Guilherme Benchimol: The Mindset Behind Building XP

We are convinced that the more capitalism we have in Brazil, the more entrepreneurs taking risks and believing in the country, the more innovation, jobs, income, and everything else we get. My father, a doctor, had no experience in the business world, and he said: "Guilherme, look, rest assured that competent, hardworking people like you will never get fired," you know? So, I think it was that sentence that ultimately led to the disappointment of being fired. After all, I wasn't a competent person.

We began to realize that often the shortest path between two points, from a business perspective, is not a straight line, but a zigzag. Creating version 2.0 of XP, which was essentially a shopping mall for financial products, transforming the role of the autonomous agent, who used to be a stockbroker, into an investment advisor.

Look, there's a good story; I don't think I've ever told this, okay? I said, "Demir, you've got to be kidding me. You want me to talk to your brokers, who are my competitors? They need to copy me. Is that it?" He said, "That's exactly it." What is the story that marked my life the most, okay? It wasn't XP.

Damn.

Everything has a way, no matter how unlikely it may seem. If you are focused, you will find a way.

It's the market rising, unfortunately. A medium wind is enough. Now, the market has to be rising.

Thanks, Arturito, the honor is all mine.

Man, what an honor, my friend. Thank you, man.

Arturito, my life is 100% XP. This is my family office, so my team that manages my personal investments is here, but it's very close to XP. But I get to XP every day at 8:00, 8:30 in the morning, and I stay until 7:00 at night. I have a very intense commercial schedule. Our board is also very active. We have two monthly committees, board meetings every two months, and I'm very influential, obviously always aligned with Mafra, right? So, I end up becoming a major internal consultant, helping to unlock important agendas internally. I always bring my point of view.

So, I think that when you manage to step out of the CEO role, which is a role that consumes you, right? So, when you're a CEO, you often don't set the agenda you want; you follow the agenda the company imposes on you. And now I can have quality time and I can dive deeper into the agendas that I think are most important. So, you know, I'll give you an example. Three years ago, I spent almost six months on an agenda focused solely on artificial intelligence. But when you're a CEO, you can't do that because you have a series of commitments that prevent you from spending so much time going deep into certain topics, right? So I'm always diving deep into agendas, always helping on the commercial side, and I end up being a great advisor to Mafra to help him be more and more successful and perhaps not make the same mistakes I made back then.

Yeah, when I was a teenager, my father, my father is a doctor, my grandfather was a doctor, my cousins are doctors, my children are doctors, right? So there was this whole medical tradition in the Benchimol family. So, I think it's normal for a teenager to want to follow their father's path at some point. I worked a lot with my father, so on the weekends he had his surgeries. I ended up following along in part. So, at one point, I thought I was going to follow that path, but I ended up being shocked at some point, right? My father went to perform a surgery and there was a tragic incident where the patient had an allergy to the catheter inserted in her vein, she ended up suffering an anaphylactic shock in front of me; she passed away in front of me. So, after that, I said: "Dad, no, no, it's not for me, I'm not cut out for this."

At the same time, I was always like that, I always liked sports a lot, I loved competition, so I had a tendency to want to be an athlete, to be a tennis player, but at the same time, it wasn't an easy life. And my father started convincing me, taking away some of my tennis lessons, preventing me from playing so many tournaments and forcing me to study a bit more. Honestly, I wasn't a good student. I was that student who just got by, I was good at math, but otherwise just a C-average student. At some point, they said, "Hey, no more tennis, you're going to study from now on." And so I ended up learning that the financial market was something interesting. I attended a lecture by Luiz César Fernandes while I was still in high school, this was in '92, '93. I said, "Look, here is a path that I think interests me."

And I think that at the same time, this thing about learning to handle money, learning to have financial freedom, right? I lived in my adolescence in two very, very distinct worlds, right? My father had a good life as a doctor and my mother had a much tougher life, right? So they separated, I was very young, just a boy. So I lived in this dichotomy, right? A good life with my father every two weeks and a very tough life with my mother.

So, at the same time, learning to deal with money, learning to build financial freedom, learning to be able to turn on the air conditioning at night, right? Because my mother wouldn't let me, "Look, no, we don't have the money, you can't turn on the AC." So, everything, everything was money very tightly counted, right? And she was managing there and supporting the family the way she could. So I think all these things converged me in the direction of the financial market. I am going to make money. I am going to make money. That's it. I'm going to learn how to work with this thing called money that's always missing here at home, right? So I think that was a bit of the beginning, right?

