Photo of Rodrigo Machado Costa

Rodrigo Machado Costa

Head of Pricing & Credit Decisioning

Data & Analytics · Machine Learning & GenAI · Credit and Pricing Platforms

Specialist with over 15 years of experience in the financial sector, working across credit risk, pricing, segment management, data, transformational projects, and the design and review of digital journeys for credit products. I have a track record of building areas from the ground up, developing high-performance teams, and leading strategic agendas with C-level stakeholders across Retail Individuals, Retail SMEs, Agribusiness and Wholesale , combining a strong technical foundation in data science and data engineering.

Throughout my career at Santander, I was responsible for building strategic areas and platforms — including the Agribusiness Credit Policy area, the Product Analytics area for Trade Finance, the Risk Platform and, more recently, the Pricing Platform — always focused on scaling analytical capabilities, modernizing decision-making processes, and driving direct impact on growth, profitability, and operational efficiency.

Key Competencies

Leadership

Building areas from the ground up, developing high-performance teams, managing multidisciplinary squads, OKRs, executive communication, and presenting in C-level forums.

Risk

Credit policies, limits, approval authorities, rating, PD/EAD/LGD, portfolio management, sector concentration, portfolio quality, Basel, and model governance.

Pricing & Profitability

ROE, RWA, RoRWA, capital, margin, spread, strategy, elasticity, optimization, and risk-adjusted profitability.

Platforms & Engines

Pricing/risk engines, scalable architecture, APIs, system integration, digital and assisted channels, observability, and governance.

Transformation Projects

Leading transformation programs with agile squads, roadmap, OKRs, FinOps, and change management — from strategy to operation.

Data, Analytics & AI

Data pipelines with Databricks and PySpark, predictive machine learning models, and GenAI applications and autonomous agents for intelligent automation.

Languages

Fluency for executive and technical environments.

  • EnglishFull Professional
  • PortugueseNative or Bilingual

Experience

Santander Brasil

13 yrs 4 mos

  • Pricing Platform
  • Pricing iAdvisor (GenAI)
  • Impact Simulator
  • FlexRate Investments
  • Decision Engines
  • Payroll Loans
  • Personal Loans
  • Working Capital
  • APIs & CRM

I lead the construction of the new corporate pricing platform for Loans and Investments, responsible for integrating pricing strategy, decision engines, APIs, products, channels and CRM. I work on revising pricing policies, CAPEX management, multidisciplinary squads, OKRs, FinOps, architecture, observability, testing and governance, contributing to more than R$ 100 million in additional margin.

  • Implemented personalized pricing for payroll loans, personal loans and working capital, enabling more than 100 million monthly pricing decisions. On the roadmap: FGI, Pronampe, overdraft credit line (CCG), acquiring advances, and credit card installments.
  • Implemented FlexRate for Investments (CDB, LCI, LCA), a solution to personalize the rates of proprietary-issued securities at the client level.
  • Deployed new segmentation and propensity-score models for personal loans, payroll loans and working capital, increasing contracting propensity and raising conversion by +4pp.
  • Leads the team responsible for the parameterization and end-to-end management of the pricing engines, reducing the time to evolve and deploy policies from weeks to as little as D0.
  • Leads the development of Generative AI (GenAI) solutions applied to Pricing, including the Pricing iAdvisor, which uses structured and unstructured data to generate insights and support pricing-flexibility analyses for corporate clients, and the Impact Simulator, a solution that lets strategy teams simulate impacts on risk-adjusted profitability from pricing policies documented in Word.
  • Developed a solution and policies to enable price-communication campaigns and abandoned-cart journeys with repricing, with an expected R$ 50 million in incremental revenue.
  • Leads the development of a transactional cross-sell calculator, integrating cash and credit to support price defense in corporate deals.
  • Hipe Risk
  • Databricks
  • SAS Vaya
  • PySpark
  • Machine Learning
  • Decision Engines
  • Credit Card
  • Overdraft
  • Trade Finance
  • Product Analytics
  • FX
  • FINIMP / ACC / ACE
  • 4131 & Loans Offshore
  • Letter of Credit
  • Python
  • SQL Server
  • Agribusiness
  • Limit System
  • Rating
  • Approval-Authority Governance
  • Machine Learning
  • Portfolio Management
  • SME Credit
  • Rating+ for Companies
  • Machine Learning
  • Provisioning & Rating
  • Product Owner
  • Transactional Cross-sell
  • Corporate Banking
  • Credit Risk
  • Portfolio Management
  • Executive Dashboards
  • Sector Concentration

