Mastercard Where To Settle Redefines Financial Inclusion in Poland
Mastercard's Where To Settle is a 2023 digital platform created with McCann Poland and McCann Worldgroup that uses anonymised transaction data and Polish government statistics to help Ukrainian refugees identify the most suitable cities across Poland in which to rebuild their lives, addressing critical gaps in housing, employment and cost-of-living information.
The campaign launched in Poland in June 2023, responding directly to the humanitarian displacement crisis that followed Russia's invasion of Ukraine. According to, almost ten million refugees from occupied Ukrainian territories crossed the Polish border, making Poland the nation that welcomed more Ukrainian refugees than any other country. Major Polish cities absorbed the initial influx, but overcrowding rapidly produced rental price hikes, intensified competition for employment and an unprecedented inflation surge. It became clear that sustainable resettlement required redirecting newly arrived Ukrainians toward smaller Polish cities that retained capacity, affordability and opportunity.
Where To Settle addresses this structural challenge through a deceptively simple mechanism. A refugee completes an anonymous online form describing their current situation, location, skills and needs. The platform then draws on Mastercard's proprietary anonymised spending data combined with publicly available figures from the Polish Central Statistical Office to generate a personalised, condensed profile of the most promising destinations across Poland. No sensitive personal data is stored. The tool delivers actionable intelligence — cost of living, economic conditions, community fit — without compromising user privacy. This integration of financial inclusion as both brand purpose and operational strategy is what Mastercard and McCann describe as the brand's defining commitment: doing well by doing good. The Clapboard Score for Where To Settle is 86 out of 100, reflecting its exceptional fusion of data utility, creative integrity and measurable humanitarian impact across the Polish market.
Mastercard's strategic foundation for Where To Settle rests on a single verified insight. According to, in the first months after the war started, as much as 34% of refugees were unable to decide where to live in Poland. That indecision was not a failure of will — it reflected an absence of reliable, personalised, actionable data at the exact moment decisions had to be made. The campaign was architected to fill that vacuum.
The strategic rationale connects directly to Mastercard's global financial inclusion agenda, which the brand positions not as philanthropy but as commercial strategy. The more people gain access to economic participation, the larger the addressable market for Mastercard's network. In Poland, that logic was tested at scale: a displaced population of millions represented both a humanitarian emergency and a long-term financial inclusion opportunity. McCann's brief was to make Mastercard's data infrastructure serve both simultaneously.
The competitive context sharpens the strategy's distinctiveness. Visa, Mastercard's primary global competitor, has pursued financial inclusion through mobile payment access programmes and partnerships with development finance institutions, but has not publicly deployed a comparable real-time resettlement intelligence tool in any European market. Revolut, a challenger fintech with significant penetration in the Polish digital banking market, has addressed Ukrainian refugees through fee-free account access, but again without a data-driven geographic guidance platform. Where To Settle occupied an entirely uncontested space: the intersection of anonymised network-level spending intelligence, public statistical data from the Polish Central Statistical Office, and the specific decision needs of a displaced population. According to contagious.com, the platform was framed precisely as a life-changing tool aligned with Mastercard's data-for-good mission, a positioning that competitors in the Polish market were structurally unable to replicate without equivalent transaction-level data assets.
Where To Settle is built on a principle of radical restraint. The creative execution resists spectacle in favour of utility, delivering its value not through film or imagery but through the quality of the decision it enables. McCann Poland and McCann Worldgroup engineered the platform so that its creative ambition is entirely expressed in the precision and trustworthiness of its output.
The user experience begins with an anonymous form. A refugee inputs their circumstances — family composition, current location in Poland, professional background, financial situation, priorities for housing and community — and the platform processes that input against two data sources: Mastercard's anonymised transaction dataset, which captures real spending behaviour across Polish cities of different sizes, and official figures from the Polish Central Statistical Office, which provide demographic, employment and infrastructure context. The fusion of proprietary commercial data with authoritative public data is the creative act. It transforms what would otherwise be a generic relocation guide into a personalised recommendation engine with genuine evidential weight.
