The Transparency Card used data to empower Brazilian citizens to monitor how public money was being spent, turning digital wallets into a tool against corruption.

It has crossed information from the government database to give people updates on expenses in real-time, as push notifications.

It monitors and simplifies all the data that is public by law but, in real life, is very hard to access and interpret.

It took data from complicated governmental websites and transformed it into clear notifications from anyone’s wallet.

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 with multiple open but complex government databases, collecting and simplifying data in real-time.

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, 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 mobile wallet.

Under Brazilian law, politicians' spending data is open — but intentionally complex and hard to access. For instance, government data is completely unstructured and spread across countless federal, governmental, and municipal systems.

So our system collects, organizes, and simplifies all this massive amount of data. When detecting a politician's spending, it sends the information in real-time via push notifications.

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 real-time 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."

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

Transparency Card tackled a system designed to hide corrupt politicians' data.

More than collecting public money spending data from multiple sources and simplifying them, it made Brazilians feel - in their wallets - how public money is being spent,democratizing information that is a constitutional right under Brazilian law - but which sadly still needs to be fulfilled with due transparency.

Using a PassKit integration API to deliver information through user wallets has allowed us to create a digital experience similar to top banks, promoting continuous public money monitoring.People are already accustomed to tracking their spending through real-time phone notifications, so this feature encourages constant vigilance.

The Transparency Card collected and assembled a vast amount of data on spending by Brazilian politicians in recent years.It provides real-time surveillance through cards and offers a spending history tool for better transparency — a valuable resource for understanding and questioning each politician's spending behavior.

More than 430K active cards in mobile wallets.

And more than 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, 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.

When this data was being kept from the public by the president, the use of data to provide more information to the citizens about politicians was a pivotal way of empowering them to claim for transparency.