Amanda Chermont

INSEAD

“I am a highly adaptable person who likes to seek new challenges, connections and views.”

Hometown: Belém, Pará – Brazil

Fun fact about yourself: I’ve loved traveling since I was a kid. At 14, I convinced a stranger couple to pretend to be my parents so my 12-year-old sister and I could get into the London Wax Museum – it worked.

Undergraduate School and Degree: Bachelor of Business Administration – Fundação Getúlio Vargas

Where was the last place you worked before enrolling in business school? Nubank as a Product Operations Manager, Latam’s largest Fintech.

Where did you intern during the summer of 2025? I was working full-time at Nubank as a Product Operations Manager.

Where will you be working after graduation? I am targeting a Product Manager role in consumer tech in Europe, ideally at a high-growth company building products that are truly making a positive difference in people’s lives. My longer-term goal is to grow into a senior product leadership position, driving impact at scale while actively mentoring the next generation of women leaders in tech.

Community Work and Leadership Roles in Business School: I am VP of Career in Latin America Club, but I also am actively involved in multiple clubs, including the TMT, Fintech and Women in Business.

Which academic or extracurricular achievement are you most proud of during business school? Winning the INSEAD Master Strategist Day (MSD) with my study group is the achievement I’m most proud of so far. The challenge was set by TB Alliance: how to accelerate market access for a new TB treatment in high-burden countries within one year of regulatory approval for a disease that kills 1.25 million people every year. Our group divided the work deliberately, with some members anchoring the diagnostics and stakeholder mapping while myself and two other colleagues led the solution design workstream. That’s where my product background took over. I pushed for ideas that were bold but grounded: redesigning packaging as a patient engagement tool, gamifying adherence, leveraging data to unlock funding, and building pharma partnerships to shorten the last mile. What made us win wasn’t any one idea, though, it was the way we worked: low ego, high trust, and a genuine belief that the problem mattered. What I’ll remember most is that for one weekend, the problem felt real…because it is. Getting to apply strategy to something that actually matters, and do it well as a team, is exactly the kind of experience I was hoping to find at INSEAD.

What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career? Launching the Payments and Transfer Platform at Nubank. I joined the squad at the beginning, when the goal was simply to establish a canonical transfer protocol for Brazil, and stayed through its evolution into a global infrastructure layer now processing 70 million transactions per month across three geographies.

What I’m most proud of isn’t any single milestone, but the compounding nature of the work: starting with a protocol, scaling it to over 80 use cases, reducing integration time from 12 to 4 weeks, and enabling 37 product launches in a single semester. At one point, Nubank’s CPO recognized the platform as a living example of what extensible, scalable infrastructure should look like, the kind of feedback that tells you the foundation you built actually holds.

It matters to me because the impact is tangible. Every product team that launches faster and every customer who gets a new feature sooner traces back to infrastructure decisions made early, carefully, and with scale in mind. That’s the kind of work I find most meaningful, uilding something that outlasts your time on the team is its own reward.

Why did you choose this business school? INSEAD was the only school I applied to. That wasn’t a default, it was a deliberate choice. After a decade operating at the intersection of finance and technology, I knew I needed to close specific gaps: moving from execution to vision, sharpening my product instincts, and broadening my external frame of reference beyond two companies. INSEAD’s accelerated format was a perfect match for where I am in my career. I didn’t want two years out of the market, I wanted ten months of intense, focused growth. But the single most important factor was the people. With over 90 nationalities in the classroom, INSEAD doesn’t just teach global business, it is global business. For someone who has lived and worked across multiple countries and deeply believes that the best ideas come from diverse perspectives, this wasn’t just a feature, it was the whole point.

Who was your favorite MBA professor? It was Marwan Sinaceur, who taught Organizational Behaviour 1. What made Professor Sinaceur stand out wasn’t just his depth of knowledge, it was his ability to make you feel the material. He would physically act out dynamics, set the room in motion, and create conditions where the learning happened through experience rather than explanation. In one class, while analyzing a case, a student mentioned she would get up on a table to address striking employees. He asked if she would be comfortable demonstrating it. She did, and suddenly the whole room understood what that moment actually looks like in practice. The concepts weren’t new, but the way they landed was. He is the kind of professor you don’t forget.

What was your favorite MBA event or tradition at your business school? The Introduction Week, and especially Leadership in Action Day. It was the first real taste of what INSEAD actually is: intellectually demanding, collaborative under pressure, and genuinely fun. It set the tone perfectly for everything that followed.