The design language reflects the same discipline. The interface is clean, accessible and operable without advanced digital literacy — a deliberate inclusion decision given the diverse educational and technological backgrounds of the refugee population the tool serves. Language accessibility was built into the platform architecture to serve Ukrainian-speaking users directly in the Polish market.
Production credits for the Where To Settle campaign identify McCann Poland, based in Warsaw, and McCann Worldgroup as the creative and strategic partners responsible for the platform's development. According to Mccann Pl, the Warsaw office led the originating creative work. Chaka Sobhani, global chief creative officer of Leo Burnett and president of the Cannes Lions Direct jury, cited Where To Settle publicly as demonstrating measurable results, scalability and global applicability — a rare direct endorsement from a senior jury president that speaks to the execution's technical and strategic rigour, as noted by.
Where To Settle generated one of the most decorated award results of any campaign in Poland's advertising history. At Cannes Lions 2023, the campaign received nine awards in total, including a Titanium Lion, a Grand Prix in the Sustainable Development Goals category, Gold and Silver and Bronze in Direct, Gold and Bronze in Public Relations, Silver in Brand Experience and Activation, and Bronze in Creative Data, as documented across published records from the festival. At D&AD 2024, the campaign received a Black Pencil in Experiential, Silver and Bronze in Direct, Bronze in Digital and Social, Bronze in PR, and a Sustainable Development Goals Pencil, as reported by the D&AD records. At the Clio Awards 2024, Where To Settle received a Grand Clio in Direct and a Grand Clio in Digital, according to published Clio Awards results.
No independently verified user-volume or resettlement outcome data for Where To Settle is publicly available beyond the campaign's own described mechanics, and does not publish platform usage figures. The structural case for effectiveness is, however, strong. The platform addressed a verified decision paralysis affecting a documented proportion of the refugee population in Poland. It delivered personalised intelligence at zero cost to users, required no account creation, and combined the two most credible data sources available for the Polish market — Mastercard's network and the Polish Central Statistical Office — into a single accessible interface. Contagious.com described the platform as a life-changing tool, a qualitative assessment grounded in the platform's functional design rather than claimed metrics. The Clapboard Score of 86 out of 100 reflects this combination of creative integrity, strategic precision, humanitarian relevance and exceptional recognition across the industry's most rigorous award systems.
Where To Settle is a 2023 digital platform built by Mastercard and McCann that uses anonymised Mastercard transaction data and Polish Central Statistical Office figures to help Ukrainian refugees identify the most suitable Polish cities for resettlement. It delivers personalised recommendations through an anonymous form, storing no sensitive personal data.
McCann Poland, based in Warsaw, and McCann Worldgroup created Where To Settle for Mastercard. The campaign was published in Poland in June 2023 and represented a collaboration between the Warsaw office and the broader McCann Worldgroup network, as documented in published records from Cannes Lions 2023.
Where To Settle won nine awards at Cannes Lions 2023, including a Titanium Lion and a Grand Prix in the Sustainable Development Goals category, along with Gold, Silver and Bronze Lions across Direct, Public Relations, Brand Experience and Activation, and Creative Data, per published Cannes Lions 2023 records.
The platform combines Mastercard's anonymised transaction data with publicly available statistics from the Polish Central Statistical Office. Together these sources generate personalised cost-of-living and opportunity profiles for cities across Poland, allowing refugees to make informed resettlement decisions without submitting or storing sensitive personal information on the platform.
According to the campaign's documented rationale, major Polish cities became overcrowded after the Ukrainian refugee influx, driving rental price increases and intensifying job competition. Redirecting refugees toward smaller Polish cities with available capacity, lower living costs and employment opportunities was identified as the most effective path to sustainable resettlement across Poland.
Mastercard's Where To Settle campaign receives a Clapboard Score of 86 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's exceptional integration of data utility, creative restraint, humanitarian relevance and verified award performance, including a Titanium Lion at Cannes Lions 2023 and a Black Pencil at D&AD 2024.
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