A Phone Booth Becomes a Bank / TIGO-UNE "THE PAYPHONE BANK"

The problem

Those 8 million low-income people couldn't open bank accounts, so they had no choice but to hide their savings at home, risking theft. They couldn't get loans either. Meanwhile, TIGO-UNE had a network of 13,000 payphones across the country, but as mobile phones spread, those payphones were losing their reason to exist. Grey Colombia set out to solve both problems at once.

The insight

The answer was simply to use something that already existed, for a different purpose. Payphones were already machines built to take coins. And they were everywhere in the country, open to anyone. They were actually more accessible than banks.

The idea

Open a micro-savings account at a UNE store, and after that, you can save money just by putting coins into the payphone on the corner. The money saved can be used to pay electricity bills, bus tickets, or installment payments on appliances, and payments can be made from the same phone. The old cast-iron phone booth became, as it was, a window into financial services.

What happened

At Cannes in 2017, it won the Grand Prix in Product Design, along with awards in Outdoor, Promo & Activation, and Direct, for 8 Lions in total. The jury president called it "an idea that matters for other countries too." The payphones came to be used for purposes other than calls an average of 6,000 times a month.

Afterthought

It's always exciting to see the moment when an ad physically changes someone's life. I'd love to see the day when phone booths on the street get called "alcancía" (piggy bank).

Awards

• Cannes Lions Grand Prix 2017

Featured in

• What Was Already There Became the MediumFrom chalk to banknotes: 11 media nobody had to buy
• The Ad Is Gone, But the System RemainsFrom a university for taxi drivers to a sidewalk you can read with a cane

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