Credit Minus the History
Designing a financial product for people the system had already decided to ignore.
■ Telefônica Brasil, trading as Vivo, is a Brazilian telecommunications company and subsidiary of the Spanish Telefônica.
4,000
Applications in first 3 months
8-10%
Conversion rate among applicants
~$90 USD
Average loan (400-500 BRL)
The Starting Point
Think of Pix as Brazil's answer to Zelle — except it was mandated by the Central Bank, works across every financial institution including non-banks, and by 2022 had more active users than the entire Brazilian population has bank accounts.
When the Central Bank launched it in 2020, instant payments became free, universal, and immediate — and Brazilians adopted it faster than almost any payment technology anywhere in the world. Vivo saw an opportunity: what if their customers could pay in installments through Pix, without needing a credit card to do it?
That was the premise behind Parcela Pix. A buy-now-pay-later product built on Brazil's own payment infrastructure, designed to reach the people traditional financial institutions had never bothered designing for.
One in three Brazilians is unbanked. That's not a niche — that's a third of the country.
My Role
I led the Discover and Definition phases of this project — the work that happens before any screen gets designed. That meant getting clear on who we were actually building for, what we knew, what we were assuming, and what we needed to find out. It's the phase where the important decisions get made, often without anyone realizing it yet.
The challenge wasn't just technical — it was about trust and access. We were designing a credit product for people with no credit history, which meant the usual eligibility signals didn't apply. We couldn't rely on the data points that banks traditionally use, because our users didn't have them. That was the whole point.
Working through an Opportunity Assessment Canvas and iterative stakeholder sessions, we mapped out what we knew for certain, what we were assuming, and where the real risks sat. We defined eligibility criteria that balanced accessibility with sustainability — excluding prepaid customers and recent Vivo joiners, for example, not to be restrictive, but to make the product viable enough to keep running for the people who needed it most. Vivo had a unique advantage here — the kind of data on their customers that traditional banks simply couldn't see.
What We Were Really Solving For
Here's what surprised us. We had designed with large purchases in mind — the kind of thing you'd traditionally put on a credit card. What users actually did was something different.
Most transactions averaged around 400–500 BRL (roughly $90 USD). Most people chose just 2–4 installments. And around 60% of the money moved wasn't going to merchants at all — it was going to friends and family. Personal payments. Informal support networks. The kind of financial behavior that the formal system has never had a clean category for.
That finding reframed the product entirely. Parcela Pix wasn't primarily a shopping tool. It was a way for people to manage the financial texture of everyday life — helping a family member, splitting something with a friend — in a way that was structured and manageable rather than stressful.
The Outcome
Parcela Pix launched in May 2024. Within three months it received over 4,000 applications with a conversion rate of 8–10%. Not because we built something flashy, but because we spent the early phases asking the right questions about who we were designing for and what they actually needed. The discovery work shaped everything that came after it. I’ve often found that to be the case.