#LOQUENOPAGUÉ
Fundación Saldo Justo · Financial Services
Challenge
Behaviour change — Informal workers aged 25-45 in Colombia's urban centers — street vendors, domestic workers, and gig laborers who earn in daily cash but are forced to use predatory 'gota a gota' (drop-by-drop) lenders because they perceive formal banking as hostile, humiliating, and designed to reject them.
Insight
In Colombia's informal economy, workers don't distrust banks because they fear hidden fees — they distrust banks because the very architecture of financial institutions (security guards, dress codes, forms requiring a fixed address) was designed to signal that people like them are not welcome. The real barrier isn't financial literacy; it's a lifetime of spatial humiliation that teaches informal workers their money is too small to matter.
Idea
Expose the 'invisible tax' — the premium informal workers unknowingly pay by avoiding banks — by physically reconstructing the spaces that humiliate them, transforming predatory lending corners in popular markets into transparent counter-banks where people could see, in real time, exactly how much more they pay for the same financial services.
Execution
The campaign erected transparent glass kiosks in six of Colombia's busiest informal markets — Bazurto in Cartagena, San Andresito in Bogotá, and others — directly next to known gota a gota corners. Inside each kiosk, a real-time 'price comparison board' showed what the same loan would cost from a formal microfinance institution versus the neighborhood lender. But the breakthrough was a TikTok series called #LoQueNoPagué (What I Didn't Pay), where former gota a gota borrowers filmed themselves walking into formal institutions for the first time, narrating their anxiety, the stares, and ultimately the moment they were approved. The raw, unpolished videos — shot on phones, often emotionally overwhelming — became the campaign's engine. Each video ended with a WhatsApp link to a Fundación Saldo Justo chatbot that pre-qualified users for microloans without requiring them to set foot in a bank branch, eliminating the spatial humiliation entirely.