Look, I remember I started interning as soon as I entered college, because I wanted to earn my money, have my freedom. So, back then you didn't really have email, so you had to print your resume and knock on the doors of brokerage firms and banks. I remember I went to about 8 to 10 banks to hand out my resume, and I tried to talk to a director at the brokerage firm to tell my story, and I ended up meeting the director of Sênior Corretora, who was Edgar da Silva Ramos, who later became our advisor at XP, right? How the world turns, doesn't it? So I met him at Sênior Corretora, this was back in '94. I told him my story and the following week I was hired as an intern, earning 300 reais at the time.

So, the brokerage was a very large futures brokerage, then it merged with Agro brokerage back then, and that was my beginning. So, I already started in college working in the back office, right? I went to a federal university, so it's a super historical course, it's a course that for those who want to enter the financial market, it's not a good option, right? So I learned to study the history of Karl Marx, right? So it was unlikely to be here today, right? But at the same time, what helped me a lot was the practicality of working and of being very curious. So I took many courses in parallel, courses at the Rio de Janeiro Stock Exchange, and so on. So that was my beginning, it was already working.

Then I spent a year in the back office of Sênior brokerage, then I went to the desk. So funny stories, really, I was a terrible trader, right? I wasn't a good person to have the cold-bloodedness to know the time to buy or sell. So, I had some curious stories in this world of trading, right? So, at the time, the Sênior brokerage had its own proprietary portfolio and I even worked for a while doing trading, right? I did index arbitrage with Telebrás, right? Telebrás was more than 50% of the index, so you did arbitrage, so you did longs between Ibov and Telebrás. It was a tragedy, right? So and then I went, I was very shy, and I thought I would work more in an operational area.

And gradually, right, I stayed two years at Sênior brokerage, then I stayed two years at the brokerage doing a super cool trainee program, right, where you got to know other areas of the bank and the brokerage. And gradually I discovered I was a commercially talented person, with a good level of empathy. And then I started discovering myself in an area more of leadership, in a more commercial area. And so, how I started my career, it wasn't exactly where I was building, perhaps, my sequence.

Yeah, I think the thing today, like, I see here in São Paulo that the most qualified universities unfortunately prevent students from getting practical experience early. So you only manage to intern at 21, 22 years old and often it's a short period. So it helped me a lot to know what I liked to do and what I didn't like to do. So having that practical experience and starting to delve into what interests you is a huge competitive advantage. So that helped me, right? Starting early to learn what I didn't do well, learning what I liked, and then you want to do better, you want to delve deeper, anyway, that was my beginning.

Look, for 4 years at the Sênior brokerage and at the Icatu brokerage, I worked in operational areas and they were technical areas, right? So I considered myself a more technical person, right? I wanted to put my mathematical knowledge into practice. At the time, I understood everything about Excel, I made macros, all the macros, right? So, at that moment, that was very much my mindset.

When I joined the InvestShop brokerage, I joined shortly after, a little before Santander bought Bozano. So, Bozano had a trainee program that was highly sought after. 8, 10 trainees would enter each year, so I was in that group, but shortly after, Santander bought Bozano and I was allocated to the InvestShop project, which was a project of the Bozano company, right? So I left Banco Bozano, joined InvestShop, but it was a commercial area and I had to build new business and my area was an area that had to convince brokerage owners.

And, 26, 27 years ago, owning a brokerage firm was a very bad business. You didn't have a financial market; it was very restricted. So brokerage owners basically traded their own portfolios because of the advantage of not paying commissions. So I had to convince these guys to do retail work using the InvestShop brokerage platform. So, I traveled all over Brazil doing this commercial work of presenting the InvestShop brokerage as a hub for retail, so the brokerage wouldn't have to invest in that tool and would start using the tool that the InvestShop brokerage had, which wasn't anything special, but was a solution with credibility behind it and some scale.

And that was how I traveled all over Brazil, met many brokerages, and that was when I got to know Porto Alegre and realized that Porto Alegre had an interesting market. I said, "Hey, this city is a city where, who knows, one day if I'm going to start a business, I'll live there, because it has a nice income level, has a very restricted brokerage market, and at the same time, no one had done anything different in the city." So, it was in these travels of mine, from having started at the InvestShop brokerage, that I ended up discovering the city of Porto Alegre, right, and realizing that the brokerages didn't have this vocation for providing services. The brokerages at the time were a bit like what I mentioned earlier; they were focused on speculating with their own portfolios. So today, it's no longer that market, right? Today, the brokerages that exist, they are so concerned with providing some service for some client profile, right?

