm not ready yet to be a pluralist and to sit on boards and pontificate. I still want to do stuff. So I came back and we found that we were getting inbound from refugees of Capital One who had ideas. And they were coming to us as like a watering hole on the way and saying, look, we've got this idea. What about this? And what about that? And all we were doing was applying a Capital One framework, heuristics, risk-based pricing, test your way into this. What's positive selection? What's not? What data sets can you use? How do the paybacks look or net present value numbers? You know, what is really the consumer proposition? How do you know? So all those analytical frameworks came out and Caribou had been instrumental in bringing Capital One into the internet age then. And he was amazing. And then Frank Rotman, who he and I had grown up together, you know, Frank is one of the most naturally talented people on the planet. And, you know, his analytical and strategic skills were fantastic. So the three of us were kind of dangerous together and people would come and present ideas. And very quickly, we found Nubank. And we found Remitly. And we found Credit Karma. And we found Flywire. And we found Avid Exchange. All within a few year period. And we didn't know that they were going to. I mean, there was a lot that we've also found that weren't necessarily in the blockbuster class. But we started to look at those companies and we looked at their traction. And it really started to be clear that this thing called fintech was real and that we might actually be half good at it. Partly because we were maybe the only game in town as a fintech specialist. But our deep operating experience and background was incredibly invaluable. And I'm not taking anything away from people who are wonderful venture capitalists who went to really great schools and then did venture all their life. But their touch and perspective on tactical issues as well as strategic issues is clouded or informed by the experience that they've had. And if you've never built a business out of the ground, it's not that easy often to give advice about the trade-offs that exist. And one of these, I always say, I call it the ghostbuster effect, Olga. And it's when. It's who you're going to call. Okay. So CEOs are great at telling you, hey, they just hit their numbers. They beat February numbers. ARR is up. They just signed a great contract with blah, blah, blah. But when they're in a pickle and they don't know what to do, who do they call? And I think that we found that they would call us because of our experience and because we could be uniquely tactically helpful. And we had an enormous diaspora of ex-Capital One people that were in Northern Virginia now multiplied many times over because we've made over 200 investments now in 20 years. You know, I think our Rolodex is incredible in the reach that we have of talented people in oh so many functional areas. So back to your question. Yeah, we were very intentional about the people that we brought into QED and the talent that they had and looking for them, the unique roles that they could play. And we adopted the frameworks from our operating days in the way we judged companies that were coming our way. I want to touch on this operator's DNA. Let's call it the full 90 minutes philosophy. You mentioned in one of your prior interviews that venture in QED is not just about stock picking, that you're playing the full 90 minutes. So I'm curious about what does that mean in terms of the kinds of founders and teams that you want to partner with and who tends to be attracted by that type of investor. Those listeners who are not soccer or football fans, 90 minutes is the time that a football game is. 45 minutes and then 45 minutes and then a bit of extra time made up from people rolling around on the floor pretending that they're hurt usually. And that's usually four or five minutes. I'm not going to pick on any particular team unless you ask me. But there are some teams that are particularly. I suck at soccer. So don't expect that question. OK, I'm not going to say anything now. So the idea was because we found this very early on in our investment experience that you make an investment in a company. And look, there's a oh crap moment that you get more than you should where you've done the diligence. You've loved the company. You've given them a term sheet. You've invested and you have the first or second board meeting and you go, oh, my, that's not what I thought was going to happen. And you've missed your numbers by a mile. And I thought you were going to do this. I thought you were going to do that. And that didn't happen. And we would see this quite often. And what the operator in me and in Frank and Caribou was now we're going to lean in because you said you were going to do that. We're going to now figure out how to do that. And we found that our VC friends pulled back. So you thought you were getting partner X on your on your board and he might still or she might still be on that board. But the person turning up at your next board meeting is two years out of MBA. So we saw that. That's the best sign, right, of how much conviction your investors have around your company. Look, behavioral scoring is much more powerful than credit scoring. The way a company behaves is more important than the a priori diligence data that you get. So I