Régis Henrique Munhoz da Cruz

Where automation first met financial markets

My career started while I was still studying Control and Automation Engineering, at an industrial multinational, in Production Planning and Control. That was my first contact with what would become a constant: processes, indicators, efficiency and decision making.

It did not take long for that curiosity to meet technology. At Itaú BBA, on the Treasury Desk, I started automating processes for financial products and investments. Operations that relied on manual work could be executed faster, more reliably and at scale. I began building bots, internal tools and interfaces to automate steps of fixed income contracting and processing.

Why are we doing this by hand if we can build a better way?

Understanding technology from the inside

Next I moved to Santander's technology hub, working on the development and modernisation of financial systems: Java, legacy systems, batch processing and critical banking applications.

That experience mattered. It showed me that knowing technology was essential — but that my real interest was not in building software. It was in using technology to solve business problems. That distinction shaped every choice that followed.

The period that shows up on no dashboard

After finishing my engineering degree I made a different call. I paused the corporate track and spent eight months in Cork, Ireland. I studied English at Cork English Academy, worked as a kitchen assistant at the Imperial Hotel to support myself, and got to know different places and cultures across Europe.

It was not just a study exchange, and it is not a CV line about tourism. It was an exercise in independence, adaptation and exposure to an environment completely different from the one where I had built my life until then — and the willingness to start over somewhere nothing was familiar.

It is also where the English I use professionally every day comes from.

When automation started changing how a company works

At Banco Hyundai Capital Brasil I joined FP&A and went deep into budget, forecast, P&L, IFRS-9, BR GAAP and performance tracking. But the same pattern came back: whenever I found repetitive, manual processes, I started automating them.

Closings, financial reporting and profitability analyses that took hours — sometimes weeks — moved to RPA, Python and analytical models. A ROA analysis framework turned simulations that used to take weeks into minutes.

And something interesting happened: other areas started coming to me. Compliance, Treasury, Sales Planning and Commercial stopped being 'other people's problems' and became opportunities to apply data and technology. What started inside FP&A spread across the organisation.

The value of Analytics is not in the dashboard. It is in the decision that dashboard enables.

Data at scale, then the other side of the table

After a period at Aon in Business Intelligence, I joined Nubank. The challenge was different: working with data at scale, in a digital company with millions of customers. I worked in Anti-Money Laundering, combining Analytics, data engineering, risk and automation, with pipelines in Scala, Python and Spark over large transactional volumes.

It required understanding technology well enough to build scalable solutions; data well enough to spot patterns; regulation and risk well enough to understand the problem; and business well enough to turn all of it into decisions.

In 2025 I left Nubank and founded BAPOS Assessoria & Consultoria, bringing financial management, indicators, automation and technology to small and mid-sized companies. More than building a consultancy, I got to know the other side of the table: the business owner who has to make sales happen, pay bills, organise people and decide with limited resources.

Back to the corporate world — with a new perspective

In May 2026 I joined PagBank's Finance Directorate, working at the intersection of Finance, Banking, Acquiring, Data, Technology and Artificial Intelligence: AI financial governance, cost planning and tracking, rate benchmarking, Opex and strategic indicators.

Today my background brings together experiences that rarely appear in the same professional. Engineering taught me to understand systems. Technology taught me to build them. Finance taught me how a company generates results. Analytics taught me to turn information into decisions. Large institutions showed me how complex organisations work. And entrepreneurship showed me how to turn knowledge into results when every decision counts.

Understand the problem, organise the complexity and build a better way of doing things.