dale!, Grupo Aval's digital wallet, launched Names from the Hood in Colombia in 2025 to give over 763,000 neighborhood businesses a personalised Tag Aval
ARCHIVEdale! Gives Colombia's Neighborhood Businesses a Digital Name
dale!, Grupo Aval's digital wallet, launched "Names from the Hood" — known in Spanish as "Nombres con Calle" — in Colombia in September 2025 to give personalised Tag Aval payment handles to more than 763,000 neighbourhood businesses, allowing shop owners, street vendors, and small entrepreneurs to receive instant payments under the informal names their communities already know and trust.
The campaign addresses a structural gap in Colombia's popular economy. Countless neighbourhood businesses operate under affectionate local nicknames — a fruit stall might be known to everyone on the block as "Aguacates Luchito" — yet no official digital identity exists to reflect that name, making it harder for customers to find them, recommend them, or pay them with confidence. "Names from the Hood" changes that by letting any business or individual personalise their Tag Aval key using the street name by which they are genuinely recognised, then deploy that key across Bre-B, Colombia's interoperable instant-payment system, including via WhatsApp. The result is that selling and getting paid becomes as simple as sending a message.
Published on September 11, 2025, and executed as a 360-degree media campaign, the initiative was created by LLYC Colombia and connects dale!'s product roadmap directly to a wider national conversation about financial inclusion and digital identity. In Colombia, where a significant share of economic activity flows through informal and semi-formal micro-enterprises, giving those businesses a verifiable, searchable, shareable digital presence is not a cosmetic gesture — it is an infrastructure intervention. The campaign positions dale! not merely as a payments app but as the platform through which Colombia's neighbourhood economy enters the formal digital era.
ARCHIVEdale! identified a consumer insight that most fintech competitors in Colombia have overlooked. The barrier to financial inclusion for neighbourhood businesses is not solely the absence of a bank account — it is the absence of a legible, trusted identity within the digital economy. Without a recognisable digital name, even a business with a payment account remains effectively invisible to new customers browsing social media or searching for a local supplier online.
Colombia's mobile-payments landscape makes the timing of "Names from the Hood" precise. According to Banrep Gov Co, Bre-B, Colombia's interoperable payments system, became fully operational on October 6, 2025, recording more than 64.4 million settled transactions in its first 25 days alone, with nearly 85 million payment keys registered by that launch date. Those figures, also reported by banrep.gov.co, signal a market inflection point: the payment infrastructure is ready, and the competition for who captures neighbourhood commerce on that infrastructure is active. Competitors such as Nequi — another Grupo Bancolombia product with deep penetration among informal workers — and Daviplata, owned by Banco Davivienda, have both pursued the tendero and micro-merchant segment in Colombia. dale!'s strategic answer is differentiation through identity rather than through transaction fees or cashback mechanics.
The strategic rationale is further supported by scale. According to LLYC's own documentation as reported by Llyc Global, the campaign targets approximately 763,000 popular-economy businesses across Colombia. According to Sdgfinance Undp, Colombian mobile-wallet usage grew substantially between 2020 and 2024, reflecting a population increasingly comfortable with app-based finance. By anchoring the Tag Aval customisation feature to names that communities already use — converting informal social capital into formal digital capital — dale! and LLYC Colombia constructed a product narrative that is simultaneously inclusive and commercially defensible.
"Names from the Hood" operates on a single, unusually clear creative idea: the nickname is the product. Rather than showcasing the technology behind Tag Aval or the interoperability of the Bre-B network in abstract terms, the campaign leads with the texture of Colombian street commerce — the warmth, specificity, and trust encoded in names like "Aguacates Luchito" or "La Tienda de Doña Rosa." That specificity is the campaign's primary creative asset, and it required discipline to resist over-explaining the payment mechanics in favour of the human story.
The creative team assembled by LLYC Colombia for this work includes Creative Director Pablo Hernández de Urrutia, Copywriter Sebastián Rendón, and Designer and Art Director Luisa Fernanda Díaz, as documented by llyc.global. Strategy was led by Lili Vega as Strategy Director, with Pablo H. Urrutia also credited as Strategic Planner. Project management was handled by Emilio Alcázar, and head of social media responsibilities fell to Cristina Angarita. Account management across the campaign involved Felipe Leal, Alejandra Rueda, Meligiovana Ponce de Leon, Ana Belén Villamil, María Camila Cortés, Marcela Jacome, Andrea Fariña, and Santiago Canon, per llyc.global. Production was handled by Meteora.
