Resume

Rodrigo Machado Costa

Leader with experience building functions from the ground up and delivering transformational projects in ambiguous environments

Credit Risk · Pricing · Retail and Wholesale Credit · Portfolio Management · Product Management · Strategy & Operations · Data & AI Automation · Machine Learning and Data Engineering

Executive leader in Credit Risk and Pricing, with over 15 years of experience defining strategies and policies and transforming operating models across Retail, Corporate and Wholesale Banking segments. Career spanning credit origination, portfolio management, pricing and risk adjusted profitability, translating growth objectives, risk appetite and efficiency into business priorities, governance and execution.

Experience building functions from the ground up and enhancing existing operations, defining strategy, roadmaps and priorities across Business, Operations, Product, Data and Technology. Led multidisciplinary teams of up to 37 professionals, managed investments and coordinated across Business, Risk, Product and Technology. Combines strategic vision with strong execution capabilities and practical expertise in data, modelling and AI to improve decision making and business outcomes.

Highlights

Pricing Transformation: led the development of the corporate platform from the ground up, integrating pricing strategy, policies, data, products and channels. Generated over R$ 100 million in incremental margin and enabled more than 100 million monthly pricing decisions.
Risk Transformation: led one of the 12 strategic workstreams of Hipe Risk, reviewing policies and the data, model and decision engine architecture. Restructured the policy and model implementation cycle, reducing delivery time from six to two months.
Strategy & Operations in Trade Finance & Services: the initiatives I led contributed to 50% portfolio growth, the recovery of approximately BRL 5 million per month in unbilled revenue and a reduction of up to 76% in rework.
Corporate and Wholesale portfolio strategy and management: developed limit management strategies for PME and portfolio analyses for Corporate. Built loss projections and stress scenarios to anticipate deterioration and support risk budgeting, provisions and executive recommendations on growth and risk appetite.
Products and Hands On Delivery: designed and enhanced digital credit and financial services journeys for Retail, PME and Corporate, connecting Channels, Risk, Product and CRM, with hands on involvement in policies, solution architecture and prototyping.
Data & AI applied to growth and decision making: led initiatives involving predictive models, segmentation and generative AI in Credit and Pricing, connecting data and models to policies, engines and customer journeys.

of experience: 15 years
A career across pricing, credit risk, credit product management, data and AI.
awards: 5
Recognitions for innovation and the transformation of journeys in Risk and Pricing.
courses: 24
Continuous learning in leadership, data science, artificial intelligence and technology.
academic degrees: 5
Foundation in engineering, risk management, valuation and finance.
technologies: 21
Stack applied to programming, data engineering, AI and UX design.

Experience

Santander Brasil

13 yrs 4 mos

Pricing Platform
Data & AI
Credit Decisioning
RAG / LLMs
LangChain
AI Agents
FlexRate Investments
Decision Engines
Retail and SME Lending
Decision engines

Responsible for structuring and enhancing the enterprise Pricing platform and leading the Strategy & Operations agenda, connecting pricing strategy, risk adjusted profitability, and channel execution. Managed CAPEX, OKRs, FinOps, and multidisciplinary squads, coordinating across Business, Product, Risk, and Technology teams within Retail, Business, and Wholesale Banking. Products and segments: payroll deductible loans, personal loans, working capital, and investments; pricing initiatives for merchant acquiring, receivables financing, and book entry trade receivables discounting.

