Karina Portugal: Learning to Ask the Right Question

How an advertising executive who once worked Cannes Lions became one of the international voices in digital trust, fraud prevention, and identity for agentic AI

Ten years ago, Karina Portugal was at advertising festivals like Cannes Lions, discussing campaigns and branding. Today, she sits across the table from some of the largest banks in Brazil, Europe, and the United States to discuss a much harder problem to sell: how do you know whether you can trust who, or what, is on the other side of a transaction.

The turning point began in a way she herself describes as unexpected. A Polish fraud-prevention startup, still in its fundraising and international expansion phase, approached her for a VP of Sales role. It was no small choice of market: Poland has established itself as one of Europe’s most relevant hubs for data science and AI, with cities like Wrocław earning the nickname “Polish Silicon Valley.” For Karina, entering that ecosystem was exactly the environment she wanted to be in at that point in her career.

Karina didn’t come from a technical background, knew nothing about fraud prevention, and was competing for the role against five male candidates. What she lacked in product knowledge, she made up for in something else entirely: she understood customers.

“What are the odds of me landing this role in Poland, competing against five other male candidates with actual experience in fraud prevention?” she remembers thinking. What she had, and they perhaps didn’t, was something else: the ability to sell, negotiate, and build relationships.

That was exactly the argument she made in the interview. “Hire me, and I’ll bring you the client you want most,” she told the startup. It wasn’t an empty promise. Karina flew to Poland, spent three weeks immersed in the product, returned to Brazil, and closed a proof of concept with one of Latin America’s largest retailers, addressing e-commerce fraud and account takeover. The POC hit its target metrics and converted into a signed contract in under a year.

It was the start of a career built on a simple but uncommon thesis: technology doesn’t sell technology. Technology sells when it solves a business problem the customer already knows they have.

The Offer She Turned Down, Until She Didn’t

Years later, already well known in the market, Karina received a LinkedIn message from a Portuguese executive at a fraud-prevention startup looking to expand its investor base and international client roster. He had been following her trajectory and wanted to talk. She took the meeting. But when the offer came, she said no. It wasn’t the right moment: she was in the middle of important negotiations at the company she was with, closing clients she couldn’t simply walk away from.

A year later, the same executive came back to find her. This time, Karina had already closed what she needed to close, including the large Latin American retailer, and she said yes, taking on the challenge of working with ten of Brazil’s largest banks in fraud prevention: card transactions, Pix, account opening, a world that already connected back to the first European bank clients she had served while at the Polish startup.

Starting From Zero, in Singapore

While at the Portuguese startup, Karina was approached by a Singapore-based startup, also focused on anti-money-laundering, raising investment for its international expansion, looking to open the Brazilian market. The offer came with no existing infrastructure: no client, no deal in motion, no base to build from. Karina built the operation from scratch: prospecting, relationship-building, pipeline, all of it.

It was one more piece of the pattern that would define her career: entering new markets with no safety net, and building a commercial presence where none existed before. By this point, her career already spanned clients across four continents (South America, Europe, Asia and, later, North America), always at a distance, by phone, video call, and occasional travel.

The Leap to the United States

That same pattern (saying no when it’s not the right time, saying yes when it is, and then building from scratch if needed) would resurface years later, in the most recent decision of her career.

Unlike the previous chapters, this time the challenge wasn’t opening a market from zero, but entering one that was already mature and fiercely competitive: the United States is home to some of the world’s largest financial institutions and its most advanced startups in digital identity and trust-focused AI, an environment where the bar to entry is high and the competition for space never lets up.

Karina went through nearly a year of negotiation and six or seven interviews before accepting the challenge of serving American and international clients from a U.S.-based digital identity startup. That’s where her career, until then focused on fraud prevention and anti-money-laundering, gained a new layer: digital identity applied to AI agents as well. “It was a very deliberate negotiation, and in the end, a happy one,” she says of the process, admitting that part of what convinced her was seeing, throughout the interviews, the caliber of the people she’d be working alongside every day.

The Right Question

Along the way, Karina went back to school, simply because she has always loved learning. She completed an executive program at the Wharton School focused on leadership, business, and artificial intelligence, then moved straight into Stanford, where she has continued participating in executive programs, staying close to faculty and other leaders in the technology sector.

