AKQA: Congresso em Foco’s Transparency Card

Every year Brazil loses about $40bn 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 corruption.

AKQA worked with Congresso em Foco, an independent Brazilian digital news portal, to provide real-time transparent information about politicians’ spending habits. The Transparency Card accesses government databases and sends notifications to users when politicians spend taxpayers’ money.

Designed to be as seamless as possible, The Transparency Card mimics the familiar way people track personal credit card spending. If a politician spends $23,000 on a private jet, for example, users of The Transparency Card receive a real-time push notification. With this information at hand, they can request more information and question each expense.

Rather than using an app to track this information, The Transparency Card uses features native to phones to relay this information in the most straightforward format possible. The campaign simplified and democratised access to this complex data, transforming every Brazilian with a phone into a potential watchdog of public money.

So far, more than 430,000 active cards are in mobile wallets, and 20m notifications have been sent. The Transparency Card also served as an investigative resource for journalists who wrote news based on the expenses exposed by the platform.