said, look, one, we're operators and we can help. And two, these things happen. And three, if we say we're going to work with you intimately, helping you with these incredibly difficult forks in the road, we're going to give it our best. Now, it's much easier to turn a 5X into a 6X than it is to turn a 0X into a 1X. And I found it really quite difficult in the early days. If I've got half a dozen people working for me and I'm running a big company, where do I spend my time? Do I spend it with the people that are doing really well and killing their numbers? Or do I spend it with the problem child? You tend to send it with the problem child. So my natural reflex was to lean into the problems and try to turn that, you know, a lower number into an OK number rather than putting petrol, gasoline on the fire. So I have to stop myself still from doing that because my natural instincts are more operator oriented. But so the full 90 minutes says we're going to give it our best show. We're going to commit. I'm gonna give you access to all the experience and resources that we can and we're going to be there with you and for you and that's what's the full 90 minutes now is it the right thing to do absolutely does it change the outcome yes it does there's no doubt in my mind that this is back to you this is not stock picking hey here's some money good luck i think you've got a great business let me know when you bring be back a lot more money please this you know i call it the point nine to the power six issue where you've got to get so many things to work and line up and often you've got it half my age twice as clever entrepreneur who doesn't know she doesn't know what she doesn't know and she's doing her very best but the road to success is really precarious and most don't make it and if we can bend those odds a little bit that's really important i think there's a story somebody told me once i don't i kind of like this analogy is that you know houdini apparently was an incredible athlete and had enormous core strength doing all those sit-ups probably but i think he died when somebody punched him in the tummy when he wasn't tensed what does that mean it means that often the value that i think we can bring to a young entrepreneur is watch out for this there's a monster around that corner because i faced that monster i may have been bitten by that monster you don't know that monster exists but watch out for that often around regulatory issues actually but the thing is about um about what we have to do as a as a specialist i'm i'm so passionate that generalists have enormous value to add as do specialists generalists can help you with you know build the culture how to do a fundraise when should you ipo you know um how to how to scale often have huge recruiting apparatus they can bring to bear fintech is really hard because there are a whole series of complicated niche verticals that you have to understand pockets of ip fraud management get that wrong particularly in developing countries or going into new areas credit risk any fool can lend money challenge is getting people to pay you back okay three aml and kyc really complicated really difficult ties to fraud get that wrong regulators will um will shut you down asset liability management i've got deposits or i've got money coming in and i'm lending money out how do i manage that that would be with assets and liabilities that would be with fx how do i treasury management incredibly complicated making sense of a really it's certainly in the united states but around the world a complicated tapestry of regulatory overlaps i've just come from a board meeting where we were talking about the difference between the regulatory climate in the united states now versus 12 months ago it is stunningly different to a point where if you'd have said to me a year ago where there's going to be 20 odd companies applying for banking licenses now with the occ i'd have said yeah they might apply but then no none of them are ever going to get a license and they will so the the um relaxation which i think is really great from a competitive standpoint by and large is enormous so that i say all a generalist will be mindful of those things but will not have lived within them and people like qed you know it's full of people that have spent their whole lives living in those complicated and often trade-off environment when you first met david velez from new bank you mentioned already you met him like super early in the cycle of qed what were the key insights that made you believe that new bank could become a breakout company and i believe you did not have investments in brazil until new bank this was between capital one and qed i don't think i'm not sure if qed had actually started at this point and i was um a special advisor with general atlantic david i was a um an associate there this is before he went to stanford it's before he met doug leone and and those fantastic people at sequoia and we went to look at they asked me to go to mexico city and we were sitting in what i can't remember the name of the hotel but it's one of that fantastic courtyard with a fountain in the middle it's in mexico city and we're having breakfast and we were looking at an entity called compotamos which was a community lender i think developed by the catholic church originally and he said to me he said nigel um i think there's an opportunity