From a client base to a network.

I designed a service around the most under used asset the segment owned: the network of people already sitting inside its own client list.

Role: Business model design and service vision
Organization: Itaú Private Bank
The asset: The client network itself
Status: Running today

01 The asset

The most valuable thing the segment owned was not a product.

Itaú Private Bank serves some of the most influential people in Brazil. Founders, executives, investors, owners of the companies everyone else banks with.

Every one of those relationships had been designed as a line between the client and the bank. Nobody was designing the lines between the clients themselves. The most concentrated network of decision makers in the country was sitting in a client list, being used for nothing.

02 What I designed

I designed a new business model, not another offer.

I designed a business model that brings clients with a shared interest into the same room. Art, sport, business. The interest is the reason to come, and the bank is the host rather than the subject.

From that come encounters worth attending: talks, masterclasses, exhibitions, themed conversation circles. Nobody is invited to hear about a product. They are invited because they care about the same thing as the people sitting next to them.

Interest groups inside a single client base, and the connections a gathering makes possible between them. Illustrative diagram · no client data shown

03 What the client and the bank both gain

The client meets people. The bank earns a reason to be in the room.

For this client, value is the kind of access money still cannot buy. They meet people they had no contact with, and business gets done between them that would not have happened otherwise. That alone is enough to make them accept the next invitation.

For the bank, the value is context. Each encounter is an occasion where the commercial team can present investment opportunities that are relevant, because the room was assembled around a shared interest and not around a product campaign.

So the bank stops interrupting people and starts hosting them. That is a different relationship, and it prices differently.

What it produced

Dozens

of encounters and events delivered

Hundreds of millions

of reais in deals generated through the program

04 The point

The best asset a segment owns is often not on its product shelf.

Conexões needed no new product, no new platform and no new team. It needed someone to notice that the client list was also a network, and to design for that.

05 How I ran it

Nobody asked for this one.

No one briefed me to connect the clients. I noticed it could be an opportunity. What gave me the model was how digital platforms make their money: on Meta, TikTok and YouTube the users themselves produce the content other users come for. Conexões works the same way. Formally, when a client gives a talk. Informally, when the exchanges between them are the valuable content being generated.

I started from an asset the bank already had

The proposition sits on the network already inside the client list. It needed no new product to fund and no new team to hire, which is why the bank could start it the following quarter instead of the following year.
I grouped people by interest, not by how much they have

The gatherings are built around art, sport and business, because a shared interest is what makes two strangers talk.
I chose each format for what it produces

Talks, masterclasses, exhibitions and round tables are not the same thing. I picked each format thinking about the kind of connection it creates.

Next · 02 · Scale

Three areas, one launch date.

01 · Relationships

Eleven clusters, and then one client at a time.