It was a bit of both, really. The InvestShop brokerage never actually turned a profit, right? So we surfed the internet bubble there. I remember that the bank, Santander bought Banespa at the time for 500 million dollars and Santander also wanted to buy the InvestShop brokerage for a value close to a billion dollars, but the InvestShop brokerage was practically nothing. And Santander couldn't buy the InvestShop brokerage and bought Patagon for 1 billion dollars, right? So, those who are older will remember this story.

Yeah, so that wasn't, it was a bubble and you weren't valued for generating results, it was growth, it was the number of clients, it was, anyway, from time to time this madness returns, right? So, yeah, a lot of what we did was just a lot of hype, right? And at the same time, I was also a more rebellious employee, right? So I think that those who are more entrepreneurial question things a lot, right? So they don't really accept the status quo.

So at the same time, when the bubble burst, right? The InvestShop brokerage had to cut expenses and at the same time I wasn't a very easy guy to deal with day-to-day there. I was always wanting to invent different things, etc. And the brokerage had its entire strategic plan. I was a young man, I joined at 22 years old, left at 24. So I wasn't a serious person, I didn't have that much experience. So I think it was that combination of things.

And what I always remember when I tell this story is that about two weeks before I was fired, I arrived home and went to talk to my father. I said: "Dad, I'm worried because I'm hearing a lot of rumors at the brokerage that they're going to do a staff cut, a significant cut, right?" And my father, a doctor, had no experience in the business world, he said: "Guilherme, look, stay calm because competent and hardworking people like you are never fired, right?" So I think it was that sentence that in the end brought me the disappointment of having been fired. After all, I wasn't a competent person.

And he said: "Oh, I don't want to live in Rio de Janeiro anymore, I want to run away from here, I'm ashamed of myself." So, my friends, right, would say: "Man, how were you fired, right? How could that be, right?" So, when you are very young, you don't understand certain things, right? And I didn't even know how to explain it properly. So, yeah, I talk about this subject naturally today, but 15 years ago it was super difficult, right? So, I think that's what made me leave.

And so, again, because I had gotten to know the city of Porto Alegre, and had realized there was an interesting opportunity there, high income and so on, I said: "Look, let me go there because I think I can start something different there." And I had met a brokerage firm, and it was precisely that firm that allowed me to bridge the gap. So, when I went to live in Porto Alegre, I didn't exactly go to start XP. I went to work for a while at that brokerage, I stayed there for a few months, and that was the kick-off that allowed me, soon after, to set up the little office, meet my partner Marcelo, who was the person who ended up founding the company with me, and that's how we started the little office right after.

It was, man. It really was exactly like that, man. The name XP was totally random. In the end, we wanted to start working, so you couldn't start if you hadn't passed the ANCOR exam. So, we took the first ANCOR exam in Brazil, this was back in 2001, 2002, right at the beginning. And we wanted to have a company tax ID, because without it we couldn't have a link to any brokerage, right? And we started XP as an autonomous agent for the brokerage that fired me, right? So, for 5 years, we worked in partnership with the brokerage that didn't want to have me as an employee, right?

And so, in the middle of "okay, we have to open a company with a name," I gave a lot of examples using the expression XPTO. I said: "Put PTO, Marcelo, it's much better than 'I' from a marketing and positioning standpoint." He said: "No, let's take out the TO," and then it became XP. So it was an abbreviation of something random, man.

Yeah, in the end, at the time, people thought we had some link to Windows, you know, there was Windows XP, later they thought we had a link to something else. So in the end, the name later on, it just became—I mean, in the end, you take Apple, right? You take it like, man, what makes the name is the company's trajectory, right? So later you find ways to tell the story of that name in a way that the consumer can have better empathy with it, right? But in the end, it wasn't. It was 100% random.

Arturito, well, our beginning was very tough from the standpoint of really having no money, right? So, after a few months, the little money we had was running out and we realized there might be an opportunity to make some money by teaching, right? So, and then we realized that often the straightest path between two points from a business perspective isn't a straight line, it's a zigzag, right? So, whoa, when we started doing a course, we gave a lecture and realized that people were very needy in terms of education, and it was much easier to invite someone to come learn with us than to convince them to come invest with us, right? Because if I say, come invest with me, okay? Who are you? What's your track record? No, I'm nobody, I have no track record, I have no credibility, but look, come learn with me. The person won't question my track record much, right? Well, they will, but less, right?