to build a capital one in brazil i went yeah he said will you help me and i said i don't know that i don't know okay i don't really don't i've never been to brazil before the only thing i know about brazil is you always seem to beat england at football and uh yeah and i'm really focused on what i'm going to do next i don't know what we did next but it's probably doesn't include brazil and he said um i'm probably i'm sure i'm making half of this up but he said um he said no please because i think capital one model is amazing and the opportunity in brazil is stunning if i come to your offices if i come and meet you in northern will you teach me how capital one does it and i said yeah of course i mean you're a lovely young man incredibly smart incredibly focused of course come do that so uh frank and i spent a lot of time with him laying out in a molecular way how capital one does what it does and he hasn't done anything yet except talk me into helping him but what he did what you started to see very quickly was how he was able to take that an amazing listener actually and i saw him in board meetings afterwards he may be the smartest guy in the room but you would never know it fantastic listener very very perceptive and then incredibly decisive so i saw him just being a sponge and absorbing it and as he started to play out well that will work in brazil this way and here's the brazil here's the landscape in brazil at some point he gave us some warrants to help him those warrants actually gold dust and um and we invested and then myself and frank and then bill salufo who joined another a capital one veteran bill actually this is something we do uh he uh chaired the credit risk committee at new bank for the longest time so we all got involved here as we saw this uh juggernaut emerging and uh we just saw the passion that he had the energy he had he adopted very quickly or already had in him some of the same critical features around talent i mean new bank is chock full of amazing talent and he took he took the capital one model and not only tailored it to brazil but he took it to another level in that it was mobile first it didn't start with i'm going to build call centers he said i'm going to originate digitally and i'm going to service digitally and if you look at his cost to serve an account per year it's de minimis relative to wells fargo or jp morgan and he built that incredibly intentionally and in an incredibly relentless way and if you spend time with debbie velez you wouldn't know that he had created a company that's worth you know what is it now 100 billion dollars the most valuable digital bank 140 million customers has a relationship with over 50 percent of every household in brazil is in mexico is in colombia and just got a u.s banking license so that was my next question for you it's very rare to see light american fintech leader that also does you like you said became one of the most valuable digital banks in the world turns around and tries to enter us and we've seen some banks and some players from latam doing that and not very successfully from your perspective what are the strengths that new bank brings into that expansion and where do you see the biggest challenges for them now i'm writing a thought piece at the moment i'll preview it which said on and around and around and after the financial crisis banks around the world financial institutions around the world pulled back from globalization hsbc barclays city bank um it would be obvious examples even chase and they pull back to their home countries even capital one capital one's not in south africa italy france spain anymore still in the uk and canada but what we're seeing now is a renaissance of fintechs that have been built outside of the u.s that have superb comparative advantage who have now conquered their home geo who are now saying audaciously you know what the biggest prize is not sweden or germany if you're it's not the uk if you're monzo or revolute and it's not brazil if you're new bank it's the u.s how do we think about that because how many multiples of tam points is the u.s over brazil 10 20 i don't know huge comparatively right now but it's also incredibly sophisticated and competitive and massively competitive now one window that's opening is the the regulatory climate is now enabling an entity like revolute or planner and new bank monzo to take a crack now the people who've tried it in the past i'm thinking n26 yeah but but I don't know if they really had conquered their home market before they tried to do this. I think it was too premature. And that's something that, by the way, half a step back. This is what emerging companies do this all the time. They attempt to take on the next geography before they take on the second product. But many of them get intoxicated by the idea of going to a new geo, and often it doesn't work. Frank Rotman always used to put that in the science experiment, ends up losing money, and you have to shut it down. So how do you think about that? Well, buy now, pay later, consumer lending and checking accounts, even some of the money movement is nascent. It's not open field anymore. At the top end of the credit card business, you've got Amex and Capital One and J.P. Morgan, fantastic in super prime. You've got a prime business that's very powerful and well-advanced. And then at the lower end, in the near prime, subprime