Brazil is facing the worst economic crisis in its History and the demand for personal loans increased exponentially in the past years - with almost 70% of it concentrated in only 5 banks. Santander was ranked number 4 on the list, but instead of fighting with the other banks, our growth strategy was to focus on attending the other part of the market that was already being covered by the fintechs.

It all started by building from scratch a mobile-based platform to customize different offers to each customer. And when it came time to give a name to this new fintech, we came up with an ambitious and bold idea: when people are in need of money, the word they hear all the time is “NO” – so, we decided to call this new fintech “YES” (that starts with the same letter as Santander and is also the abbreviation of “simple” in Portuguese). And since it’s a mobile platform to help people “unlock their lives”, we’ve adopted the unlock symbol as our icon - placing it everywhere, from the badges and mugs to the illustrations that we used to create all the visuals. Finally, our communication strategy was based on the famous quote “You already have NO as an answer. Try SIM instead”.

We did an immersion with people from different social groups to understand their pain-points when applying for a loan at a bank. And the overall opinion was that the processes were extremely slow and there was a lack of services for lower-value credits. So, the conclusion was… SIMple: we had to launch a new fintech powered by Santander with a much simpler customer experience and focused on microloans.

The first step of this journey was to design all the steps of the customer journey. Then we started building in-house all the technology necessary to support it – and since the beginning, we decided to make it SIMple:

• A SIMple solution: we launched a new fintech powered by Santander focused on microloans.

• A SIMple platform: we built a mobile-based solution accessible to everyone.

• A SIMple design: the application process has only 4 steps.

• A SIMple request: you can put your car and even your bike as collateral for the loan.

• A SIMple verification: to finish, you take a selfie to sign.

RESULTS (IN LESS THEN 2 YEARS):

+ 3 million active users

+ 700 million BRL given on loans