We're a tech company that happens to do financial services. If it feels like a bank and it talks like a bank and it acts like a bank, nobody's gonna wanna work there, 'cause the best tech people don't wanna be at banks.
Welcome to another episode of Outsider Inc. I'm your host, Ian Hathaway. Today's guest is Pierpaolo Barbieri, the founder and CEO of Ualá, an Argentine fintech serving more than eleven million people across Argentina, Mexico, and Colombia, which was just valued at more than three billion dollars. Pierpaolo grew up in a middle-class neighborhood of Buenos Aires, an only child in an Italian family. He was a teenager when Argentina defaulted in 2001 and the banking system froze. People across the country lost access to their savings, and his own family lost part of theirs. He wanted to understand how a country does that to itself, so he studied history, and it took him about as far away from Buenos Aires as you can get. A full scholarship to Harvard, then Cambridge. A book published by Harvard University Press before he was thirty. That path eventually led to a career in global finance on Wall Street. By any measure, he had made it out. The obvious move was to stay on the insider's path. But Pierpaolo went back to build an alternative for the half of Argentina the financial system had left out entirely. Today, Ualá holds banking licenses in Argentina, Mexico, and Colombia. They've raised capital from investors including Soros, Goldman Sachs, Tencent, and SoftBank, and the company has been taught as a case study at Harvard Business School. Pierpaolo also founded Seventeen Sigma, an early-stage venture fund backing founders across Latin America. We'll get into all of it, what it takes to build through seven straight years of Argentine turmoil, and the debt he says he still owes the country that made him. Pierpaolo, welcome to Outsider Inc.
Pleasure to be here. Thank you very much.
It's great to see you, Pierpaolo. Thanks for being here. We'll walk through your whole journey in a moment, but I wanna start somewhere broader. When you launched Ualá, half the adults in Latin America had no way to pay for anything but in cash. In Argentina, you couldn't even get a card without walking into a branch. Your story is about an outsider who fought his way onto the inside track: Harvard, Cambridge, Wall Street. You made it out, and you had a nice path laid out ahead of you in the United States, but you chose to go back home instead. So what does it take to walk back out of that inside track once you're in it, and why did you do it?
I have always tried to find a way back to Argentina, as you said in your intro. This was my way back. I love my country. I was very lucky to be born here. I love working in Argentina, and I wanna raise my family. I became a father four months ago, and I wanna raise my daughter in Argentina. And one of the key problems that I saw in Argentina was this lack of financial inclusion. When I was in New York I was very happy with my life there, with my business there, and with my career development, including that book that you mentioned that nobody really read, although it's always nice to hear about it. But the reality is that I wanted to find a way to give back to my country. I had a lot of opportunities in my life, and a lot of people in this country don't get the same opportunities. And so Ualá was my way to find an avenue, not just to go back, but also to start something in a country that desperately needs financial inclusion. Even today more people have ways to pay in Argentina, but there's less than 10% of debt to GDP. And when you compare that to the rest of the countries in the region, Mexico has 40, Chile has 90, Brazil has 65, and so people don't have access to credit. And when you don't have access to credit, then the poor are always poor and the rich are always rich. There's no possibility for social mobility. And so I really believe in that journey and that's why I had the idea of starting Ualá, and I did it, and here I am running it serving more than 12 million customers in the region and adding a quarter million customers a month.
First of all congratulations on becoming a new father. As the father of three young boys I can tell you it's the accomplishment I'm most proud of, so congrats to you. Following that thread of financial inclusion, I'd like to go back to the beginning for you to Caballito, the Buenos Aires neighborhood where you grew up. Only child, your mom an accountant, your dad in real estate, and your grandmother living under the same roof. It's December 2001, the banking system freezes, and your grandmother, who had done everything right, played by the rules, loses part of her savings anyway. So what does something like that do to a 14-year-old?
