Banks have discarded many traditional barriers during the pandemic to scale and adopt the technology. While the pandemic sped up the digitization of the banking sector, it has also increased customer expectations exceptionally. 

With so many banking apps available in the market, customers today expect an engaging, personalized, and seamless experience. 

But let’s face it, banking activities are not exactly fun and exciting, and delivering a seamless yet engaging experience for your customers is quite challenging. Well, gamification can help you meet this challenge, up your game, and turn overwhelming financial tasks into fun and rewarding activities. 

This article will discuss gamification in banking, some best practices, and excellent examples!

Gamification in Banking

Gamification in banking does not literally mean turning your banking app into a mobile game but rather strengthening traditional methods with game elements. At its core, it means incorporating game mechanics into customer interactions with your banking app. In other words, the process of transforming day-to-day routine banking activities into milestone-based rewarding activities. 

Gamification in banking increases customer engagement and boosts their interest and knowledge of banking products and services while making their experience fun and memorable. The game elements promote a sense of competition, community, achievement, personalization, and high interactivity.

Also read: Gamification in Fintech: Top 5 Fintech Gamification Examples To Level Up in 2022

Benefits of Gamification in Banking

Increased Engagement and Retention

Gamification makes banking apps interactive, immersive, and, most importantly, less boring. It can be used to increase awareness of your banking products and services by rewarding users every time they complete a tutorial or use a new feature. 

Customers love an app that feels personal and educates them on finances in an engaging way. Gamification does precisely that and makes the customers feel accomplished while increasing their financial literacy leading to better brand loyalty and retention.

Encourages Financial Management

Setting saving goals, implementing financial limits, tracking finances, and guiding the customer with all their financial decisions can be achieved through gamification. It can be as simple as allowing users to set saving goals and rewarding them when the goal is achieved. 

Apps that can help customers establish personalized financial plans, set goals, track their progress, and encourage savings will have a competitive advantage, leading to better customer retention and brand loyalty.

Builds a Community

Gamified experiences can create a strong unity between members of the same financial service, leading to more referrals and recommendations.

For example, customers can be rewarded with cashback for recommending the bank to a friend or family member. It not only builds a community on the app but also helps your app reach more audiences and get a huge user base. 

Get Priceless Customer Insights

Gamification can open a treasure trove of user information. It gives an accurate picture of the number of active users, their level of interest in banking services, how much money they’re saving, and what goals they’re pursuing.

Boosts Financial Literacy

Incorporating game elements in banking apps can make financial management less intimidating and help customers gain a deeper knowledge of complex concepts. 

Boosting your user’s financial literacy by introducing short videos with exciting and crisp financial content, making financial management simpler, and rewarding them upon completion is a great way to boost engagement.

Key Elements of Gamification

Gamification is not just about incorporating games into users’ experiences. It awakens curiosity, fosters competition, and creates a sense of achievement which motivates the user to keep coming back for more, leading to better financial habits.

You can use elements like progress bars, badges, and rewards to represent users’ accomplishments as they move to the subsequent levels. Quizzes and trivia increase awareness of various financial topics without boring them.

Here are some simple and effective elements of gamification that can be used to boost your user engagement.

Badges represent small accomplishments users can receive when they finish a desired task or reach a goal. These badges can be shared with friends and family and added to their profiles.

Points are simple progress indicators; users can be awarded for every task or action they perform. These points collectively can lead to a new badge or a reward.

Leaderboards instill a sense of competition by showcasing the progress of all individual users.

Rewards–by offering tempting rewards or deals, you can excite the users and keep them coming back for more, increasing user retention and encouraging loyalty.

Progress Bars motivate the users to finish the task and track their timely progress.

Trivia can boost users’ productivity by creating awareness around essential topics and providing important & relevant information.

Opinion Polls are the most effective way to ask for the user’s feedback without making their experience monotonous. Collecting their opinions will make them feel their inputs matter to you.

Mini–Games like spin the wheel, card shuffle, etc., can be used to give out valuable rewards and deals to make users’ experiences fun. 

Best Practices And Examples

Gamification in banking has significant potential as it can instill habits of a money-saving mindset, increase financial literacy among all age groups, broaden awareness of new financial products, and significantly simplify the perception of complex banking concepts.

