WeCapital turned shopkeepers' notebooks into a real credit history for Mexico's unbanked

WeCapital was told to make a campaign to support women, but DDB Mexico saw a worse problem underneath: 83% of Mexican women had no credit record, so even reliable borrowers were invisible to banks. The agency reframed the ask from a brand-comms job to a product that manufactures the missing asset.

Women in Latin America buy food and supplies on trust at their corner store, and stores keep handwritten ledgers of who owes what and who pays. That behavior — 'fiado' — is effectively a credit history, except it lives in a notebook the formal financial system cannot read.

Data Tienda collected the storekeepers' records via a simple two-minute online form, converting them into an official credit profile. Women authorized the data collection, and the resulting file was usable at WeCapital and other lenders, not just the sponsor.

By December 2021 more than 100 women had received their first microcredits and the scheme had spread from Mexico City to Puebla, Guadalajara, Morelia and Monterrey. The whole program mobilized a vast informal financial record that banks had overlooked for decades.