It changes your life, right? It changes your perspective. I had always been interested in studying something related to the liberal arts. But at that moment, I wanted to learn economics. I wanted to understand what had happened to my country and why. That was the crucial moment for me when I became interested in political economy, which is something that I then studied, studying financial history at Harvard, as you mentioned. The reality is that Argentina is a fundamental problem of political economy. And so there are very few countries in the world that have de-developed in the last 100 years. So Argentina used to have three times the per capita income of the rest of the world, and now it has roughly one time the per capita average income in the rest of the world. And so we have lost part of that wealth that Argentina had a century ago. And it's a century that is plagued by financial problems, but also political problems. Democracy was suspended five times with successful coup d'états, and then you had nine sovereign debt defaults, where 2001 was just another one of the debt defaults that Argentina had. Argentina is a problem child perennially in financial history. And so I wanted to understand that. I wanted to learn it, and I wanted to see what we have to do to turn the tide against that history and to overcome that history of problems. That's when I decided to study economics. I was obsessed with economics in high school, and then when I had the opportunity to leave for Boston and go to the US, I wanted to study precisely that, which is why I ended up doing what I did.
Along that way, you started debating at age 13, made it to three world championships representing Argentina. In Calgary, that team reached the semifinal for the first time in Argentine history, and you finished ninth in the world, first among competitors from non-English-speaking countries. Then after that this sort of opens the door to going to the university in the US. You applied to exactly one university, Harvard, telling your interviewer that you wouldn't apply anywhere else if you got in. There was no backup plan. So where does a kid from Caballito, three years after his country's economy collapsed, get the confidence to make a bet like that?
Well, debate really helped. I always loved that activity. I recommend it to everyone who has young kids because I think debate gives you self-confidence and there's a reason why the Greeks and the Romans were so obsessed with studying rhetoric and oratory. And I think to be able to put yourself in a position of ideas and beliefs that you don't always share is super important to learn the power of argumentation, something that is useful in academics, that's something that is useful in business, something that is useful in politics, and why not in economics as well? The reality is that life is a debate of ideas. And I really believe in that activity, so much so that I ended up representing my country in those debate championships, as you mentioned. It had been a long time since anyone mentioned our success in that 2005 World Cup, but it was a really crowning achievement for my team and for me personally. And also that opened the door to meeting a lot of people that were studying in great American universities because many of the American and the best British universities recruit debaters just like they recruit athletes. Some of my best friends to this day were people representing Indonesia or Canada in the World Cups, and they were already studying or planning to study in those places. So I said why not me? It meant a lot of sacrifice for me and for my family to study, to be able to sit the SATs when I had no previous experience doing that, and there was not a lot of experience in my school, even though it was one of the best private schools in Argentina. Nobody really applies to university abroad from Argentina 'cause the quality of life is very good and the schooling is excellent, and so are the local universities, including some of our public universities that are some of the best rated in the world. And so I studied to do that, to be able to follow in the footsteps of many of my debate colleagues, friends and why not opponents. And I like to say that I got lucky because I made that bet and I said "I'm not applying anywhere else if I get into Harvard," and I got in early to Harvard. That 14th of December at 8:00 PM at night, my life changed because I didn't need to apply to any other university. It was right then when former President Larry Summers had started the policy of need-blind admissions for foreigners, which was particularly welcome in my case, 'cause after the debacle in Argentina, I wouldn't have been able to afford 50,000, $60,000 tuition every year. And I got an opportunity to study in what is perhaps the best university or the best college in the world. It was an opportunity I couldn't refuse, even if it meant leaving my family and leaving my parents, which is something that even 18 months before I had never planned.
I know when you arrived at Harvard, you actually considered studying film, but ultimately you went down this path that you described of history, political economy, economics to really understand why Argentina had fallen behind. You were able to study under the legendary Niall Ferguson, and you published this history book that I mentioned through Harvard University Press. Then Cambridge, Soros, Bridgewater, Greenmantle. Your classmates would have voted you the least likely to ever start a company, right? You were more likely to become a professor or a markets guy. But you have argued that being a historian actually made you a better founder. So what do you think your classmates maybe would have gotten wrong about you, and what makes someone capable of actually going out and building something?
