Noh: banking couples in Brazil

This interview was conducted and edited by Timothy Motte

Biography

Ana Zucato is the CEO and founder of Noh, a Brazilian startup building a joint account app for couples. “Noh” means “knot” in Portuguese.

Via Noh, couples can discuss and organize their finances, with the exact same level of permission on both sides. They also receive a card linked to the account.

In 2022, Noh raised a $3M seed round. Ana has over a decade of experience in various tech companies, including roles at Intuit and Truora. To date, Noh has been downloaded around 400,000 times and processed over $60M. 

Noh started as a bill-sharing app. What led to the pivot?

Our initial thesis was that Brazil lacked multiplayer financial capabilities. We share everything (Netflix, housing, meals) but payments always rely on a single card. We weren’t certain for which user persona that pain was most acute for however. We gave ourselves a year to test a variety of features, growth hacks… We became known as Brazil’s bill-sharing app.

We then took a few months to analyze the results of these experiments and dive deeper into user discovery. One persona came out on top: couples. 

Brazil’s banking infrastructure was built in the 1950s, at a time when women weren’t allowed to own bank accounts. In recent years, Brazil’s outdated bank incumbents have been disrupted by neobanks, Nubank chief among them. But the joint couples account vertical remained underserved. 

In traditional Brazilian banks, most joint accounts have an “owner” and a “beneficiary”. The beneficiary, as its name suggests, has restricted access to the account’s functionalities. For certain actions, the beneficiary has to ask the owner for permission. In the case of heterosexual couples, women often held the “beneficiary” title. Many found this setup egregiously unadapted to our times.

That’s for the infrastructure part. The user experience part of joint accounts was also horrendous: my husband and I used to track our joint expenses on Excel, trying to parse them together fairly at the end of the month… 

The need for a modern, egalitarian joint account app for Brazilian couples stuck out like a sore thumb. We decided to pivot and focus on that vertical, much to the disappointment of users that weren’t couples. 

How is Noh different from other Brazilian neobanks?

For many neobanks, the North Star metric is becoming their users’ primary account. The one where they receive their salary. We didn’t want to play that game because we believed that market to be saturated. 

Instead, we built upon recent open banking legislation. Open banking mandates Brazilian banks to open up their data to third parties, enabling said third parties to build better services. Under that same legislation, third parties can also plug directly into banks, making money transfers between banks and third parties seamless for users.

Noh integrates with all major Brazilian banks. Users can easily move their money from their “traditional” account to their Noh account. In the process, we’ve become sort of an overarching account overseeing others. We view Brazilian banks more as commodities than as competitors. Unexpectedly, 40% of our users actually use Noh as their primary account.

Couples on Noh individually top up the account, but the Noh account is truly egalitarian: transparent, with its own card, with the exact same levels of permissions for both users.

Does Noh need any banking licenses then?

We work with a “banking-as-a-service” provider (Dock), which takes on the burden of regulation. This is a revolution in Brazil. Now, fintechs can register as normal corporations and find a banking partner instead of going through the regulatory process themselves. This has saved us millions of dollars and countless months. The money stored on Noh is actually stored with our banking partner. 

What are the three, most important Noh functionalities?

The first is that connection with users’ existing banks. Noh is simply a software layer which interacts with one’s bank. The recency of open banking legislation makes this feature novel in the fintech landscape. We’ve been one of the first to ship it.

The second encapsulates the transparency features: each user has equal access, a user can edit the name of a transaction (to clarify what that transaction was for)... Our goal is for users to talk openly about money, the key to healthy communication. 

The third is the "envelopes" feature. Couples can create envelopes for specific projects (ie: a trip, buying a house…). They can name those envelopes based on inside jokes they have, allocate money to those projects over time, see them come to reality…

There is no free Noh version. All users pay a monthly fee. Why?