space, again, you've got Capital One who are supreme, and then a whole bunch of smaller entities. So where do you go? It's not at all easy. Now, what do you have on your side? Well, one, although you love to do things de novo, there are lots of little things that you could cobble together that are culturally not dissimilar, that will struggle in these days of funding austerity. Sidebar, if you are trying to go to market today and looking for growth equity, and you don't start with my business is stablecoin or native AI, it's going to be really hard. So this market is intoxicated now by AI startups, and that's where all the money is, and everybody wants to create, to be part of, you know, Anthropic and others. So I think there's a certain faddishness and cycle about that that we're in the middle of at the moment. I believe, and I have to believe this, Olga, and maybe I'm being delusional. I've been accused of it in the past, is that I believe in the end it's about fundamental, and I believe in the long run, markets are efficient. And in the end, companies that really solve a problem, that have great unit economics, that are managed by sensible people that know how to grow things, they will get paid for those businesses. And if your business is all hot air, yes, you might get a markup between C and A, and a B, somebody comes in and gives you a load of money, and then the C round, we're not so sure, and then you'll fizzle out. I've got companies now that got funded at the APEC, APEC Maximus in 2021, where people paid 20 times revenue for these companies. And in that period of time, four, five years, they've grown by 5, 8x, and they're still valued today at less than. They were valued at in 21. The hangover from those periods of excess is dramatic. And the impact on culture and people, and look, I've got a big pile of options in 21. They're not worth anything today, or maybe just starting to get into the money. I've had to work for five years to get them back in the money. We've had to reprice the options. We've had to deal with all that tumult. So anyway, I think it's really challenging for them that they can buy their way in and cobble together. Most of them are not good at buying. If I think of those three or four big companies, none of them are good at buying. One of the things I always say to my companies is, look, before you get too big, go try buying things and mess it up and learn. Build the muscle to how to do diligence, how to integrate, how to negotiate, how to put the cultures together, and do it when it doesn't matter. When you're running around with 500 million of revenue and you buy something that's for 200 of revenue, if you get it wrong, it matters. When you are 60 million of revenue, buy something for 600,000, it doesn't matter. Build that muscle early, because just having M&A as a growth vector is really important. I say this all the time to my banking friends. I call it the Galapagos effect. So the Galapagos is this. If I'm a bank, what am I good at? I'm good at not messing up. I don't make mistakes. My company, my bank goes at 3%, 5% a year, and I manage the diversification. I'm good. I'm conservative on credit risk. If you listen to bank earnings calls, they start with how much equity they've got. Okay, I've got lots of equity, i.e. I'm very safe. What they're bad at, by and large, is innovation. Tell me about a large bank that's innovated anything substantial in the last decade, 20 years. Now back to Galapagos. What you've got going on in front of you is you've got the Galapagos Island. You're Charles Darwin. And you've got all of these organisms fighting to reproduce, being funded by people like QED and Nigel Morris. And they're attempting to reproduce. They're attempting to grow. Why wouldn't that be your outsourced R&D energy? Why wouldn't you be not only watching, but videoing? Why wouldn't you be partnering? Why wouldn't you be learning from? Why wouldn't you be figuring out how to selectively buy these organizations and learn how to build on that? Your skill is your scale and your conservatism. And here in front of you, you have ingenuity in real life. And it seems so obvious to me that that's what you should do. But candidly, the reason why there is a Capital One and there's a new bank is that the incumbents don't think that way. And they're too busy figuring out, now the regulators will let me buy versions of myself and I can smoosh them together and get bigger. Or I can reduce 2% or 3% in my cost structure using dabbling with AI, and that will be enough. They don't have the vision or the passion to do that. And it's a different culture. You know, there's a whole ecosystem that is venture, is antithetical to banking culture. And how do I put my tentacles? And then, of course, I often say that when a fintech target for a bank is small, your legal department will tell you that it's not industrial strength, KYC, AML. And by the time it's big enough and it's proven itself, your CFO will tell you that you can't afford to do it because of dilution. So maybe there's only a sweet spot around $300 million or $400 million when it can make sense. But we've not seen banks engage in buying fintechs. We've seen Capital One make a very, very striking move with Brex, very audacious, makes, I think, terrific sense. On top of what I think is the crowning glory of Rich Fairbanks' leadership there is the Discover