That's a fantastic question Ian and I think about it a lot. Look, the reality is that I never expected to start a business of this kind of quality. When I started Greenmantle with Neil, who was my mentor, it was a relatively small firm full of PhDs in history and in politics or economics that try to understand the world and do what we call applied history, to try to understand how the forces that you study in history interact with the realities of today to shape different political or market outcomes. We're all economic historians trying to make sense of the present and predict the future, especially in markets. The issue is that in 2013, 2014, I thought that Argentina was due a macroeconomic re-rating, that there was going to be a fundamental change in Argentina that markets were mispricing because nobody expected it, and there was an election that was gonna reprice the country no matter who won because a whole era of leadership was coming to an end. And so that opened the door to investing in Argentina in a different way because you were expecting a macro re-rating that ended up happening. I raised a fund for Brevan Howard, which was one of the largest hedge funds in the world, still is, and we invested in that and we did well with that. But as a result of that, I saw the inner workings of the financial institutions in Argentina, and I got the idea of starting Ualá. And the reality is that I looked very desperately for people that could start it, that could do it, that could recruit the team and then code it, and eventually I reached the conclusion with some of our first investors that it was impossible to find a team to build somebody else's vision, and if it was my vision and it was my idea, I had to come down here and lead the team myself, and that's what I ended up doing. That meant leaving New York, leaving friends and a life that had been my own for a decade or so and restarting back home. That was great for my family because I got to see my parents a lot more often but it was very challenging socially and economically, and also from a life perspective it provided a radical departure from what I was doing. It was super welcome because I found an incredible team of people that built a vision that was way better than what I had thought about. And we instantly hit product market fit in the sense that the first day we launched we expected to issue 50 cards and we issued 200. That was eight years ago. Since then, there hasn't been a day when Ualá hasn't grown in users. Not a single day. And it's made me happier than I ever could have expected, and it's made more challenging than I could have ever expected, but I wouldn't trade it for the world. That is how I ended up learning a lot about management because now we have a team of 1,200 people, three countries, millions and millions of users, and the other day I was walking with my dad out of a restaurant and somebody asked me for a selfie and told me that they were users and they were very happy with the product. So that doesn't usually happen when you're in the markets, right? When you're a markets person, it doesn't happen. But it's very welcome and it's fantastic, and there's this real social mission behind the business, which is to bring financial markets in places like Argentina to the 21st century, and that's really awesome.
Going back, you mentioned you have this great career, successful career happening in New York. You had this vision during a visit to Buenos Aires of how pensioners were collecting cash, and things were being done the same way in 2015 as they had been done in decades before, and that's where this vision comes from. You also mentioned that you had this idea, but you were actually reluctant to lead it. Your early investors suggested that it needed to be you, and therefore you needed to move back to Argentina to do it. Why were you reluctant to lead the company early on, and what do you think they saw in you that maybe you didn't quite see in yourself yet?
I was reluctant because I didn't feel fit to do it. I didn't feel like I had the proper experience because I had only worked at Soros and Bridgewater, and then I had started this company that never meant to be an operating company but a research company. Our output is geopolitical advice and research. So it's radically different than leading a consumer fintech where you have to build a payments team, and you have to understand the rails, and you have to comply with regulation, and you have to have a great compliance team, and then you have to go seek banking licenses, and then you have to operate the banking licenses and lend, invest, et cetera. So I didn't feel like I had that operational ability or that managerial experience to do it. At the same time, I had investors who were like, "Look, no one's gonna build your vision but yourself. And so it's gonna be impossible for you to hire a professional CEO." And we had somebody from Harvard Business School running it in the beginning, but people didn't wanna work for somebody whose vision they were not leading. And so I was the president of the company and the chairman of the board and not the CEO. And then it was apparent to us that I had to come and lead it. And I still remember the time when one of my investors took me to a Starbucks and said, "Look, I have good news and bad news. The good news is this is gonna be a very large company, a lot bigger than we expected. And the bad news is that you gotta move from New York tomorrow and lead it yourself." And that was awesome.
