Banking and finance have historically been considered serious fields. Fair enough, since this can’t be another way with all those charts, numbers, and assiduous attention to security and compliance. However, things have changed. While all the serious stuff keeps happening behind the scenes, consumers crave fun and rewarding user experiences.

This is where gamification comes into play, allowing users to turn everyday tasks into delightful activities and providing companies adopting it with a distinctive edge.

What is gamification in finance?

Gamification in finance means incorporating gamified elements — points, badges, leaderboards, challenges, progress bars, streaks, and rewards — into a finance app to deliver more engaging user experiences. Gamification mechanics can be implemented into various aspects of digital finance, including:

• Facilitating healthier financial behaviour: an app can feature financial challenges or contests where users compete against each other to achieve specific financial goals.
• Financial literacy: educational videos followed by quizzes can help users understand complex concepts in a fun way.
• Promoting sustainability: financial organisations can motivate users to meet specific goals by donating to charities.
• Cashback and rewards: gamification can enhance these programs by adding surprise rewards, streaks, or levels users can achieve based on spending or saving activities.

Why do fintech apps need gamification features?

The main reason behind gamification getting enormous traction in finance is user engagement. Gamification elements make financial apps more engaging and interactive. By turning typically mundane financial tasks into enjoyable activities, app users are more likely to stay actively involved with the product.

In addition, gamification is especially helpful when it comes to educating users. Gamified features can go a long way towards simplifying complex financial concepts and making them more accessible.

Gamification is also an effective tool for acquiring new users: word-of-mouth recommendations and social sharing of achievements or rewards facilitate organic growth.

Fintech apps can collect user data through gamified elements, enabling businesses to better understand user preferences, behaviours, and needs, and use these valuable insights to improve their services.

Moreover, it’s crucial to remember that the representatives of Gen Z, accustomed to gamified digital experiences, have just begun to enter financial maturity. By incorporating gamification, financial companies can attract and retain younger users.

Gamification examples

Let’s take a closer look at how the gamification approach is revolutionising the financial technology sector. Here are some finance app gamification examples to get you inspired.

Cake

Cake, a Belgian fintech app, uses a genuinely unique gamification approach — sharing profits with its users. Primarily designed as a banking app, Cake is also a powerful data analytics platform. It analyses banking transactions and converts them into anonymized data that other financial businesses can utilise. And here’s the most exciting part: Cake rewards users for sharing their data with money.

As a result, people transact with the app as much as possible since it generates profit. In addition, this idea promotes transparency: while most financial services providers try to maximise their profits by using consumer data, Cake brings value back to its users.

It’s not surprising that people love Cake. At the time of writing this post, Cake is experiencing a 494.19% monthly visits growth.

eToro

eToro is a brokerage and social investment company with offices in the UK, US, Israel, Australia, and other countries. Their trading and investment platform lets users trade everything from stocks to cryptocurrencies in an engaging, gamified way. eToro’s gamification strategy is anchored in social behaviour and competitiveness. The app’s News Feed resembles a social network feed, where users can share opinions and achievements.

Still, this is the CopyTrader feature that fuels the competitive atmosphere. It enables beginners to leverage the experience of others while rewarding traders whenever someone copies their trades.

This way, eToro provides a realistic simulation of market conditions, allowing beginners to refine their skills without worrying about financial loss.

Monobank

Monobank is a Ukrainian digital bank that has been using gamification since its first day on the market. Their mascot, a cute white cat, appears throughout the app. In the beginning, the cat was featured on Monobank badges which users received for their achievements, such as sharing their email, spending on food, travelling, books, etc., making purchases abroad, splitting bills with a friend, topping up the phone, and over a hundred of other achievements. In September 2023, Monobank introduced an update — now, users can customise their Monobank cats by choosing outfits and skins that unlock with new achievements. Monobank users can share their achievements via Instagram stories.

Monobank has proved that online banking services don’t have to be boring. A well-thought-out gamification strategy combined with generous cashback helped Monobank become one of the financial industry leaders in Ukraine. As of September 2023, the online bank boasts a whopping 7.6 million customers.

Fortune City

One of the brightest examples of gamification in fintech is Fortune City, a personal finance app that looks like an actual game. It allows users to build virtual cities by recording their income and expenses. Different expense categories — there are over ten — let you create different types of buildings. For instance, you can add a Food Stall to your city by spending on food.

In addition, players can hire virtual citizens to work on their buildings to generate coins, which they can spend on upgrades. Users can also choose from a collection of themes to personalise their cities. And that’s not all: the game features achievements and a ranking system that allows you to compete with your friends.

With millions of active users, Fortune City is an excellent case of gamified finance boosting user engagement and retention.

BBVA Game

BBVA, a Spanish bank and one of the biggest financial institutions in the world, has also adopted gamification to promote its services. Their platform, called BBVA Game, is based on a point system. App users can score points by completing daily tasks, such as paying bills, making purchases, and transferring money. In addition, you can get points by watching short educational videos on BBVA services. The points can be swapped for prizes, for example, music downloads.

The variety of prizes the platform offers caters to a wide range of interests, driving a broad audience to download the app. Only in its first six months BBVA Game attracted over 100,000 users.

Benefits of gamification for banking and finance

Gamification is a powerful tool for boosting user engagement and improving customer experiences in banking and finance. By incorporating game elements such as badges, points, leaderboards, challenges, and rewards into financial apps, businesses can take customer engagement to the next level. Let’s look closer at the numerous gamification benefits for banking and finance.

1. Increased user engagement

One of the most apparent benefits of gamification of finance is its ability to skyrocket user engagement. While traditional banking activities are usually fairly mundane, game elements can transform routine tasks into exciting challenges. Obviously, users are more likely to interact with an app that makes managing finances fun and engaging.

2. Greater customer satisfaction

Gamification plays a vital role in enhancing customer satisfaction within the financial sector. It’s as simple as one-two-three: when users find an app enjoyable and rewarding, they are more likely to have positive experiences. Moreover, gamification helps create an environment where users feel that their financial institution cares about their financial well-being and actively supports their financial goals, which inevitably translates into higher customer satisfaction.

3. Data-driven insights

Gamification generates valuable data on customer behaviour. By analysing this data, finance businesses can obtain crucial insights into customer needs and preferences, allowing them to refine their products and services to meet customer expectations.

4. Efficient customer acquisition and retention

Banking gamification not only engages existing customers but also serves as a robust tool for customer acquisition. Interactive games allow financial institutions to grab consumer interest, drawing new customers. Furthermore, engaging gamified experiences go a long way towards retaining the existing client base, reducing churn rates, and increasing customer lifetime value.

5. Strengthened brand loyalty

Elements of the game foster a deeper connection between customers and finance businesses. Customers who associate positive experiences with a financial institution are more likely to remain loyal.

6. Motivated saving and investment

Gamification enables finance businesses to turn saving and investing into motivating challenges. Customers can set savings goals and receive rewards for reaching them. Similarly, investment gamification allows customers to learn about different investment options while earning rewards, motivating them to invest regularly.

Bottom line

Institutions that choose to gamify finance win the big game of engaging customers. While gamification allows users to turn routine tasks into fun activities, it provides financial institutions with enormous benefits, including increased client engagement, rocketing retention rates, and valuable user data.

DeepInspire is a software development company with over 20 years of experience building solutions for finance and banking. If you consider gamification as part of your digital transformation journey, contact us. We’ll help you bring your exciting gamification idea to life, creating a secure, high-performing fintech product with elements of fun.