Vitor Olivier spent years building the infrastructure behind Nubank, the Brazilian digital bank that gave roughly 100 million people a cheaper, simpler way to handle everyday transactions. Now he is going after the part of financial life that mobile banking’s first wave never touched: investment advice.
His new company, Decade, recently emerged from stealth with an $85 million seed round, the largest ever raised by a Latin American startup. Its AI-driven advisory platform aims to make investing as simple as banking already became.
Everyone inherits the job of managing their own money, Olivier, Decade’s CEO and co-founder, said in a conversation with Karen Webster, CEO of PYMNTS. “Managing money is a second job,” he said. Decade is betting that AI, paired with a flat fee, can finally take that job off people’s hands.
An app alone won’t get there, Olivier argued. “A lot of financial services require deep expertise, relationships, trust, long-term thinking, planning,” he said. “These are not good things that you can just do by yourself with an app.”
Decade’s Bet Against Commission-Based Advice
Demand for that help is clear in Brazil. Roughly 70% of Brazilians who invest say they need another person to help them decide how, and only about half the population invests at all. Yet access, Olivier argues, was never really the barrier.
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The bigger problem is how advisors get paid. Brazil’s investment advisory business still runs largely on commissions, so an advisor’s income depends on what they sell rather than what fits the client. “You’re likely more incentivized to push products with higher fees, not necessarily the product that’s appropriate for you,” he said. Decade charges a flat subscription of roughly $40 a month instead. Without commissions, the incentive to upsell goes away.
For that fee, customers get a platform that connects to their full financial life through Brazil’s open banking APIs. It consolidates spending and investments, flags high-fee products or tax inefficiencies and offers on-demand access to a human advisor for bigger decisions. Olivier said Decade will start as a second opinion rather than try to replace advisors outright. Over time, he hopes it earns enough trust to become a customer’s primary one.
AI Unlocked What Failed a Year Ago
None of this worked when Olivier first tried it. He left Nubank roughly a year ago with a working thesis, built a first prototype and hit a wall. The models of the time weren’t reliable enough at planning, math or following multi-step instructions.
That changed when the agentic era arrived, he said, pointing to Anthropic’s release of Claude Opus 4.5 late last year. “That’s exactly the capabilities that you need to be able to have the product that we’re building.” Until then, automated advice had to be rigid: a handful of preset portfolios built for a hypothetical investor who doesn’t really exist. “Humans are complex and difficult, and your financial life is a reflection of your life,” he said. “AI gives you that flexibility that deterministic software couldn’t give you.”
The same shift lets Decade keep human advisors in the loop without the usual cost structure. A high-quality AI layer now handles most routine questions, Olivier said, so only a small share of cases, in the low single digits by his estimate, ever reach a person. He pointed to his time running customer service at Nubank as a preview of that leverage: it served the same customer base with a fraction of a legacy bank’s headcount, even before AI.
Early results suggest customers are listening. The company says Decade’s usage data backs up the pitch. It actively steers people away from assets it flags as too costly or risky. Before using Decade, a customer has roughly a 20% chance of holding a flagged position. Afterward, that drops to about 2%. Olivier said that shows customers are acting on recommendations, not just reading them.
Brazil has seen this arc before. A decade ago, Olivier noted, a bank transfer there cost $3 and an account carried a $20 monthly fee. Today those services are free and instant, and he expects investing to follow. Ten years from now, he predicts, people will have “self-driving money,” one entry point into their financial life, managed by “an agent, a company that represents you as a fiduciary” at every step. “That’s what money should look like,” he said. “It should not be a second job. It should be something that feels like it’s actively representing you and protecting you every step of the way.”
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