It's wild. Yeah. You did take the mantle and didn't look back. Product launched sometime late 2017. I read a story about how a prominent Argentine banker told you that only the poor and the kids would use your product. He meant it as an insult, but you took it as a compliment maybe, and really more so a motivating force. 'Cause in Argentina there are far more young people and far more poor people than there are rich ones. The system he represented looked at that same market and didn't see customers worth competing for, but you did. So at the time, did you know that he was wrong, or did you have to wait for the market to give you those early signals to let you know that it was there?
Look, fintech had already taken off. Obviously there are some very large companies that have been created in this space, but there was a great pioneer company I remember using in the US in 2012, 2013 called Simple, which was a great digital checking account. And then obviously there was the success of NuBank in Brazil, which is led by a friend and a great mentor, and then obviously Revolut in Europe and Ant and WeChat Pay in Asia. Fintech had started, and the real revolution of fintech is that you can deliver products and services with radically lower costs than the incumbents. And that hadn't been applied in Argentina. That hadn't been created in Latin America beyond Brazil, and that created an opportunity for us. So what I think those bankers didn't see is that technology was going to totally remake these markets, and especially the delivery and the distribution of financial services. At the end of the day, I like to say that Ualá is not doing anything radically different than the Medicis or the Rothschilds were doing, only that we're doing it at a radically lower cost with radically better technology. And so if you are able to cut by 90% the cost of delivering those services, a savings account, an investment account, a credit card, a personal loan, an insurance product as we're doing now. We have the only truly digital life insurance product in Argentina that has ever been created, and we do it with Allianz, which is probably the world's best insurer. And so the fact that we have those two things, a great partner delivering radically lower costs for the user because of better distribution and technology to cut the cost of that delivery, means that you can make a lot more users profitable, and you can deliver a better experience to the user. That is a free card where that guy thought you had to pay, better money market funds, better dollar funds, better credit card because you don't have to pay a maintenance fee, or a better loan because your cost of delivering that loan is a lot lower, and your risk metrics eventually at scale are also lower. So you get a better ROE than the incumbent banks. That is all based on a promise of efficiency, and so the amount of money that you save by having better technology, you redeploy in better product and better experience and better customer service for the individual. And at the end of the day, we're dealing with people's money, right? So it's something very precious, something very important to them, because it's the livelihood of their families, and you have to be extra careful. And so we made the decision really early on to pursue bank licenses because we thought and we still believe that banking is to be won by banks, because the government is not gonna stop regulating banks because of technology, but the banks that are gonna win are the ones that are going to implement better technology at scale.
I'd like to ask a question about the environment in which you built this company. You mentioned building in Argentina as certainly making the company more relevant to the customer it's serving. But it has been a challenging environment. You launched publicly in 2017, and it's basically been nearly a decade of turmoil in Argentina, right? Devaluation, a crash, election, pandemic, debt restructuring, runaway inflation. At the same time, you're expanding into two different countries. I have to imagine you have friends who are running companies in the US and we can get a little flustered when interest rates change by a quarter of a point here. But in Argentina, they can swing by 10% and it's barely even noticed on the radar. This show is a lot about founders who are building great tech companies in outsider geographies, places outside of Silicon Valley. A lot of times that has meant second and third-tier geographies in the United States. I would say Argentina is a much different place. So do you feel like building in Argentina has held back the company in some ways? Has it made it more challenging? Or has, let's say, maybe the challenges faced by building in Argentina, has it made the company stronger?
I think it's made it stronger. Obviously, it builds resilience. It's distracting. I'm not gonna deny it. You have to adapt to new regulations. We had to live through the pandemic, the boom of 2021, the crash of 2022, the election in 2023, the higher growth of 2024, and the interest rate shock of 2025 in Argentina. So we've had a shock a year, and those things are distracting. That also meant that we had to go multi-product and multi-country a lot faster than our competitors. So other companies just focused for the first decade in one country. If we had done that in Argentina it may have been challenging to get to the scale that we have today. But it also teaches you and it makes your team and the management especially far more resilient to deal with different shocks as they may in other markets.