Looking back over your MBA experience, what is the one thing you’d do differently and why? Only three months in, I would say it is overanalyzing micro-decision. INSEAD is genuinely accelerated; you are constantly choosing between academics, recruiting, social events, networking, and panels, often all in the same week. As a self-confessed maximizer, I spent the first few weeks overanalyzing every micro-decision and then second-guessing it anyway. As we learned in Prices & Markets: that’s a sunk cost. The decision is already made, the only rational move is to be fully present in the one you’re in. If I could go back, I’d try to internalize that lesson on day one.

What was the most impactful case study you had in business school and what was the biggest lesson you learned from it? It was Sabena Belgian World Airline Strike given at Introduction to General Management class by Professor Felipe Monteiro. This case outlines the strategic changes implemented by Pierre Godfroid, Sabena’s CEO, and introduces Erik Weytjens, a recent graduate of an MBA program and his first assignment to solve a major logistics problem. At that time, Sabena was in crisis facing imminent bankruptcy. The case delves on decision-making under constraints and pressure. I believe it was my favorite not only because it was the first case given to us, but also because it is a relatable, considering we can face similar challenges right after graduation and how we can better prepare ourselves during the MBA.

What business leader do you admire most? Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code. What draws me to her is that she identified a systemic problem, the underrepresentation of women in tech, and built an organization to fix it at scale rather than just talk about it. She didn’t come from a technical background herself, which makes her commitment to the cause more deliberate and more credible. What I admire most is that she translated a personal conviction into something structural and lasting. Reshma Saujani decided to build that at scale. That is exactly the kind of impact I want to have.

What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? What insights did you gain from using AI? INSEAD has taken a thoughtful approach to AI: rather than banning it, most courses encourage you to use it and disclose how. What I’ve gained isn’t just efficiency, it’s clarity on where human judgment is irreplaceable. AI can structure, synthesize, and accelerate. It can’t read a room, build trust, or make a call when the data runs out. INSEAD is teaching me to be a sharper thinker alongside AI, not in spite of it. The students who thrive in this new world won’t be the ones who resist it or the ones who outsource their thinking to it, it’ll be the ones who know when to use which and how to best leverage it without replacing critical thinking and creativity.

Which MBA classmate do you most admire? I believe I was extremely lucky with the study group I was paired with, but also with colleagues and classmates. I’ve been learning both on academic, professional but also personal level.

If I had to choose one classmate, it would be Sanket Kashyap. He is part of my study group, with a background in computer engineering and experience spanning AI and venture capital, a combination that consistently brings new perspective to the group. But what sets Sanket apart isn’t his expertise, it’s his character. He volunteered to tutor classmates before finals because he genuinely enjoys helping people learn. He is patient, structured, and completely without ego about it. In our Organizational Behaviour case, he handled a real leadership challenge with care for his team and calm under pressure. Sanket is the kind of person who makes a cohort better just by being in it and I feel lucky to have him in as a peer.

What are the top two items on your professional bucket list?

First: I want to lead a product organization at a global consumer tech company as a senior executive, one that puts a real and positive impact on people’s lives at the center of its strategy – not as a side initiative, but as the core of how it creates value. I’ve spent a decade building products used by tens of millions of people. I want to be in the room where those bets get made.

Second: I want to build real pathways for women in tech. I’ve benefited from mentors who believed in me before I fully believed in myself, and I want to do that for others – not just informally, but at scale. Whether that’s through an investment platform, a foundation, or an organization I haven’t imagined yet, the goal is the same: fewer women who feel like they don’t belong in rooms they have every right to be in.

What made Amanda such an invaluable addition to the Class of 2026?

“Amanda is an exceptional addition to the Class of 2026, bringing a combination of deep operational expertise, cross-cultural fluency, and collaborative spirit. Drawing on over a decade of experience in finance and fintech, she enriched classroom discussions with practical insights that bridge the gap between strategy and execution at scale. Amanda speaks several languages and embodies the global outlook that defines INSEAD. Her team’s victory in the Master Strategist Day competition – a defining event in the MBA life at INSEAD – reflects both her strategic thinking and her instinct to channel business skills toward meaningful impact. Her team spanned four continents, and Amanda was essential in galvanizing such a diverse group to bring the best out of each team member and take the win. She is also the VP of Careers for the LatAm Club, where she has been a connector and community builder, organizing events that strengthen ties across cohorts and alumni networks. Amanda is deeply committed to inclusive leadership, particularly to creating more space for women in business, a value she has carried from her years of mentorship at Nubank into every team and conversation at INSEAD. Her analytical skills, energy and curiosity elevate those around her by combining rigorous thinking with collaboration and openness to diverse perspectives. It’s been a pleasure to teach her and I can’t wait to see what she does next!”

Aldona Kapačinskaitė
Assistant Professor, Strategy Area

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