What she credits that education with is a shift in posture: learning to lead with questions rather than ready-made answers. “I’ve always learned the most from figuring out how to ask the right questions. Listening, and asking the right questions,” she says. In a career built on understanding the customer’s problem before selling any solution, that became a core skill, and also a direct tie to the American technology and artificial intelligence ecosystem she has been part of ever since.

It’s that same skill she applies today to the biggest open question of the moment: no one yet has a ready answer for how to establish trust when AI agents start acting on behalf of people and companies. Karina doesn’t claim to have that answer. But she has built her entire career on knowing exactly which question to ask before the market knows the answer.

Four Continents, Four Ways of Thinking About Risk

Few professionals in the industry have sold identity and fraud prevention to European, American, and Brazilian banks. Karina is one of them, and it has changed the way she sees the very concept of trust.

“People who come purely from technology tend to believe the best product wins. People who come purely from banking tend to believe the safest process wins,” she says. “My experience has been different. Customers don’t buy the best product. They buy the product that solves the problem they’re trying to solve at that moment.”

That philosophy translates into method: Karina opens the sales conversation with the customer’s own numbers, not a feature list. In one of the most striking examples from her recent career, a major financial institution had used the same identity solution for years, simply because it had become the market standard. By analyzing, together with the client, fraud performance, operating costs, and user friction, it became clear the legacy approach was costing real money: the projection pointed to a meaningful reduction in unnecessary costs, representing millions of dollars in projected annual savings.

“That was the moment the conversation changed. We stopped debating technology and started talking about business outcomes,” she says. “Data takes opinion out of the room and gives everyone a common language for making decisions.”

The Question No One Can Answer Yet

Today, at a U.S. digital identity startup, Karina serves as Director, covering banks, marketplaces, and strategic partnerships in agentic trust, working with some of the largest financial institutions in the world, including Brazil’s five biggest banks, alongside active conversations with players in the United States. She is immersed in a subject that, in her view, still has no definitive market answer: identity in a world of AI agents.

“No one really knows yet. Everyone is testing,” she says, plainly. The question she hears constantly from bank executives isn’t about distrust of the technology, but about a concrete gap: how do you know who is actually behind an autonomous agent making decisions on a customer’s behalf.

She has already taken part in one of the first real agentic transactions inside a major financial institution, a moment that, in her telling, marked the shift from a theoretical concept to something already beginning to happen in practice. “This isn’t a future concept anymore. It’s already starting to happen,” she says.

Karina compares the current moment to the early days of contactless payments. “People didn’t trust it right away. Over time, confidence grew, until tapping your card became something completely natural. I think agentic AI will follow a similar path. We’ll trust it first with low-risk decisions, then, progressively, with more complex interactions, as confidence builds.”

The Throughline

From advertising at Cannes Lions to banks moving billions, Karina identifies one trait that hasn’t changed: customer obsession. “Ever since account management at an agency, I’ve always stayed very close to my client. Always available, always responding the minute they need me.”

That obsession, combined with the discipline of knowing when to wait for the right moment and the ability to turn data into argument, is what has sustained an entire career of deals closed with large financial institutions.

Karina Portugal continues to move between São Paulo, New York, and San Francisco, contributing to the global conversation on digital identity and agentic commerce, betting that the next frontier of trust won’t be written by someone who understands only technology, or only banking, but by someone who can move naturally between both worlds.

It’s this track record, built across four continents (selling to European, American, and Brazilian banks, opening markets from zero across South America, Europe, and Asia, and closing multimillion-dollar contracts) that today underpins her most recent ambition: continuing to expand her presence in the U.S. market, right at the center of the global conversation on identity, fraud, and trust in agentic AI.

While you finish reading this piece, there’s probably already a new AI model, a new capability, or a new agent doing something that seemed impossible yesterday.

But the question Karina Portugal hears every day, in conversations with banks, fintechs, and technology companies, remains the same: who is behind this agent, and on whose behalf is it authorized to act?

It was precisely around that question that she decided to build her career.