And then we realized that it was smarter to create a community that we would be educating and teaching, and then we would naturally be converting that community into clients. So often, the entrepreneur is concerned with the pain point they addressed and wants to go straight to that issue, right? Actually, maybe for an entrepreneur, zig-zagging, worrying about creating a community first and then converting, is the "slow is fast" approach, you know? Sometimes you want to go fast, you go straight to the point, but that's actually slow. Sometimes you go slow because you zig-zag, but then later you go fast, right? So, in our case, it was a great success, though it was unintentional, right?

Well, obviously there was a bit of a gut feeling, right? We started to realize that trying to convince people to come and invest with us wasn't working. Let's invent something new. And we started giving lectures, courses, and started making money from that. That was when I started to realize, "Whoa, I'm actually starting to be an entrepreneur because there's some money left over here." And then, little by little, the students started converting into clients and things started growing.

2008 was, for 6 or 7 years already, when you're focused on one product and that product is trending, it's the best thing there is, a simple business. So we were a single-product, single-line business and the market was just growing. Spectacular, right? And often you think you're being very competent, not that you weren't, but there's a big element of luck involved, which is having ridden a trend that lasted long enough.

But then right after that came the 2008 crisis and our business that was very good started to become very bad. We were forced to make important cuts in the company, and that's when we became certain that we had to build a more diversified and resilient business. And it was there in 2008/09, after we got through the crisis and stabilized the company again, that we started studying models that had worked around the world, like, how do you turn a brokerage firm into a resilient business over time? And that's when I ended up getting to know Charles Schwab well, I met Charles Schwab a few times.

Yeah, that's actually how we ended up creating XP itself, you know? We went to visit one of their fairs, one of their benchmarks. And we said: "Wait, the Schwab in the early 80s created a campaign called Wake Up America, right? Don't invest without comparing first." We said: "Wait, this makes total sense for Brazil, it's extremely concentrated here. Like, people only invest through banks, right? How do we set up our own Wake Up Brazil, right?" We launched the Wake Up Brazil campaign, started building the technology that allowed people to compare funds, fixed income, etc.

And that's how we started making version 2.0 of XP, which was essentially a shopping center for financial products, transforming the figure of the independent agent, who used to be just an equities broker, into an investment advisor, right? And that was when the English fund Actis bought into this vision of ours, right? So they didn't buy what we were, but they bought what we wanted to become. And back in 2010, that was when we started to look a bit more like what we have transformed into today, but it was after a crisis. So, yeah, these inflection points always appear in good stories.

Yeah, for many years, I didn't have the capacity to offer much more than equity, right? So, yeah, many entrepreneurs don't have it either, you don't have financial stability, right? You can't offer very high salaries, but many people don't know how to take advantage of that properly, right? So, we set up a partnership that allowed us to attract talent from the market by selling shares at a subsidized price, but at the same time having the call, which allowed us to buy back that stake if, by any chance, that person didn't work out. So, in a way it wasn't that hard to make bets like that, because we had mechanisms that allowed us to correct things.

And that's how it went, right? So, whenever we found a gap, something that would allow us to make the company more complete and we didn't have the technology internally, we would look for someone from the market, tell a bit of our story and invite the person to become our partner, right, as well as internally. So, the people who were growing and becoming important, we wanted to retain them, we wanted to retain them with us and show that they were part of the project, right?

So, I would say that setting up a partnership is a way for you to not only align people, but to have a more armored business, because when a person becomes a partner, they, theoretically, don't have a plan B; they are focused on you, on your project. So, it increases your probability of success, right? So, you know, if you create solid meritocracy concepts, you know, where you make people rise within the company and the maximum ascension is perhaps becoming a partner, that is correlated with delivering results, with having a strong culture, you do that well over the years, you get a company that is increasingly solid with people who are actually very loyal and very faithful and are very competent at your business, right? So, it was very important, for sure. Actually, it still is to this day, right?

Look, at that time we were heading toward going public on the B3 in 2017. Right. We were growing quite a bit and we thought it was the moment to go public in Brazil. We had already applied for a banking license in the country, right? So, we wanted to, it was necessary to have a bit more capital.

And then Martin Escobari from General Atlantic, a great partner of ours, a great friend, our partner to this day, actually, said: "Guilherme, let's go have a chat with the folks at Itaú, it won't lead to anything, let's just talk to them." I said: "Man, Martin, you know it makes sense, right? Itaú is our competitor. Does it make sense for them to understand that we are heading in this direction and all?" And we went to talk and the conversation was a very interesting one, right? Then we left there with the feeling, perhaps, that there could be an alternative.