So what I'm hearing is you feel like ultimately it's been more challenging, but you've built a better company as a result of those challenges.
So you've talked a little bit in the past about having episodes of imposter syndrome, and you've been open about it more so than I think most founders would be. I know in your first months at Harvard, you called your mom and told her you felt like you didn't belong there, that Harvard had made a mistake letting you in. Here we are 20 years later, you're running this multi-billion dollar company. You have people coming up to you on the street and asking you for selfies. But at the same time, I know you've had doubts and thinking, "Hey, I should have just stuck with history." It's a long time to carry that same feeling, and simultaneously, I know lots of founders feel this way, even if they don't talk about it. How do you manage that imposter syndrome? And what can you share that might be useful for founders out there listening today who may be struggling with that very thing?
I mean, I struggle with it every day. I feel incredibly lucky and incredibly grateful to be in the position I'm in, to have been trusted with capital from my investors, licenses by the regulator, and most importantly and most crucially, the money that people deposit on Ualá, investments they make or the credit they take, or the insurance they buy, et cetera. As I mentioned, Ian, we deal with people's money. There are very few things that are more important than that. So if the app is down or it has delays because of some provider, we suffer these things and we try to always be 99.9% up. But this is very crucial to us, and I feel personally a great sense of responsibility because of that gratitude and because of that trust that is given to me. That also means that it's a challenge to deal with it. I try to keep a very honest view of the business at all times. I don't have a private office. I want a very horizontal team. I want a team that tells me things how they are. I try to hire better people than me, very open about that. I want people in my management that understand the business and their areas a lot better than me 'cause at the end of the day, I'm a historian, right? And so I'm not an expert on risk or an expert on AI or an expert in coding or an expert in credit or an expert in investments. So we have to hire, retain and build teams around better people than ourselves. So I try to run a very horizontal organization where, like in debate, the best ideas win, and it doesn't matter where they come from. We want that philosophy, and that helps me be a better CEO. And on the personal side, I try to deal with the responsibility by having a disciplined lifestyle, being focused on the business, trying to have time to work out, try to find balance, and then try to spend the time that I'm not at the office with my daughter and my family. I live the imposter syndrome every day and I know that a lot of other founders have it. I don't think it ever goes away, and I think it's part of what pushes you to try to never settle and try to be the best founder by always going for more growth and try to defy the status quo. Because if I had heard that banker and I had been dissuaded instead of motivated by the fact that he said only the poor and the kids were gonna use our products, I wouldn't be here.
Well, so just double-clicking on that environment that you're creating, you mentioned trust, honest view of the business, horizontal structure, hiring people better than you, people telling you no. What does it actually take to build a company where the CEO is not only okay with being told they're wrong, but is actively building a team in an environment where that is being sought out, where you're actually hearing that?
Well, you need a CEO who has an ego in check because if you're being told that you are the best thing since sliced bread every day, you're not gonna wanna surround yourselves by better people. And better people are not gonna wanna work for you because in the end, in the org chart, you're above them. I came into this job as I told you, reluctantly at first. I love it today. I wouldn't trade it for the world, but I have to understand that in fast-moving organizations that are aiming to hyperscale you need better people than yourselves, and I need people that hire better people than themselves. Otherwise, you're never gonna get to the size or growth or effectiveness that is required, especially in these parts of the world where the talent pool is different than the US, the availability of capital is radically different than the US, and the competition is different than the US 'cause you have these established players that have always been there, and they think they will always be there. And so for instance, I'm very proud of the fact that now in Argentina, Ualá is the single largest bank by amount of users in the private sector. We built that in eight years. My biggest competitors have been there 100 years, and they never thought that we were gonna be able to grow this way. We can only do that because we have a team that aims to be better every day, where excellence, commitment, and the mission are always first and foremost, and I wouldn't have been able to build it myself. And so I wake up every morning knowing that, so I need to retain and empower the people around me to deliver that excellence themselves and then hire those that will bring that into the company as well.