The 360-degree execution spans social media, digital, and broader channel touchpoints, with the campaign anchored by a Spanish-language video asset that accumulated more than 1.28 million views as recorded in the archive record on Clapboard. The creative decision to use WhatsApp as the payment delivery channel is itself a piece of craft thinking: in Colombia, WhatsApp functions as primary communication infrastructure for millions of micro-businesses, so embedding payment capability inside that familiar environment removes friction at the exact moment a transaction is most likely to happen. The visual and verbal language of the campaign deliberately mirrors the hand-painted signs and informal naming conventions of Colombian neighbourhood commerce, connecting the digital product to a genuinely local aesthetic register.
No independently verified sales or conversion performance data for "Names from the Hood" is publicly available at the time of publication. What the public record does confirm is significant audience reach at the campaign level. The video asset associated with "Nombres con Calle" registered more than 1.28 million views, as recorded in the Clapboard archive entry dated September 11, 2025. For a campaign directed at a niche of neighbourhood micro-businesses in Colombia rather than a mass consumer audience, that organic reach figure reflects meaningful resonance beyond the core target.
The structural effectiveness of the campaign rests on a product mechanism with measurable national context. According to banrep.gov.co, Bre-B recorded more than 64.4 million settled transactions between October 6 and October 31, 2025, and approximately 33.05 million people registered on the system in its initial operating period — roughly three-quarters of Colombia's adult population, per banrep.gov.co. dale!'s decision to anchor "Names from the Hood" to Tag Aval customisation within the Bre-B ecosystem means the campaign is not merely creative communication: it is acquisition strategy tied to a national payments infrastructure rollout. Each personalised handle created by a neighbourhood business is a persistent, searchable asset that compounds in value as Bre-B adoption grows.
According to llyc.global, the campaign targets the approximately 763,000 popular-economy businesses identified as the addressable universe in Colombia. The conversion of even a fraction of that base into active Tag Aval users would represent a structurally significant expansion of dale!'s merchant network. Clapboard rates "Names from the Hood" at 72 out of 100, recognising the clarity of its central idea, the precision of its product integration, and the cultural intelligence of its execution, while noting that independently verified downstream metrics remain unavailable.
"Names from the Hood," or "Nombres con Calle," is a September 2025 campaign by dale! and LLYC Colombia. It allows neighbourhood businesses in Colombia to personalise their Tag Aval payment handle using the informal name their community already knows, enabling instant payments via WhatsApp through the Bre-B interoperable payments network.
Tag Aval is dale!'s customisable payment key within Colombia's Bre-B system. Through "Names from the Hood," any business or individual can set their Tag Aval to reflect their street nickname — such as @AguacatesLuchito — making it searchable, shareable, and usable for receiving instant payments via WhatsApp, as documented by llyc.global.
LLYC Colombia created "Names from the Hood" for dale!, Grupo Aval's digital wallet. The core creative team included Creative Director Pablo Hernández de Urrutia, Copywriter Sebastián Rendón, Art Director Luisa Fernanda Díaz, and Strategy Director Lili Vega, with production handled by Meteora, per llyc.global.
The campaign targets more than 763,000 neighbourhood and popular-economy businesses in Colombia. This figure is cited in the campaign brief documented by LLYC Colombia and reported by llyc.global, encompassing shop owners, street vendors, and small entrepreneurs operating within Colombia's informal and semi-formal economy.
Bre-B is Colombia's interoperable instant-payment system. According to banrep.gov.co, it became fully operational on October 6, 2025, recording more than 64.4 million settled transactions in its first 25 days. dale!'s Tag Aval handles operate within Bre-B, meaning each personalised business name created through "Names from the Hood" functions on national payment infrastructure.
Clapboard rates "Names from the Hood" at 72 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's clear central idea, precise product integration with Tag Aval and Bre-B, and strong cultural relevance to Colombia's neighbourhood economy, while noting that independently verified downstream performance metrics are not publicly available at time of publication.
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