Strategy, roadmap and prioritization: built the Pricing function from the ground up and led the development of new real time pricing capabilities, from concept through implementation, defining strategy and roadmap amid uncertainty and change. Assessed priorities and trade offs based on available evidence, including limited information, considering business impact, effort, operational risk, strategic alignment and the cost of inaction to provide clarity and direction to teams.
Platform and scale: led the integration of pricing policies, decision engines, APIs, products and channels to personalize pricing by client, transaction, risk and behavior, generating more than BRL 100 million in incremental margin and enabling over 100 million monthly decisions.
Growth and conversion: increased conversion by more than 4 percentage points through segmentation strategies and offer prioritization for personal loans, payroll deductible loans and working capital, applying machine learning, propensity models and explainability to commercial decision making.
Pricing strategy: critically assessed pricing strategies and underlying assumptions, using impact and sensitivity simulations to evaluate trade offs across growth, conversion, margin, risk, and capital, while identifying repricing opportunities by product, channel, segment, and risk profile.
Profitability and capital: developed a profitability solution for Wholesale Banking, capturing won and lost quotes and simulating P&L by transaction and client relationship, RWA, RoRWA and ROE, supporting commercial negotiations, pricing decisions and capital allocation.
Commercial opportunity recovery: designed a repricing strategy for clients who abandoned digital journeys, delivering a new offer within 15 minutes of the initial simulation, with projected potential for BRL 50 million in incremental revenue.
Customer perspective and journeys: designed the acquiring pricing journey, integrating MDR, receivables advances and equipment rental, as well as the journey for registered trade receivables discounting.
Open Finance: developed an engagement strategy for risk approved customers for whom the bank offered a pricing advantage, while incorporating categorized Open Finance data as signals for credit policies and models.
Decision efficiency and AI: developed a generative AI and RAG solution to support the review of pricing exceptions, reducing assessment time and improving recommendation consistency, with human oversight for critical decisions.
Governance: served as Pricing Data Owner, accountable for the governance of the domain's data and analytical assets. Established assessment, traceability and quality control practices for AI solutions applied to business decisions.

Hipe Risk
Risk Platform
Data & AI
Databricks
SAS Viya
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

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

Fundação Dom Cabral

Supply Chain, Logistics and Operational Resilience

2026-2027

FIA Business School

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

2014

Instituto Educacional BM&FBOVESPA

Specialization in Credit, Market and Liquidity 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

Key Competencies

Leadership and Function Building

Building and scaling functions and cross functional teams, defining operating models, accountabilities, and priorities. Developing talent and aligning executives and teams to translate strategic objectives into deliverables and results.

Credit Strategy and Portfolio Management

Defining and reviewing customer centric policies, assessing interdependencies across products and their impact on the portfolio. Guiding underwriting, limits, and preventive actions in line with risk appetite and growth objectives.

Pricing and Profitability

Designing and critically evaluating pricing strategies, considering customer behavior and financial performance by product, transaction, and relationship. Using simulations to inform commercial and capital allocation decisions, with a focus on risk adjusted profitability.

Product Management and Strategy & Operations

Defining strategy and roadmaps for financial products and platforms, connecting customer needs to business objectives. Prioritizing initiatives and coordinating execution and operational improvements, considering returns, risks, and delivery capacity.

Data & Analytics for Business Decision Making

Structuring ambiguous business problems and applying quantitative modeling and machine learning to assess risks, anticipate behavior, and identify opportunities. Translating complex analyses into executive recommendations and actionable strategies for Credit, Pricing, and business decisions.

Decisioning Platforms and Operational Transformation

Leading the modernization of Credit and Pricing platforms, integrating data, models, and policies into customer journeys and channels. Establishing implementation processes and governance to scale operations, reduce lead times, and ensure decision consistency and traceability.

Artificial Intelligence and Governance

Identifying and developing generative AI and agent applications to support decision making and automate processes. Leading initiatives from use case selection through implementation and results assessment, with quality controls, traceability, and human oversight.

Customer Growth and Experimentation

Developing conversion, retention, and relationship expansion strategies based on customer behavior and potential. Assessing alternatives through experimentation and simulation, monitoring impacts on growth, portfolio quality, and profitability.

Languages

Fluency for executive and technical environments.

English: Full Professional
Portuguese: Native or Bilingual

Technologies

Python

PySpark/Databricks

SQL

Github e CI/CD

LangChain/LangGraph

ChatGPT

Devin

Claude Code

Azure

Power BI

Figma

Jira

Confluence

SAS

HTML/CSS

MongoDB

Supabase

TypeScript

Weaviate

Microsoft Foundry

AWS Bedrock

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.