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Zestmoney Women Like You Puts FinTech Feminism on Film
Women Like You is a 2019 documentary-style audiovisual campaign created for Indian FinTech lender Zestmoney by Bengaluru-based agency Zensciences, celebrating the women employees whose work drove the company's growth in India's rapidly expanding digital lending market.
Published in August 2019, the campaign consists of a single photo-documentary film that foregrounds Zestmoney's internal talent rather than a fictional consumer archetype. The decision to look inward — to spotlight real women within the organisation as protagonists — gives the work a specificity that distinguishes it from the broader wave of generic female-empowerment advertising that swept across India's banking and finance sector during this period. Zestmoney positions itself not merely as a company that serves women, but as one shaped by them, a distinction with genuine strategic weight in a sector where such claims are rarely substantiated with evidence.
The campaign carries direct continuity with an earlier promotional effort. In August 2018, Zestmoney ran a social and YouTube campaign titled "Avail 0% EMI for Women with ZestMoney," offering zero-interest EMI financing exclusively for women between 11 and 26 August 2018, a promotion that accumulated 67,664 views according to archive material held by Clapboard.com. The 2019 Women Like You film deepens that thematic thread, moving from promotional offer to cultural statement. In doing so, Zensciences shifts the brand's relationship with women from transactional to reputational — from giving women a deal to recognising women as the company's defining asset. The campaign earned a Clapboard Score of 61 out of 100, reflecting a creative concept with clear strategic coherence executed within the constraints of a single-asset format.
Zestmoney operated in one of India's most contested consumer finance segments around 2019. The company's core product — digital EMI financing and Buy Now, Pay Later credit — placed it in direct competition with LazyPay, Simpl, CASHe, Amazon Pay Later, and Flipkart Pay Later, according to research documented by Ken Research. Within that crowded field, differentiation on product terms alone is difficult, which makes brand identity a meaningful lever, particularly when addressing a segment — women professionals in technology and finance — underserved by conventional banking advertising.
The strategic logic behind Women Like You rests on an insight that is both culturally specific to India and commercially grounded: women remain significantly underrepresented in formal financial products and in FinTech leadership simultaneously. By celebrating internal female talent, Zestmoney signals to prospective employees and customers alike that the company's values are structural rather than performative. This is particularly resonant in the Indian market, where trust in digital lending platforms was still being established at the time of the campaign's release, according to reporting by the Reserve Bank of India on the growth of digital financial services across the country.
The 0% EMI for Women promotional post from August 2018, which preceded this campaign and was archived on Clapboard.com, reveals that Zestmoney had already identified women as a priority audience segment. The 2019 documentary represents a strategic maturation of that positioning — transforming a one-off promotional gesture into a durable brand narrative. Zensciences, the Bengaluru agency responsible for the work, brought to the project a compact, high-conviction creative approach suited to a single-film format, avoiding the dilution that multi-asset campaigns can sometimes introduce when budgets are constrained.
Women Like You takes the form of a photography-documentary audiovisual work — a format that occupies deliberate middle ground between editorial photography and branded film. The approach draws on the visual grammar of photojournalism and documentary cinema, lending the piece a credibility that conventional advertising production often struggles to achieve in the finance category.
The creative choice to treat Zestmoney's own employees as subjects, rather than actors or influencers, introduces a register of authenticity that aligns with the broader documentary tradition. Real faces, real roles, and real professional contexts within the company give the film a texture that scripted brand films rarely replicate. This is particularly effective within India's FinTech sector, where consumer scepticism about digital lending platforms remained a live challenge during 2019, and where brands seeking trust had to demonstrate substance rather than assertion.
Production credits for Women Like You are not publicly documented in full. The campaign was submitted to Clapboard's archive by Suraj Chandrakar, Head of Brand at Zensciences, who is identified in the archival record as the submission contact. Chandrakar's role as Head of Brand at the agency indicates that the work was developed at the intersection of brand strategy and creative production, with brand positioning informing editorial decisions at the image-making stage rather than being applied retrospectively. The campaign comprises a single media asset, a formal constraint that concentrates creative energy and demands that every visual and narrative element carry weight. In the context of a brand-building exercise for a digital-first lender competing in India's increasingly saturated BNPL and EMI market, the economy of the format reads as a considered decision rather than a limitation.
No independently verified performance data for the 2019 Women Like You film is publicly available beyond the archival record held by Clapboard.com. The most proximate engagement data on record relates to the August 2018 precursor campaign — the "Avail 0% EMI for Women with ZestMoney" YouTube and social video — which accumulated 67,664 views and 51 likes, with two documented comments, according to archive material on Clapboard.com. These figures represent modest reach for a brand-level campaign in the Indian digital market, though they predate the 2019 documentary and cannot be attributed to it directly.
Women Like You receives a Clapboard Score of 61 out of 100. That score reflects a campaign whose concept is structurally sound and whose cultural timing is well-calibrated, but whose single-asset format and limited documented distribution constrain its measurable impact. The decision to produce one film rather than a multi-platform content ecosystem means the campaign's reach was necessarily bounded, even if its creative quality was sufficient to merit archival recognition.
From a structural effectiveness standpoint, the campaign succeeds in building brand distinctiveness through specificity. By anchoring its empowerment narrative in documented internal reality rather than aspirational fiction, Zestmoney and Zensciences created a piece of work with genuine long-term brand equity potential — the kind of asset that earns credibility incrementally rather than generating immediate performance spikes. In India's competitive FinTech environment, where LazyPay and Simpl competed aggressively on product features, a brand story rooted in people and values represents a differentiated and defensible position.
Women Like You is a 2019 documentary-style film campaign created for Zestmoney by Zensciences in India. It celebrates the women employees who drove the company's FinTech growth, using a photo-documentary format to position Zestmoney as an organisation shaped by, and not merely serving, women in finance.
Zensciences, a Bengaluru-based advertising agency, created the Women Like You campaign for Zestmoney. The campaign was submitted to Clapboard's archive by Suraj Chandrakar, Head of Brand at Zensciences, and was published in India in August 2019 as a single documentary film asset.
In August 2018, Zestmoney promoted a zero-interest EMI offer exclusively for women, a video that accumulated 67,664 views according to Clapboard.com archive records. The 2019 Women Like You film extends this commitment, shifting from a promotional offer to a sustained brand narrative celebrating women's leadership inside the company.
Women Like You received a Clapboard Score of 61 out of 100. The score recognises a campaign with clear strategic intent and culturally grounded creative execution, while reflecting the limitations of a single-asset format and the absence of publicly verified distribution or performance data for the 2019 film.
Zestmoney competed in India's digital lending and BNPL segment against platforms including LazyPay, Simpl, CASHe, Amazon Pay Later, and Flipkart Pay Later, according to Ken Research. This competitive landscape made brand differentiation a strategic priority, giving campaigns like Women Like You significance beyond their immediate promotional function.
Zensciences produced a photography-documentary audiovisual work for Zestmoney, a format that blends editorial photography with documentary film. Real Zestmoney employees appear as subjects rather than actors, lending the piece authenticity that scripted finance advertising rarely achieves and reinforcing the campaign's core message about women's genuine role in the company.
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