And then shortly after I scheduled a lunch with Roberto Setubal. We went to get to know each other, right? I didn't know him. And the conversation was great. And then we started running both things in parallel, right? I wasn't a believer that the deal with Itaú would go through. So, I thought the likely outcome was precisely to continue with the IPO process. But, I liked the format of the deal, which was a format back then where we addressed one of the important pain points we would have, which was credibility.

Having Itaú as a minority shareholder in the company. So, and then subsequently, right, we ended up doing this deal, the Central Bank, in a way, actually prevented even Itaú itself from being able to buy our control in 2013, right? So, it ended up deconfiguring the initial deal a little, anyway. And that was the path that we opted for, right? We had two pain points there: needing more capital, and the second pain point was having credibility, and doing this as a private company seemed smarter to us at that moment. So, we addressed credibility, addressed capital, and didn't have to answer to the market at that time.

Yeah. That strategy worked. But at some point, right, we understood it was important to go public again, because our relationship with Itaú was always very respectful. We admire their shareholders a lot, above all. Everything that Itaú built in Brazil...

is a great benchmark, but we couldn't have certain ties that our contract had with them. And so we went public, and at the same time, that helped us have other partners by our side that gradually made our relationship separate, and we started to get back to having the total independence that we wanted to have. So that was a bit of that moment in our phase there, in our life, actually.

Look, there was a good story, I don't think I've ever told this, okay? Right when we started doing this investment platform format, right, back in 2010 when we became an investment mall, Edemir Pinto, who was the former CEO of B3, well, at the time there was B3 and there was Cetip still, right? He said, "Guilherme, I need to host an event with you here at B3, because I need to convince the other brokerages to also follow your business model." I said, "Edemir, you've got to be kidding me. You want me to tell your brokers, who are my competitors, that they need to copy me?" And he said, "That's exactly it. That's exactly it."

And then it was a space on the B3 trading floor, right? That space where you enter the B3 nowadays. So there was a room set up there, a packed room, all the brokers present, and Edemir Pinto was interviewing me so I could share the virtues of the business model I was building and why to follow the direction of the CVM, and so on. And look, I understand the request he made; he was the CEO of B3, right? But at the same time, we were really occupying a lot of space at that moment, we were trying to find our place in the market, right? So, Edemir helped us with many things. He was such an important person in our journey. So I even asked him for many favors, right? Evidently, within all the rules, and at that moment he said, "Look, now I also want a favor from you; you'll have to help me here, you'll have to help build a bigger market." So that was his pitch, right? You will indeed stimulate your competitors, but you will have more success if there is more market.

Yeah. No. So that was quite curious. I was arguing with the competitors, literally saying, "Look, you don't have to do it this way, you have to do it that way," right? So that was quite interesting, right? Crazy. And the group really followed that path, right?

Ah, we already have, we have from individuals, more or less 1.5 trillion. We have today approximately 2 trillion when we add all investor profiles, right, institutional and individual investors, and companies, right? And we currently have more or less 11% market share in Brazil. So, Brazil still continues to have a very high banking concentration in the country, but people still invest through banks, through account managers, and trust in savings accounts. And all this financial education work that we discussed just now, we continue to do it with slightly different formulas, but we keep on doing it. Evidently, a higher Selic rate makes this process a bit slower, because people end up becoming very tied to the CDI, very short-term oriented, which is a huge craziness, right? So you don't create an investment culture in the country; in fact, nowhere in the world do you invest expecting high returns in the short term. If you want to have a high return, you have to diversify, you have to lengthen your investments, and Brazil ends up making this big mess, right? Literally, we don't have our public accounts in order, we are getting more and more into debt, and therefore, the government has to borrow at increasingly higher interest rates, and the savings that should be taking risks, right, is financing short-term debt, right? So we are certain that it is possible to build a transformation very similar to what was done in the United States. Today, 20% of what is invested in Brazil is outside of banks. In the United States, it's 90%.

So, the dream is precisely to decentralize capital in Brazil, create competition against the conventional banks in the country, and increasingly show Brazilians that, if they want to invest, it is important that they invest with freedom, having investment advisors, having consultants that allow them to better understand their investor profile and help them build a plan that allows them to have financial freedom over time, right? So this work of ours is only just beginning, for sure. So, that's the path, right? So, goal one was one trillion, then the second trillion, then the third trillion, but the direction is to democratize investments in Brazil. Today, 80 to 90% of everything that Brazilians invest through banks are the banks' own products. When people go to invest at XP, it's the opposite.

