Brazil has approximately 12.5 million app-based gig workers according to IBGE data from 2022, with that number continuing to grow. Add the broader informal self-employed population, and you are looking at somewhere between 25 and 40 million workers whose income flows through channels the formal banking system was not built to read. These are not unemployed people. They are not people who cannot manage money. They are workers who earn real income every week and who remain, from the perspective of a bank credit officer, financially invisible.
Understanding why this happens requires understanding how the Brazilian credit system was designed, and for whom.
The System Was Built for Formal Employment
The Consolidacao das Leis do Trabalho, Brazil's foundational labor law framework, created a formal employment ecosystem with standardized income documentation. Contracheques, FGTS contributions, INSS records, and employer-registered payroll data all flow through government and banking systems in predictable, machine-readable formats. A bank evaluating a credit application from a CLT worker has a clear data chain: verified employer, verified salary, documented tenure, verified contributions.
That data chain is the foundation of the Brazilian credit evaluation model. SERASA Experian and SPC, the dominant bureau infrastructure, were built largely to enhance and complement that formal employment record with payment history data. When everything works as designed, the system identifies creditworthy formal workers and excludes high-risk ones. The problem is that the design assumption was full formal employment.
Brazil's formal employment rate has never actually matched that assumption. Informality has been a structural feature of the Brazilian economy for decades, not an exception. The gig economy acceleration of the 2010s and 2020s added millions of workers to an informal category that already existed, and it did so faster than any regulatory or institutional response could keep up with.
What Gig Workers Earn and What the System Records
A full-time delivery courier in Sao Paulo working 40 to 50 hours per week on a motorbike typically earns between R$ 3,000 and R$ 5,500 per month, depending on platform, zone, and experience. These are real earnings. They are not marginal or supplementary income for most couriers in this category. This is what funds rent, food, family obligations, and all the other costs of life in a large Brazilian city.
From the formal banking system's perspective, however, these earnings leave almost no readable trace. The delivery platform pays the courier directly into a bank account or digital wallet. That deposit looks like any other transfer. The bank cannot distinguish platform earnings from a family remittance, the proceeds of a sold item, or any other informal cash inflow. Without a formal payroll record, the bank has no way to verify the income, determine its consistency, or assess whether it will continue.
When that courier walks into a bank branch and asks for a personal loan or a higher credit limit, the bank officer faces a verification problem. The courier can show their phone and point to their iFood or Rappi payment history. That information is not verifiable through any institutional channel the bank trusts. The officer's hands are largely tied. The outcome is a decline or an offer at a risk-premium rate that may be unworkable.
The Informal Workaround and Its Costs
Financial exclusion does not mean couriers have no access to credit. It means they access it through channels that do not require formal income verification. Consignado credit tied to digital accounts sometimes applies at higher effective rates than the salaried equivalent. Non-bank lenders operating in the informal lending space are accessible but typically expensive. Family and community credit networks fill some of the gap at social cost.
The cost of credit invisibility compounds over time. A worker without a formal credit history cannot build a SERASA score. Without a score, every credit product accessed carries a risk premium. That premium is essentially a tax on informality, paid by workers who already earn less per hour than formal employees doing equivalent work and who receive none of the formal protections that formal employment carries. The compounding works against workers at every stage.
Why the Cadastro Positivo Was Not Enough
The Cadastro Positivo, established in its most recent form in 2019 under Lei Complementar 166, aimed to shift the bureau model toward positive data. Instead of recording only negative events, it would also record on-time payments, building a positive payment history that could improve scores for workers who managed their obligations responsibly.
The Cadastro Positivo helps workers who already have formal credit relationships. If you have a credit card you pay on time, a financed item you are keeping current, or a bank loan in good standing, that positive behavior now flows into your bureau file and can improve your score. For a courier who has never had access to any of those products in the first place, the positive registry has nothing to record. The registry improves the picture for people who already have some picture. It does not create a picture where none existed.
The Structural Gap This Creates
The result is a significant portion of the working population locked out of the financial products that help people manage risk, accumulate assets, and plan for the future. Personal loans for vehicle repairs, credit lines for equipment, mortgage access, and most insurance products all require the kind of formal credit history that gig workers cannot build through their actual work.
This is not an abstract policy problem. It translates into daily financial decisions made under constraint. A courier whose motorbike needs a R$ 1,200 repair either absorbs the repair at a high-rate loan, borrows informally, or stops working for as long as it takes to save the money from reserve. None of these options is equivalent to the options available to a formal employee with an emergency credit line at a reasonable rate.
We are not arguing that banks are acting in bad faith. The verification problem is real, and lenders who extended unsecured credit to unverified incomes would face genuine default risk. The current system is not malicious. It is structurally misaligned with the labor market it operates in.
What Changes When Income Becomes Visible
The core question Trampay is working on is whether delivery platform data, accessed with consent and read consistently over time, can substitute for the formal payroll record as a basis for income verification. Our early-access work in Sao Paulo suggests it can, at least for a subset of lenders willing to evaluate the data and for couriers with consistent documented earnings histories.
The change when income becomes verifiable is not primarily about any single credit product. It is about the shift from invisible to legible. A courier who has been earning consistently for nine months and can demonstrate that earnings history through a Trampay credit profile occupies a categorically different position in a credit conversation than a courier with no documented income at all. The first conversation can be a negotiation. The second is almost always a decline.
There is a long way to go before alternative income verification is broadly accepted across the Brazilian financial system. The lenders in our partner network are adopters, not the mainstream. But the direction is clear, and the labor market reality that makes this necessary is not going to reverse. The workers are there. The earnings are real. The question is how quickly the system builds tools to see them.