As a feather in the cap, the global gamification market is expected to reach $96.8 billion by 2030. Let’s look at how a few banks have successfully implemented gamification over the past few years and why you should give gamification a try!

#1 Monobank: Make Routine Transactions Exciting and Fun

Banking activities like deposits, opening an account, withdrawals, etc., are often too boring and time-consuming. Gamification can transform these tasks into a fun and rewarding experience.

The same is the case with the Ukrainian virtual bank, Monobank. It offers a gamified app with a signature cat mascot and fun game mechanics such as shaking your phone to activate a peer-to-peer money transfer, earning badges for every achievement, and more.

When a user performs a specific task within the app, like spending on a particular category, making transactions, or splitting bills, they earn achievement badges. 

Badges motivate users and contribute toward positive behavioral change. Receiving badges will positively reinforce desired user behaviors, and seeing locked badges will motivate and drive users to use the app to unlock these badges. 

With its generous benefits, gamification, and installment schemes, the app is used by a whopping 1.3 million people every day and has gained over 4 million loyal customers since 2017.

#2 Standard Chartered Bank: Rewarding the Experience

Cashbacks are ubiquitous in banking apps and are a sure-shot way of winning your customers’ loyalty. 

Twist & Win is a gamified campaign by Standard Chartered Bank that offers users chances to win surprise cashback for transactions made with their credit cards.

This gamified experience is fully integrated into the bank’s mobile app, from the personalized onboarding of customers invited to participate in the campaign to the real-time assessment and random allocation of cashback for every eligible transaction delivered via an interactive animation with a fun in-app gumball machine.

Standard Chartered Bank wanted to encourage its customers to use their credit cards and saw a significant uptake in customers’ activities and expenditure during the promotional period.

#3 PNC Banks: Building Healthy Financial Habits

Saving money is one of the essential aspects of building wealth and being financially secure. It gives you a way out of the uncertainties of life.

A US-based banking app, PNC bank, with $364 billion in assets, created a virtual wallet as a modern solution to encourage customers to set and reach their savings goals. The virtual wallet is a hybrid of checking and savings account.

This virtual wallet helped customers distribute their funds between accounts depending on the purpose, from regular payments to short-term savings or long-term investments. One of the virtual wallet’s features was an interactive “Punch the Pig” widget. 

While using the app, a piggy bank appeared on the user’s screen, contextually nudging the user to transfer a certain amount from the checking to a high-yield savings account, encouraging a money-saving mindset among the users. 

#4 INDmoney: Learning to Invest like a Pro

Investment apps have been on the rise lately; investing is an effective way to put your money to work and generate wealth. With such a wide range of assets like stocks, mutual funds, commodities, etc., monitoring and managing them is essential. 

INDmoney is a super finance all-in-one app that helps you save, plan and invest among your family members. Since its launch in 2019, the app has quickly grown to 5 million users, backed by innovative features such as US Stocks investing, Neo Banking, Deposits, and Financial life tracking & management.

The app launched a reward program called INDRewards, India’s most powerful rewards program. It rewards customers with stocks for good financial behavior and users who invite their friends and family to the app. These rewards track the real-time price of the corresponding stock. Hence their value grows with you over time.

Once you receive a reward, you can claim it to make it a part of your reward holdings. These holdings behave just like an investment portfolio. You can sell any fraction of your holding to get money in your bank account!

Conclusion

Hundreds of fintech apps were set up and have failed in the past few years, but the winning apps have figured out the most crucial aspect of the app’s success: engagement. Gamification acts as a catalyst for app engagement and retention.

It helps reinforce positive behaviors, encourages customers to use banking services, and drives them toward healthy financial habits. These examples of gamification in banking show that it is a powerful tool that can boost motivation and engage customers by providing them with simple and fun activities.

The Upshot.ai Advantage

Upshot.ai is an omnichannel, user engagement, and gamification platform that helps digital product owners and marketers improve product adoption and conversions.

With Upshot.ai, banks, Insurance, and FinTech firms can enhance their digital experiences with pre-built gamification features. It can provide personalized insights, actionable recommendations, and contextual nudges designed to deepen its relationship with its users. Book a demo of the most comprehensive user engagement and gamification platform to achieve your digital product goals. Join our communities for more insights, guides, and best practices that keep you updated with proven strategies and tips to supercharge your campaigns.

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