“The key is to work on something that truly motivates you to get out of bed every morning.” – Bruno Monteiro Vannucci advises the novel entrepreneurs.
Bruno Monteiro Vannucci, the Co-Founder & COO at EmpreX. He is an entrepreneur with a quest to enhance people’s lives via innovation and technology by providing consumers with a method to monetize their data in the form of better loans.
In this interview with Company Upside, Bruno Monteiro Vannucci discusses marketing tactics for business promotion, recommendations on producing practical ideas, employing people, and becoming a successful entrepreneur.
Edited Excerpts from the Interview:
Bruno Monteiro Vannucci[BV]: How did you get your idea or concept for the business?
Business Upside[BU]: I worked as a portfolio manager at UBS when I decided to leave to search for an impactful way to contribute to society. I was acutely aware of the massive distortions in the credit market, with interest rates completely detached from fair levels for certain types of credit. After a series of regulatory changes, I got in touch with my two European co-founders and decided to tackle the problem of abusive interest rates for unsecured personal loans in Brazil.
Bruno Monteiro Vannucci[BV]: What was your mission at the outset?
Business Upside[BU]: Our mission was to establish credit as a beneficial tool for Brazilians to improve their financial lives – just like it is used in other parts of the world. Credit should be something accessible that allows people to reach accomplishments without leading them to bankruptcy. The reality in Brazil is that banks and FinTechs are charging astronomical interest rates that routinely exceed 100% per year. In some cases that we have seen, the number reached an incredible 900%. Instead of a useful tool, loans are often traps that destroy people’s lives.
Business Upside[BU]: How do you market your business, and which method has been most successful?
Business Upside[BU]: We market our business through digital channels, and it is the combination of all of them that works best for us. We implemented a cross-channel UX tracking that allows us to reduce friction continuously and take action on every step of the user’s flow to ensure they receive the best possible offer for their particular case.
Business Upside[BU]: What is unique about your business?
Business Upside[BU]: We offer our users a way to extract the monetary benefits of their data in the form of better loans. By sharing a view on their principal bank accounts, we can analyze their full financial picture and present them with offers to either refinance expensive bank loans or take out new loans at much cheaper rates – in both cases, saving them significant amounts of money. We achieve this by applying the most advanced machine learning algos on the high-quality, big data that has become available in the new Open Banking environment.
Business Upside[BU]: How do you generate new ideas?
Business Upside[BU]: At EmpreX, we conduct frequent brainstorming sessions to address the most critical issues that arise, and we encourage our people to speak up if they think of a better way of doing something. We follow the Netflix culture that includes nurturing freedom with a responsible environment, resulting in many innovative features developed by different people in our organization.
Business Upside[BU]: If you had one piece of advice to someone just starting, what would it be?
Business Upside[BU]: Never stop studying and learning new things. Even if it doesn’t bring immediate results, it boosts creativity and opens new doors, like being able to identify opportunities you didn’t even know existed.
Building a business takes people with different strengths and backgrounds. By acquiring new skills, you’ll automatically increase the number of opportunities for you to contribute to making the next solution for a big problem.
Business Upside[BU]: What do you look for in an employee?
Business Upside[BU]: We seek people that take ownership and place bold bets. Financial services in Brazil are being disrupted at an unprecedented pace, and evolving fast is a key success factor for every company in this space. We want people to dig into whatever they are doing and then give them the freedom to make decisions. If you add a culture of transparency and mutual learning to that, people openly share their failures, their rationale to place the bet first, and what they have learned from it – all of which is rocket fuel for the company’s growth.
Business Upside[BU]: Do you believe there is some sort of formula or pattern to become a successful Businessman?
Business Upside[BU]: There is no straight line or formula to success when building a business. The key is to work on something that truly motivates you to get out of bed every morning.
In my case, after having spent ten years in the investment industry, I was burning for a new challenge. And after I learned about the seismic change in the regulatory landscape around credit, I was all in on the idea to use my expertise as a portfolio manager and trader in the virtual financial world to build something that has a massive impact on the real economy.
I like the famous phrase, “Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.” Working on a project that excites you is the fuel that keeps you going.
Business Upside[BU]: What has been your most satisfying moment in business?
Business Upside[BU]: The first loan that we gave out was a watershed moment for me, and I saw that what we are doing has a real-world, positive impact. It’s a great feeling to know that we manage to make a person’s life a little easier by successfully lowering their future financial obligations with refinancing.
Business Upside[BU]: What motivated you to become an Entrepreneur?
Business Upside[BU]: After achieving some financial comfort from working in the financial industry, I started thinking a lot about this question: “When you are 60, what would you want to look back on?”. And from this came my drive to positively impact people’s lives through my daily direct actions and the work I develop. EmpreX was born as a result of this, and our mission is to provide millions of good, hard-working people with the fair and affordable loans they deserve to achieve their dreams.
Company name: EmpreX
Company URL: https://emprex.com.br
Bruno Monteiro Vannucci’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bruno-monteiro-vannucci-a6708932/
Bruno Monteiro Vannucci’s Designation: Co-Founder & COO at Emprex