acquisition, which is terrific again. But these are the exceptions rather than the rules. And, you know, somebody once said to me that J.P. Morgan and Capital One are playing chess while the rest of the banks are playing checkers. I think that there's something in that. So the clarion call for these other banks is, look, I think you're in the Galapagos Islands, guys, and there's so much opportunity here. So let's now bring that way back to these overseas companies that have conquered their home markets. You know, they too should be thinking about more than de novo. But their natural reflex will be to build it themselves because they will fear they won't be able to get the talent and the processes. I think that those worries are often overstated. If NewBank were to succeed with that expansion, what are the two, three things that they have to get like really, really right in such a complex market like you asked? There are things that they already know how to do. They know how to, the cost structure is superb. It's all digital. And they'll get better and better at it. They are data junkies. Yeah. So they collect all the data and they've learned how to leverage it with alacrity. Absolutely. They offer customer propositions that are wonderful. Their net promoter scores, they disclose some of them, are in the 80s. It's not lost on us that most financial institutions don't disclose their net promoter score. Why is that, you wonder? Well, is it because they don't collect it, which is really bad? Is it that they do collect it, but they don't like it? So I think the banks have got better, largely as a result of the pressure and competition from fintech. But still, you know, they have wonderful customer propositions. They start, so many banks, so many incumbents start with, I've got lots of products and I've got branches. How do I get you to go into the branch so I can sell you stuff? Nobody wants to do that anymore. I'm being facetious, of course. New bank starts with, what's the problem? And how can I, using my technology and my capability, engineer products that are going to hit those sweet spots in terms of product and satisfy and have customers fall in love with me? And that's not easy to do, but it's that same passion that we saw in little old, you know, 24-year-old David Velez's eyes sitting in that courtyard in Mexico City over 20 years ago. It's so interesting, but it feels like ever since then, that first deal, right? New bank, you have built such a massively impressive portfolio in Latin America. Quintandar, Creditas, BITSO, both Brazil, Mexico. I'm curious, when you look at Latin America today versus when you first arrived to Brazil and learned the biotech ecosystem there, what has changed the most and what are the most important changes that happened to the region? I think that there's a belief that things can change. In the early days of Nubank, the incumbents did not believe that a new bank could be built. Citibank and Chase did not believe that Capital One was a threat until it was too late. They didn't believe, you know, Richard and Nigel are going to build something that's going to compete with us. Amex, no chance. No, I think that it's the new banks of this world that point to it can be done. And young, energetic entrepreneurs with the right venture support can, from small, you know, small acorns, giant oak trees can be built. That belief is existing. And then, as you said, Creditas and Confio and Kavak and Bitso and companies now that are more recent, Plazo. And these are companies that are fueled by people who are incredibly passionate, grew up in Latin America, often, you know, went to the top engineering schools, undergrad. Ironically, they all seem to go to Stanford and do their MBAs. And then they work at Goldman or they go to McKinsey. And then they come back and they have that perspective. And I think that what's changed is the belief. Now, there's also money coming in and the, you know, new bank is throwing off talent, you know. A dear friend, the Capital One fellow, the only Moroccan I've ever known in fintech is Yusuf Laresh, right? He came out of Capital One, did an amazing job there, and then went to New Bank and now is doing some other things. Capital One's threw off a huge diaspora of talent. New Bank will do the same thing and they will start things. And I think it's wonderful for, I mean, there's so much friction. There's so many economic rents. The incumbents are so vulnerable. Yeah. There's so much opportunity. One of the criticisms we often hear about venture capital in Latin America is, you know, currency volatility and macro and, more importantly, limited exit markets. Yeah. Makes it difficult to generate this type of new bank, venture scale returns. How would you respond to that argument? It's true. Currencies are volatile. Actually, interestingly, they've been volatile in the right way in the last year with the U.S. But, yeah, I think you have to go in with your eyes wide open that it's not the same as the U.S. or the U.K. You do, you can make an argument that in certain places at certain times, the regulatory climate can actually be more benign. I mean, look how forward-looking the Brazilian regulator has been or the Indian regulator around UPI. So I think that there are swings and roundabouts. Labor costs are cheaper. That helps. The incumbents, I think, by and large, are weaker. That