Itaú Unibanco

1 yr 6 mos

  • Risk Modeling
  • Basel II
  • PD / EAD / LGD
  • Receivables (Checks & Trade Notes)
  • Corporate Credit

Academic Background

FIA Business School

Extension, Valuation: Company Valuation, Mergers, Acquisitions and Equities

2014

Instituto Educacional BM&FBOVESPA

Specialization, Risk Management

2012

COPPE/UFRJ

MSc., Electrical Engineering — Control, Automation and Robotics

2011

UFRJ — Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

BSc., Control and Automation Engineering

2006–2011

Technologies

Python

PySpark/Databricks

SQL

Github e CI/CD

LangChain/LangGraph

ChatGPT

Devin

Claude Code

Azure

Power BI

Figma

Jira

Confluence

SAS

HTML/CSS

Awards & Recognition

2025

New Payroll-Loan Pricing Engine

Conquistar Customer Engagement — Best Innovation Project | Santander Brasil

Recognition for enabling the decision-engine architecture for pricing, delivering the first online pricing policy for new payroll-loan operations — covering account holders and non-account holders, internal channels and CTPS — using client and operation data for personalized pricing.

2023

Hipe Risk

Star Santander — Best Project in the Risk Category | Santander Brasil

Recognition for acting as leader of one of the project's 12 strategic workstreams, responsible for revising the data architecture, decision engines and Risk analytical models, and for leading the tool selection and the pilot.

2022

Migration of SAS Pipelines to Databricks

Conquistar Technology & Operations VP — Best Project in the Risk Category | Santander Brasil

Recognition for leading the project to modernize the Risk analytical pipelines, creating the Risk Data Mesh to feed policies, models and decision engines. The initiative eliminated manual processes, automated critical routines in Databricks and increased the area's scalability, governance and operational efficiency.

2017

Rating+ for Companies

Risk Pro — Best Project of the Risk VP | Santander Brasil

Recognition for implementing a new risk-rating methodology for mid-sized companies, based on five machine learning models, along with the development of a management system used by risk specialists.

2014

European Central Bank Audit

Risk Pro — Best Project of the Risk VP | Santander Brasil

Recognition for supporting the defense of the European Central Bank audit of the Corporate portfolio, contributing technical analyses and portfolio risk evidence.

Certifications & Courses

Professional Certifications

Amazon Web Services

ISE Business School

  • Strategic Results Management

    2025

    ISE Business School

SAS Brasil

  • Applied Analytics Using SAS Enterprise Miner

    2017

    SAS Brasil

  • SAS Base Programming 1, 2, 3, Macro and SQL

    2011

    SAS Brasil

Courses

Artificial Intelligence

Data Engineering

  • FIA — Big Data and AI | Santander Track

    2021

    Santander Brasil

  • DP-203 — Data Engineering on Microsoft Azure

    2021

    Microsoft

  • Excel VBA

    2012

    Ka Solution

Management

  • Feedback Accelerator Journey for Heads

    2025

    Academia Santander

  • Communicating Leader Program

    2024

    Santander Brasil

  • Privacy and Data Protection

    2023

    Santander Brasil

  • Public Speaking

    2012

    Eunice Mendes

Agile

  • Pro Agile — Domain Owner Track

    2025

    Santander Brasil

  • Pro Agile — Domain Technical Lead Track

    2025

    Santander Brasil

  • Technological Singularity and Agile Methodologies

    2019

    Santander Brasil

Finance

  • Project Finance

    2013

    Santander Brasil

  • Corporate Banking Products

    2011

    FGV