The Latin American couple, David Velez, co-founder of digital bank Nubank, and his wife, entrepreneur Mariel Reyes, announced Wednesday their commitment to donate most of their fortune to charity while they are alive. Forbes Puts it at $5 billion. This 40-year-old Colombian engineer runs the successful new bank sweep the area With more than 40 million customers and has revolutionized the banking landscape in Brazil. Vélez-Reyes joined an initiative called Giving Pledge, Following the example of Warren Buffett or gates.

Reyes, a 41-year-old Peruvian economist, runs Reprograma, a start who teaches computer programming to vulnerable women, especially black and transgender women, in Brazil. With her husband, this club of committed millionaires already has four Latin Americans. The pioneers are Eli and Susie Horn, a 77-year-old Brazilian businessman and his wife.

The Vélez-Reyes couple, who have been living in Brazil for more than a decade, announced their engagement. English letter, published on the Giving Pledge, in which they explained that they intend to devote the majority of their wealth to providing opportunities for the most vulnerable children and adolescents in Latin America because “opportunities are not evenly distributed”.

Nubank is the source of the bulk of the wealth they have amassed. Vélez founded the company with two partners in 2012 after leaving his job at Sequoia Capital, the US venture capital fund, which he sent to Brazil to seek investment opportunities. It was enough for him to deal with Brazilian banks, after a huge outcry, to launch an alternative, a digital bank without commissions. I got it right. “Our goal is to reach 100 million in five or seven years across Latin America…” he told this newspaper in 2020.

In their letter, they explain b Photograph They are both on a deserted beach, they don’t explicitly mention the inequality even though they know it Latin america As “a region of great potential, but where millions still live in poverty and have few life chances to fully grow and develop”. Both make it clear that, on the other hand, they belong to families that can provide them with opportunities.

Vélez hails from the Barranquilla business clan where “the motto has always been: You don’t have to have bosses, you have to go your own way”. Prior to founding Nubank, he worked with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Reyes has been a World Bank employee for ten years.

The plan of these millionaires is to create charitable platform They focus on Latin America to give opportunities to other people willing to work hard and confront, they write, “some big problems in an unconventional way.” They actually recruited staff to help them with the charitable mission they embarked on because “life is limited, because ‘you can’t wear two pairs of shoes at the same time’ and because they want their children to build their own paths, that ‘feeling of desperation, that drives us to work hard to achieve something we don’t have’.” “.

Vélez-Reyes is a minority among the 223 pledge donors due to their origin and age. The initiative adds delegates from 27 countries. Most of them are in their sixties. Horn, a Syrian-born Brazilian construction worker and Orthodox Jew and the only one in Latin America so far at this club, described himself in An interview with this newspaper in 2019 as a “socialist and right-winger”.

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