Brazil loses about $40 Billion per year to corrupt politician spending.

Although Brazilians have the constitutional right to access information about politicians' use of public funds, the data is complex to monitor, leaving room for corrupts to act without being watched.

So amid the most critical and polarized elections in Brazil's history, with a significant amount of fake news, and the threat to transparency posed by President Bolsonaro's secrecy orders to hide his own spending data, Congresso em Foco, an independent Brazilian digital news portal, came to us with a brief:

How to provide quality information to voters so that they can push for transparency in Brazil?

Public money is people's money. So Congresso em Foco created an innovation that sends real-time notifications whenever a Brazilian politician spends taxpayer's money: the Transparency Card.

It's connected in real-time with multiple open but complex government databases.

Designed to be as seamless as possible, it mimics the familiar way people track their personal credit card spending. That's why it doesn't need an app, nor a webapp — just a function native to phones, the mobile wallet. Which turns every Brazilian with a phone into a potential watchdog over public money.

For example, if a politician spends $23,000 on a private jet, Brazilians receive a real-time push notification. With this information in hand, they can push for more transparency, questioning each expense.

To track the expenses of more than 500 politicians, visit cartaodatransparencia.com and add the cards of the politicians you want to watch to your wallet.

Our target: Brazilian voters, 18 to 70 years old.

Months before the 2022 elections, "Corruption" was the leading topic in social media conversations (source: Twitter Market Insights & Analytics Survey), so we tapped into the subject from the perspective of transparency.

The tool is non-partisan. It has information from all politicians, no exceptions. To cut through the loud noises of a polarized election, we opted to deliver the information via mobile phones wallets — using push notifications as a media format to emulate the familiar way of tracking credit card transactions.

Since public money is people's money, we had a clear call to action: "Feel in your wallet how public money is spent."

All data used to develop this project come from official sources of the Brazilian government, as public money expenditures made by politicians are considered open data by Brazilian law but have extremely complicated access.

Since under Brazilian law politicians' spending data is open — but intentionally complex and hard to access — we created a system connected in real-time with multiple official government databases, gathering unstructured data about more than 500 politicians.

Upon detecting the expense in real-time, it delivers detailed information to Brazilians in the simplest possible format: a push notification directly to their phone's wallet.

With no need for an app, or a webapp, it uses a function native to phones, the mobile wallet.

All you had to do was go to cartaodatransparencia.com and choose the politicians you want to follow from your own wallet.

An integrated campaign with film, digital media and social content, launched the project 4 weeks before the national elections, when the president's secrecy orders threatened transparency.

Transparency Card is an ongoing project. Ever-evolving, and globally scalable.

So far, more than 430K active cards are in mobile wallets, and 20MM notifications have been sent.

Congresso em Foco simplified and democratized access to complex data, transforming every Brazilian with a phone into a potential watchdog over public money - becoming even more relevant as a media channel.

According to Contagious, Transparency Card "Empowers a nation to monitor politicians and not blindly trust those in power."

The innovation also served as an investigative source for journalists who wrote news based on the expenses exposed by the platform.

One of the biggest Brazilian activist movements, Projetemos, organically supported the innovation and spread the word about it in more than 15 state capitals.

As an innovation that exposes politicians, Transparency Card has faced several attempts at hacker attacks, which was expected due to the messy Brazilian political scenario.

The Transparency Card was launched in September 2022, weeks before the national elections — In Brazil, election years are historically years in which politicians spend larger amounts of public money in questionable or even corrupt ways.

This particular election was even more tense when it came to that matter, because the president's party had passed a law of 100 years of secrecy, protecting his information from going public and causing great dissatisfaction amongst the population.

Providing this data to the citizens about politicians in such an easy way (using their phones and digital wallet, a tool that is part of their daily life), was a pivotal way of bringing information to people who had no transparency from their government.