helps. But, yeah, it's all part of an integrated trade-off, set of trade-offs. Once you get to product market fit in LATAM, then it's about putting your foot on the accelerator pedal. Where there is a vulnerability is the lack of growth capital. Yeah. Not so much on the venture side. And I think what we need is, you know, when I talk to my PE friends, I say, you know, how are you thinking about this? It's not clear to me why they are reticent. I think there's a sense of fragility in general. And I think there's a petrification with a lot of private equity at the moment. And they're looking for reasons not to do things because they're nervous. I mean, these last few years have been incredibly volatile. And I call it the EKG effect. Everything's kind of going up and down and up and down from, you know, from COVID. And then Putin invades and supply chain disruption and interest rates come way down. And then they go way up. And there's whipsawing that's been going on. To be an entrepreneur in fintech over these last five years is incredibly challenging. And now with the wave of the generative AI, right, that many fintech startups are, you can see that they're built really differently today compared to even before COVID. And I'm curious, how has that changed the way you evaluate companies or what has been the biggest shift for you as an investor in terms of what makes a fintech company interesting and investable right now, both in the region and globally? We're seeing AI being deployed at scale in two or three areas now, almost without exception across our active portfolios, 140 companies. They're all deploying AI to some extent. And they will be the first adopters. Back to in the Galapagos Islands, you know, you're struggling to reproduce. So you're the first mover. You're the most agile. What are they doing? Well, writing code. You know, before COVID, if you came out of Harvey Mudd or Caltech or Carnegie Mellon, you were a great engineer, you could demand enormous salaries. Obama once said, I think everybody should go and do computer science. With AI, with Claude, the machines are writing 60, 70, 80, 90% of the code. That's really changed. That is a massive productivity boost. Two, anything call center, any manual process that's repeatable is going away. I had this conversation with one of my team the other day. I think of the last eight investments that we've made, six or so of them have been around particular tools that are in vertical SaaS supporting fintech. So what would be an example? A company called Laurie Keat that basically allows call centers to be digitalized and move to smart AI chat and then builds layers of decision algorithms on top of it. I think there's a real revolution going on. We're going to see costs come down. That's the second area. The third area, I think, is more about businesses that are yet to be created. In the Capital One days, we used to say, and I think I was telling Fibs when I said this, that we offered the right product to the right customer at the right time at the right price. And we were doing that in a world of clunky batch of sending out direct mail. So we weren't really targeting at the N equals one stage. Now, I can collect all this data and I can build a script that's massively tailored, empirically driven to derive the objective function that I want. If I want to get you to respond, I can come up with a message that's perfectly designed to maximally make that happen. That we could never do in days of old. That's now a reality. And what we're going to see is that, well, they increasingly see the more advanced, sophisticated platforms, technologically, starting to unleash these agentic AI. And my favorite one to think about is that I was with a regional banker analyst the other day, and he told me that 40% of regional bank profitability is coming from lazy money, is what he called it. That's where I pay you 30 basis points or nothing, and that money's worth 400 basis points to me. 370 basis points for doing nothing. In a world of more open banking, in a world of agentic AI, in a world where I don't really love my bank, I might be stuck to my bank. Back to, you know, Amaya Scarity on my team always says that bankers confuse loyalty with inertia. Yeah. Well, as that inertia drops, and as I'm dealing with largely a commodity product, I'm not going to switch from bank A to bank B today for 10 bucks a month. But if the robot will do it for me, and there's no downside, why won't I do that? I'll do it right away. So I think we're on the verge of a tsunami of agentic AI attacking that 40%. And I think that there's going to be a huge wake-up call for regional banks who historically have not developed any comparative advantage. And who's going to go after those deposits? Revolut. New Bank. Klarna and New Bank. Who can do it with national charters and will engage these tools state-of-the-art. On that note, we're going to move to the rapid fire because I promised your team to let you go out of here on time. Okay. I'll ask you five short questions and I'll appreciate your immediate responses. I hope they're easy ones. The first question is, what's one question founders should ask VCs but almost never do? I mean, what would be on my mind as a founder is, am I going to get the partner that I've worked with? People ask me, well, should I sign up Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan