While João Vitor Menin, CEO of the digital bank Inter&Co is dedicated to his family—two daughters and son—he also holds a deep love for his job.
“Some days I spend more of my time with the bank than with the family, which I’m not proud of, but that’s the reality,” he says. “I consider it my fourth kid.”
Menin’s role as CEO includes expanding the innovation of Inter&Co, Brazil’s leading financial platform, which offers an expansive range of services within one digital ecosystem—a hub for users to access full banking capabilities, including investments, credit insurance, cash-back rewards, and cross-border solutions. This month, Menin was announced as the recipient of the BRAVO Innovative CEO of the Year Award for his visionary leadership in revolutionizing digital banking in Brazil and driving its strategic expansion to the U.S. market.
Key for Menin is that the company creates a thriving marketplace that invites collaboration between top global retailers along with opportunities to expand further in the future.
Menin outside of Inter&Co’s headquarters
GROWING UP IN A BIG BUSINESS FAMILY
Menin recalls big family gatherings growing up with conversations about sports, kids, and a lot about business.
“We were always talking about what we could learn from each of the businesses,” he says, referring to the companies co-founded by his father, Rubens Menin Teixeira de Souza, including MRV, the largest Brazilian home builder and real estate company, and Banco Inter, the Brazilian bank which led to the creation of Inter&Co.
“I learned a lot in terms of what we should do in order to access the capital markets—how we should treat our shareholders, how we should manage the company in order to become a listed company—with this exchange of ideas throughout board meetings, family gatherings,” Menin says.
Inside the Inter&Co lounge
CHOOSING A FINANCE PATH—AND THRIVING
While Menin is happy with his career choice, the path wasn’t always clear to the former engineer.
Before graduating with a civil engineering degree in 2005 from FUMEC, a private nonprofit Brazilian university in Belo Horizonte, Menin was preparing to join his father at MRV.
However, he decided to join Inter, named Intermedium at the time, in 2004 to follow his passions.
“‘I like finance. I like the banking business. I want to go there,’” Menin recalls thinking. “It was a tough decision at the moment, but I made it.”
Although Menin noticed that Banco Inter was small and growth was at a standstill, he was enthusiastic about the potential of the company and served as a member of its Board of Directors from 2005 to 2019.
“It was just like a community bank that serves friends and family,” he says, noting that it was a traditional bank with only one branch before he later implemented digital banking for the company.
His results at Inter were eventually rewarded in 2008 when he became COO; he moved up to CEO in 2015.
“After I stepped in as CEO, the company changed a lot,” he says, “the scope, the growth, the KPIs, the teams.”
Menin didn’t decide to add digital banking overnight. He first began pondering the idea while at Inter in 2008 and 2009 when Wall Street was in trouble due to the United States market crash.
Menin noticed that the big banks were at a strategic advantage because they held the savings of 300 million Americans, meaning they had a wealth of deposits from their clients, solidifying their clientele.
“They have their relationship with millions and millions of customers. This is the power that retail gives you,” he says. “I thought, I’m going to launch a retail bank from scratch.”
Digital banking was the clear direction, as he knew that most people owned smartphones, giving the company a vast market.
From 2009 and 2010, he learned more about the advantages of democratized digital banking. By the end of 2015, it was finally time to launch the company’s digital retail initiative. ”Things were not happening fast, but we were building our foundation,” he says.
Inter&Co Lounge inauguration with Commissioner Bakari Burns, BR Ambassador João Lucas Quental, CEO Joao Vitor Menin, and Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer
EXPANDING TO THE UNITED STATES
In 2020, Menin had in mind that the business would expand to more markets.
“Brazilians have a very good connection with the U.S., and we saw a lot of good things about doing business in America, the stability of the country, the culture,” he says.
However, it was easier said than done as he twice tried to purchase a small bank in the U.S. to no avail.
Finally, in 2021, Inter&Co bought a remittance company called Usend, which focused on currency transfers for more than 60 countries in the world.
“I was interested because in the U.S., at the end of the day, they are the heart of the financial market,” Menin says. “You have money coming in and out, like a heart, pumping in and out every single day and the fact that we bought a remittance company that specialized in doing this type of transaction, money going in and out, it’s something that helped us further build our foundation.”
In 2019, Menin began pursuing an app that would allow the user to transfer and withdraw funds, make bill payments, and many other functions, becoming a precursor of the superapp concept.
“I was thinking, everything that we do in life, almost everything, relies on banking. So, we need to pay for everything for your travel, for your lodging, for your car, for your food,” he says ”If you can combine these other features inside a bank app, you’re going to have something different—you’re going to have a super app.”
It became clear to him that focusing on the United States and Brazil alone would limit Inter&Co, so he set his sights on a global reach.
He envisioned the app bolstering cross-border business with the ability to reach millions of people that travel internationally.
The company began by launching Intershop in 2019, which enables large retailers to put their inventory in the app though a single account.
The app started as an affiliate, which meant that it relied on a marketing network to connect it with retailers. Being an affiliate involved a “middleman” and limited the company’s direct connection with clients. However, it evolved into an integrated API (application programming interface) that allowed Inter to sell products directly from the source and offer clients the ease of choosing the product and the in-app payment option, then receive the product in a day or so.
Inter launched its own MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) and cellular data plan.
“It’s operated by a carrier but, we managed everything on the front end, payment and the number and the contact with the client,” Menin explained.
The Inter&Co Stadium
SECURING A SUCCESSFUL FUTURE
As the financial super app’s development continued, Inter added more and more to bolster its vision: an insurance platform, an FX platform for currency exchange, as well as a loyalty program called Loop that allows over 6 million customers to earn points to exchange for goods.
He also plans to add more financial services that offer more connectivity to its millions of users.
Today, Inter has more than 32 million Brazilian clients, nearly 3 million of them taking advantage of the global account when traveling to other countries.
The company opened the first Inter&Co Lounge in Orlando, Florida, and acquired naming rights for Orlando’s Major League Soccer venue, now called Inter&Co Stadium.
“I would say that Florida is a natural habitat for Latin Americans, not only for the clients, but for the entrepreneurs,” Menin says. “Close, similar weather, good time zone.”
His understanding of the Latino community in Florida makes it the best place for the company to expand first, but for the CEO, it’s just the beginning.
“We just want to have this first spark in order to start growing beyond borders,” he says.
