How can we make digital banking exciting to users by applying gamification?

Well, demand from customers and ever-changing technology has had a significant impact on how banks do business. Not to mention how they keep ahead of the competition.

Banks can no longer afford to sit back and wait for customers to come by themselves to open accounts or use any other products. Millennial customers of today are spoilt for choice. Give them a better deal, and they will change teams in a jiffy.

The modern user is driven by the quality of experience and always seeks a better experience.

Gamification is a great way to give them that better experience and engagement.

The gamification of customers’ experience with their finances is an exciting development to meet that challenge; it helps users engage with their financial institutions more effectively and turn routine or usually overwhelming financial tasks into a fun and rewarding activity.

Gamification in banking

We all have seen gamification get popular and implemented in various industries, including food, lifestyle, education, entertainment, etc. But what if we tell you gamification can make your arduous bank experiences fun, exciting, and engaging?

Modern consumers are picky and bored with businesses big and small trying to force-feed them goods and services. Today, businesses need new, sometimes surprising approaches to customers and experiences. That’s where gamification can help.

Gamification adds game-like elements to make a product or service more “sticky” by using gaming psychology to ingrain desired behaviors.

In recent years, it has emerged as a significant trend that radically changes how banks interact with their customers online.

Using gamification, banks can strengthen their relationships with customers and encourage the adoption of products and services. It can also be used to increase corporate goodwill, engage customers with the bank’s social presence and help educate them.

How digital banking can benefit from gamification

• Boost deposits and Encourage Savings: Gamifying savings is one of the most important and easiest ways to enable users to set savings goals and reward them if they achieve the goals.
• Broaden customers’ awareness of new products and services and simplify the perception of complex banking products
• 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.
• Increase Financial Literacy: Boost your user’s financial literacy by introducing short videos with exciting and crisp financial content, increasing their awareness and creating a sense of productiveness.
• Improve Financial Management: Set financial limits by which they can keep track of their spending and make a proper budget.
• Build a Community: Gamified experience will create a sense of unity between members of the same financial service, leading to referrals and recommendations.

How to make digital banking fun with gamification?

There are numerous gamification elements that can be employed to make the digital banking experience fun for the users. Some of the commonly used strategies in digital banking are leveraging points, leaderboards, challenges, and milestones.

These gamification elements are typically embedded into a banking app to motivate users, increase the digital service’s stickiness while creating an opportunity to encourage good financial habits in customers.

Points and rewards :

Rewards are one of the most common techniques for gamifying banking apps and apps in general. Rewards don’t necessarily have to be that valuable, as long as they coincide with the customer’s goals.

Earning points are a great instant feedback mechanism for users to signify an achievement, accomplishment, or upgrade in their journey.

Progress Bars :

Whatever goal you’re after, gamification cannot thrive without visible progress and achievement. Progress bars allow users to visualize where they are at in their journey, what they have yet to achieve, and how much they have left until something wonderful happens (they reach a daily goal or get a reward). The display of progress acts as a visual stimulus that keeps people motivated.

Leaderboards and Badges:

When applied correctly, leaderboards and badges are great social gamification elements and visual tools that can be used to recognize achievement and encourage progression.

Trivia and Polls

Trivia helps users engage in a fun and entertaining way. Interactive quizzes boost engagement and deliver personalized experiences in real-time.

Polls are used to give users a voice and understand their needs and expectations. It is an easy way to collect data from users to understand what they need and to serve them with the right content.

Inspiring examples of Gamification in digital banking

For any banks that aspire to make their apps more engaging, we strongly suggest taking a look at these examples to get you started:

Standard Chartered Bank — Twist & Win

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.

The 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.

BBVA smart reward program

BBVA, the leading digital bank in Spain, created a gamification strategy to drive customer loyalty. They launched the BBVA Game, a web app with app tutorials and explanations on paying taxes and doing transactions online as part of their strategy.

Customers can earn points by completing challenges and redeem them for music downloads, movies, smartphones, tickets for the La Liga football league, or even auctions. After only six months, the game had over 100,000 users, and its users showed an 18% higher satisfaction rate.

Axis Bank Augmented Reality

The Indian-based Axis bank is the first bank in India, and perhaps the world, to use augmented reality in its banking app. After the global success of Pokémon GO, this bank decided to find a use case for AR in banking.

Their banking app allows users to look around and see offers pop up. With Pingpay, users can instantly pay and get discounts on various items.

PayPerks educational rewards program

PayPerks is a financial education platform that rewards users for taking financial courses and savings-like behaviors. It’s primarily aimed at lower-income individuals to encourage saving and financial literacy.

PayPerks turned boring financial studies into game-like experiences with fun and easy-to-understand explanations. Their platform incentivizes real-world actions such as card usage or online behaviors that help users install the proper habits. They have helped millions of consumers get through tens of millions of tutorials and given away hundreds of thousands of dollars in prizes.

Conclusion

Introducing gamification provides you with endless possibilities for entertaining and educating your customers and nudging them to change their behavior in a good way for themselves and your bank.

A few banks have already identified this potential and are actively working towards incorporating gamification into their strategy at a grand scale. More players in the industry are poised to do so. The question is, are you?