or Morgan Stanley? I say, you sign up the partner that you like. Should I work with Egon Zender or Spencer Stewart or Russ Reynolds? Sign up the partner that you want to work with. They're not all the same, but the difference between a good partner and a bad partner is bigger than the difference between the firms. So find a person that you really resonate with, that's going to add value with you, that's going to play the full 90 minutes, and then make sure that he or she is going to be there. So ask them, are you okay here? Are you going to stay? Are you thinking about leaving? Are you going to retire? It's okay to ask that and be forward about it. They should ask you that question. I ask my entrepreneurs all the time. If your company ended up being worth $100 million and you owned 19% of it, would you sell? We've had a number of situations, it breaks my heart, where I think people have sold two, three years too early. They were doubling. But the risk aversion in some people says, look, I'm going to take the money off the table because I know I can buy my house. I can keep my spouse happy. I can put the kids through private school. I can, you know. It's probably even more so in the emerging markets. Yeah. So I think really, for me, it's about the human being and being sure that you're going to get the support you want. Question number two, what is something founders consistently underestimate when building a company in emerging markets? My first reaction is that the efficient theory people are from Chicago schools. would say that if you can return above the economic cost of capital, then there'll be money there for you. I think that it's more capricious than that in the more developing the country is. I'll give you an example. We have made several investments with Benga on my team in Africa. And we've made investment in a company called Money Point. I know a bunch of companies, a really well-run, great company. But you talk to, you say, I've got this company, it's a lending company and it's in Nigeria. And you say that and it's very hard to get any private equity people to even take your phone call because they have a viewpoint that's not grounded in empirics and it's not open-minded, but it is what it is. And until we get a new bank in Nigeria, until we get a blockbuster in Uganda, that's going to be the case. New Bank did more than just create this juggernaut. It made Brazil investable. What has been the highest ROI investment of your time in the last 12 months and how do you measure it? I went along through a dear friend of mine called Don Berman. Don Berman built Merrick Bank, a great friend of mine. And he said, Nigel, I know you think you look after yourself physically, but you should go and do this one day full-on testing of your body. And you go along and they do an MRI of your brain. They put you in a big tube that makes a lot of noise for 40 minutes. They do an AI evaluation of your skin. I grew up in Wales and in England, so I never really saw the sun. So I'm not going to die. I know that that's not going to kill me. And they do this incredibly sophisticated blood workup on 200 variables. And then they do some analysis of probabilities of what I would have a propensity to make me sick down the road. And I found that really, really valuable. And my exercise and the nutrients I put in my body are designed to help me stick around for longer. I have five wonderful grandchildren. I want to see them grow up to be adults and I want to be able to see their children. So to me, promoting, it's not so much living longer, it's living better for longer. So that's probably the highest ROI that I had in the last 12 months. What's one habit or system that most improved your decision-making as an investor? Unit economic. Hands down. You know, companies, to get to vertical profitability, which is the way the world looks at everything, you know, what's your ARR? What are your costs? You know, let's get down to an EBITDA. Let's deal with taxes, blah, blah, blah. The only way you build a business is by doing it one customer at a time. Cost me this amount to get a customer. Customer has these predictable, to at least some extent, cash flows. And then I can discount them back and I can get an MPV per customer. And if I have enough layering of horizontal economics, I can build vertical economics. And I think that, you know, one thing that we learned at Capital One, we were fanatical about it, and I'm fanatical about it at QED, is the only way you build a business one customer at a time, and it's a cumulative addition of horizontal economics. What is the most underrated or under-the-radar tech company in Latin America today? Two that I've spent time with recently is Felix Pago, which is using stable coins to move money and growing massively by a couple of fantastic young entrepreneurs. Or Plazo, which is doing an amazing job of buy now, pay later in Mexico. We didn't touch on that, we'll do round two, but it's incredible to see how different the skill set and the strategy of companies that are successful in Brazil versus Mexico. And Plazo is one of those great examples of how can you succeed without having this massive regulatory tail wings like Brazil's enjoying. Nigel, thank you so much for your time. I would spend another hour here with you, and I'm hoping that we will do round two. Thank you for being here today. It's a pleasure.