Yes. 90% of what they invest with us are third-party products, right? So this already shows a bit how much we have democratized access to different products, to different asset managements, to different banks, to different insurers, but this process is only just beginning.

Turito, I don't have that perception, this whole success thing, I'm sure it hasn't gone to my head, much less the team's, right? So, our feeling is that we're just getting started, we love what we do, so we enjoy the journey, right? We like, I like being here with you telling my story, right? I like being with the teams, I like to keep improving what we do, I like, you know, asking myself how we can do things differently, how we can correct our mistakes. So, when you enjoy the process, in the end, you keep improving. You want to improve, you want to improve as an entrepreneur, you want to improve as a human being, you want to see the company growing, you want to see clients more satisfied, you want to see your partners evolving in life. So, I think that's wonderful. So, what I want most is to continue living this life I live. Anyway, it's really about loving what you do, right? So, I don't see myself having another business in my life. I turned 50 this year, 25 years at the company. So I see myself turning 75 in 25 years, 50 years at the company, and together with the team. So XP is a life project of mine, of Mafra, of Berenger, of Santana, and of all the partners who make the company what it is. So it's very cool when you approach a business that way, right?

So I think a lot of my entrepreneurial character was formed by reading Jim Collins, right? I don't know if you've had the opportunity to read him yet. So it was a bestseller of the past, right? How do you create a business that is built to last? How will the business endure in the long term? So that's our mindset, right? So, it's good that I found my dream early on, right? It's good that I have a team that is also committed to this long-term journey. It's good that I have fun in the right way, that it's something that fulfills me. So, I think when you look at it that way, there's no such thing as thinking you've arrived, right? Obviously, you get more experienced, more mature, you start worrying more about Brazil, right? So you mentioned our entrepreneurship institute that I started together with David Velez and André Street. You start worrying that, well, you won't have long-term success if Brazil doesn't succeed, right? So having founded the Institute, right? B55 is a way to strengthen Brazil, right? To help contribute as well. Our vision is that if there are more entrepreneurs in Brazil, better than us, we will have a better country. So, I think in the beginning, you start a business being a bit selfish, really. You're looking more at your own belly button, but then after some success, you start worrying about Brazil, you worry about the competition, you worry about other sectors. You want Brazil to work out, right? Otherwise, your children won't grow up in a decent country, right? Otherwise, you won't have a consumer market. And, well, I think Brazil is a country that can really succeed, right? We just have to make the right choices. And I think B55 in a way addresses that pain, right? I'm certain—actually, I, André, David, and Cris, we are convinced that the more capitalism we have in Brazil, the more entrepreneurs taking risks, believing in the country, it means more innovation, more jobs, more income, more of everything.

Yes, right? And so I am very confident that B55 will really help Brazil move in the right direction.

Look, in practice, here at XP, I would try to divide it into two fronts, you know? Everything that is operational, when you apply artificial intelligence, you do it better, cheaper, and more efficiently. So, you ultimately become more efficient, right? You run your business better, without depending on as many people, it's more precise, and so on. And there's a commercial aspect, which is how you manage to build a journey for your client that allows you to deliver more quality every day. So, that is how we separated our most relevant initiatives from an artificial intelligence standpoint. For the end client, it's: how do we, knowing all the consumers' habits, knowing the best time to reach out, knowing each investor's profile, how can we help our advisor be precise in how they connect with clients? So, today we don't see artificial intelligence disintermediating the advisor. We see artificial intelligence making the advisor and consultant smarter, so that they can have more scale and impress the clients they serve even more. Evidently, operational tasks are handled by AI, but all the advisory work is what fuels the advisor, allowing them to deliver a better service at the end of the line.

And there is a third front, which I didn't mention, the whole work of managing the internal team is currently much faster, right? In the past, you had to capture information by talking to the company's data departments. So, you wanted information from a business area, you talked to the department, they sent you the data, so the director's or manager's ability to make decisions was much slower, because you had to fetch data from an area and then wait for it to return. So, artificial intelligence allowed us to consolidate this, and the team's ability to access important information in real-time and realize whether things are headed in the right direction has increased exponentially. So, these three things are where we have been putting most of our chips and I am very confident that artificial intelligence is going to make us take a huge leap in productivity over the next few years.