Colombia's Fintech Dollar War: Selling a Strong Peso

While football played out on screen, a quieter contest unfolded in the ad breaks — and it had little to do with football. It was about the dollar.

The backdrop was the currency itself. Over the tournament window, the Colombian peso kept strengthening: the dollar traded at roughly 3,574 pesos on the June 11 opening day, sliding to about 3,389 by July 3. Pull back and the move looks larger still — the peso was trading around 15% stronger than a year earlier, when the dollar sat above 4,100. A cheaper dollar is a dollar on sale, and Colombians took notice.

In MIA’s tracking of the fintech category, “dólar hoy” — “dollar today” — draws more than 2.7 million queries: the highest-volume search term that isn’t a bank’s own brand name. It outranks every neobank, Nequi included, and trails only the biggest traditional-bank brands. When an entire country is checking the exchange rate, the exchange rate itself becomes a product.

The incumbents are selling dollars too — just differently

The World Cup surge exposed a twist: the dollar isn’t just an online talking point — it’s a product traditional banks are actively selling, using the assets only they have: trust, licenses, and offshore infrastructure.

BBVA ran the loudest dollar campaign in the category. Across more than 5,000 tracked radio spots plus open-TV airtime, it promoted a dollar savings account through its Panama branch at a 3.56% annual return, framed with a family-planning story: “Juan and Mafe save with a dollar account to secure Isa’s education.” Several of those spots ran within football and sports-radio programming, and one riffed on the June prima (mid-year bonus) — “what should we do with the bonus money?” — steering the answer toward dollars.

Davivienda pushed the same idea through its app, inviting customers to “open your International Savings Account… save in dollars” in a couple of taps. Grupo Aval took a subtler route, sponsoring live market-indicator reads on radio — quoting the day’s dollar and euro rates on air — to position itself as “the aval of the economy.” Even Banco de la República, the central bank, surfaced in the tracked social conversation around the currency.

The third seam: crypto cards and in-app games

Crypto-native and digital players worked a third seam of the same story. Among digital global-account apps, ARQ maintains an active presence in the category with dollar-linked messaging. Lemon promoted a “100% free Visa card with cashback in dollars on every purchase.” Nequi — Colombia’s most-searched neobank, with around 2.4 million queries — skipped the dollar pitch entirely and played to the tournament’s audience with “La Polla Nequi,” an in-app football-prediction game.

Different products, one underlying insight: attach your brand to what the country is already thinking about. Where BBVA and Davivienda turn the dollar into a regulated, offshore savings vehicle, Lemon turns that same demand into a card you can tap today — and Nequi skips the currency entirely to drive engagement through the tournament itself.

Why it matters

Taken together, the dollar becomes the clearest lens through which to view how Colombian fintech actually competes. Old-line banks are turning the dollar into a regulated, offshore savings vehicle and leaning on decades of trust to sell it. Digital and crypto-native players are turning that same demand into slick, low-friction products — a card, an app toggle, a game — and buying attention wherever it’s cheap, football audience included. Both are riding a strong peso and a search bar full of “dólar hoy.”

For anyone planning media or product in this market, the takeaway is straightforward: the sharpest fintech positioning of the World Cup season wasn’t a football tie-in at all. It was a currency play — and the brands that read the exchange rate as a marketing signal, not just a market number, were the ones that turned a macro moment into a message.

Competitive media, social and search intelligence by MIA by Pipol.