Dive Brief:

• Nubank swiped longtime Visa executive Rob Livingston, who will take the finance reins of the Brazilian neobank from Guilherme Lago on July 13, the company said in a Monday press release and securities filing.
• The move comes less than a week after Dutch payments processor Adyen said its CFO, Ethan Tandowsky, is exiting the company, effective Aug. 31, for an “opportunity outside of fintech.”
• In Livingston, São Paulo, Brazil-based Nubank is getting a CFO with more than three decades of experience in financial services, including 12 years at Visa, where he most recently served as CFO of North America. Prior to Visa, he worked at Capital One for 18 years. 

Dive Insight:

Nubank’s financial leadership shakeup comes as the company is pushing into the U.S. In January, Nubank received conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to establish a U.S. national bank and in March, it hired TikTok alum Kim Farrell to serve as its global marketing director.  

Nubank, named one of Time magazine’s most influential finance companies of the year, reported net income rose 41% year-over-year in the first quarter to $871 million. Revenues rose above $5 billion for the first time, while the business also saw elevated credit loss allowances in the period, the company reported earlier this month. 

David Velez, founder and CEO of Nubank, said in a statement that Lago determined “after careful consideration” that this was the right time for him to step down, noting that the two shaped the succession plan together.

“Rob Livingston is the right person to lead the team through what comes next. Our priorities, growth in our core markets, reshaping Nubank around AI, and disciplined international expansion, are unchanged,” Velez said in the statement. 

Lago has served as Nubank’s CFO for five years. He’ll be a special adviser to the company once Livingston starts in the finance role.

During Lago’s tenure, the company grew from a regional fintech to a global digital banking platform serving 135 million customers in Brazil, Mexico and Colombia.

“This planned transition does not change Nubank’s operating model, risk appetite or long term strategy,” Nu Holdings said in the filing, which also thanked Lago for “significant contributions” to Nu’s growth and profitability. 

Adyen

At Adyen, meanwhile, the supervisory board will begin searching for a replacement, according to a release May 27. The company called Tandowsky a “core member of the leadership team.”

Adyen’s co-CEOs said they regretted Tandowsky’s decision to leave but valued his contributions.

“Ethan has been a constant part of the Adyen journey for nearly a decade,” the co-CEOs, Pieter van der Does and Ingo Uytdehaage, said in a press release.

After joining the company in 2016 as a financial controller, Tandowsky became the head of group finance in 2020 and its CFO in 2023, according to his LinkedIn profile. 

In Tandowsky’s departure announcement, Adyen credited its soon-to-be-former CFO with steering the company’s worldwide financial operations during high-growth periods. 

Adyen is losing its CFO as the company vies for a bigger U.S. market share. North America has been a key growth market for the fintech in recent years, but the Dutch company faces tough U.S. rivals. They include Fiserv, with its Clover point-of-sale services, and Worldpay, now a unit of Global Payments as well as digital players PayPal Holdings and Stripe.

“Adyen’s infrastructure is built for long-term resilience, and our daily operations proceed without interruption,” a spokesperson for the company said by email. “Ethan is focused on supporting a seamless transition over the next few months while the search for a successor is carried out.”

New York City-based financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, which follows Adyen, noted that Tandowsky is headed to a pre-IPO company next and that “the start date was likely determined by the needs of the new company.”

Tandowsky is the latest executive to exit the Dutch fintech. Last November, Davi Strazza, the company’s president for the North American region, left the company. Following Strazza’s exit, Gary Yang, then the senior vice president of global account management and partnerships, stepped up to oversee the region while the company searched for his successor.