Switching gears a little bit to the company itself, you mentioned the word bank. I know you initially built Ualá on not being a bank, not lending out deposits. You bought two banks in Argentina and Mexico, but you've said all along that your philosophy hasn't changed, it's only that the range of services you wanted to offer has, that banking cannot really be won by a non-bank. You have to be something different. You built this company because you thought incumbent institutions had stopped competing. You mentioned they've been around forever, you haven't. But in some ways, by now, you are almost an institution. So how do you become something that's lasting, something that's valuable, without becoming like the very institutions that you set out to disrupt?
Great question. So I think you have to keep a tech DNA. We're a tech company that happens to do financial services. If you lose that tech DNA, then you lose the way you should build product, which is with the tech team as part of the business and product teams. If you treat your tech as IT, as most banks do, you'll never build a better product. So you need to be able to bring people that challenge the status quo, because oftentimes they don't come from that status quo. They don't come from the banks. We're very successful at recruiting people that come from incredibly different areas of life. Obviously, the credit team, they're experts in credit, but there's a lot of people in product, in communications, in marketing that come from other areas, other walks of life. And you have to welcome those people because you're trying to redefine a financial services product to get to that part of the population that was ignored by the incumbents. And I always said, you have to start with those people, but then build products for everyone. We needed to become a bank because unless we became a bank, we were never gonna be able to be the largest bank in the country by amount of users, and we got there in eight years. We wouldn't be able to have a reality where 99% of the country knows Ualá and where over 20% of the country has a Ualá account. And then you have to build all the products and services where you start with the things that no one else has with the clients that nobody else wanted, but then you have to build a full stack. Because somebody that needs payments also needs credit, and then they need insurance, and then they need investments, and then they have the money. So you gotta offer a product for when they have more money than they need, investments, and a product for when they have less money than they need, which is lending. And if you don't offer those things in one place, then you give them an opportunity to go somewhere else. In the US, there are so many opportunities to use different apps for different things. So I have Coinbase for one thing, and I have Robinhood for another thing, and then I have Chime or JP Morgan Chase for another thing. But in Argentina, we don't have a Robinhood, and we don't have a Coinbase. And so in Ualá, with the ability to grow as fast as we have been able to grow, we are able to offer trading and bonds and equities and money market funds and dollar funds and a direct APR yield on your account with our investments products, and at the same time to be able to build credit products. The only way to do that is if you challenge the way things are built, and you try to keep technology at the forefront. That's why we've been able to build a structure that delivers better customer experience, better products with radically lower costs which allows us to scale the way we've been scaling. 80% of the people that come into Ualá every month come in organically. That's awesome, and that's the best way to grow. I don't need to go buy users because users come, because if they wanna buy FX, it's better on Ualá. And if they wanna have a money market fund, it's better on Ualá. And if they have a debit card or a credit card, it's better on Ualá. So those things are very important to us, and you can only build that with the strength of technology. So the tech team has to be inextricably interlinked with the business and product teams. And if it feels like a bank and it talks like a bank and it acts like a bank, nobody's gonna wanna work there, 'cause the best tech people don't wanna be at banks.
Look, at the heart of financial services is, you mentioned an array of different offerings, but initially it's about credit. On the other side of that, the other way to think is debt. So I feel like your whole argument is that without credit, there's no social mobility. The rich continue to stay rich, the poor continue to stay poor. But at the same time, lending to people with no credit history also means rising delinquency which can occur when a credit portfolio grows quickly, especially with new users, that longer tail, people who have not been in the banking system really at any point in their lives. So how does Ualá, how do you think about the line between democratizing credit versus democratizing debt? And how do you stay on top of that so that it doesn't undermine the very thing you're trying to promote?
