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, collecting and simplifying data.

Designed to be as seamless as possible, it mimics the familiar way people track their personal card's spending. That's why it doesn't need an app, nor a webapp — just a feature 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.

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 and organizing 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.

The design choices reinforced the importance of the message about transparency, bringing translucent and minimalist elements.

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.

Days later, we received support from one of the biggest Brazilian activist movements, Projetemos, a group that makes nationwide wall projections on social and political issues, spreading the word about the project in more than 15 state capitals.

So far, there are more than 430,000 active cards.

Resulting in more than 20 MM notifications sent.

The project empowered Brazilians to hold politicians accountable and served as an investigation source for journalists, helping to boost transparency as a crucial elections topic.

Following the elections, the newly elected congress members have been added to the platform. And in his first speech, President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva announced that the Access to Information Law would be reinstated, reversing Bolsonaro's secrecy orders. So we updated the platform again with every single hidden expense.

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

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 - everyone was asking for more transparency.

By curating and bringing this data to citizens, we empowered them to respond to the lack of transparency in an immediate and meaningful way.