Lucca Tosto

Arazul is a boutique financial services firm in São Paulo, with over R$2 billion in assets under management across credit, corporate finance, asset and wealth management, and trading, and associates in China and the USA. I looked after clients directly, designing personalised portfolios and wealth management solutions with integrity always at the forefront, and built relationships strong enough that many of those clients are friends to this day.

Walke was my first time owning a business: a forward-looking fintech I founded with fellow computer engineering and business administration students. The idea was to make investment advice more affordable, a platform connecting independent advisors to people willing to pay fixed fees, where everyone could also share portfolios and ideas like a social network. I managed and optimised the MVP development alongside the CTO and CEO, leading a team of four developers. We raised outside investment and were paying the whole team, but eventually wound the company down when further funding dried up, since we were all still at university. Still, it was a formative first taste of building something from nothing.

I was invited to help build BRASFI by Viviane Torinelli, PhD, a risk manager at the Central Bank of Brazil and, at the time, a PhD student, who has since become a long-standing friend. The Brazilian Research Alliance for Sustainable Finance and Investments was inspired by GRASFI, its global research counterpart, and we built it from nothing: I ran the first webinar, led the early social media, then moved onto the admin side. As funding and annual membership fees came in, I became head of finance, formally establishing the association in Brazil, managing expenses, forecasting and reporting back to the members. It has since grown across 15 Brazilian states and 10 countries.

My family has been in the restaurant business in Brazil for over half a century, at one point across seven states, including Brasília, São Paulo, Salvador and Recife. It's where I learned the basics of owning and running a business: the finance side, and people management, which can quietly make or break a business.