Deep customer engagement is a hard-to-achieve, yet vital ingredient for the success of any business and, according to research, customer loyalty is worth ten times more than a one-time purchase. It’s also been found that if customers are happy with their interaction with a business, nearly all of them will keep using its products or services and share their positive experiences with people they know.

By using Gamification, your Fintech business can significantly drive revenue while minimizing or preventing bounce rates and churn. And although not everyone is familiar with its secret psychological powers, it has been growing in popularity with immense speed among various industries globally. Back in 2020, MarketsandMarkets reported that the market size for Gamification is forecasted to grow from $9.1 billion in 2020 to $30.7 billion by 2025, tripling its size in just five years.

In this article, we’ll explore tried and tested methods and techniques to help you catapult your business to the moon and beyond — all with the help of Gamification. We’ll also look at some real-world examples of its mechanics in action.

Gamification Defined

Gamification means incorporating gaming mechanics into non-game environments. This includes going through fun missions and challenges, collecting points, earning rewards, etc.

An old-school example of Gamification is the returning flyer programs offered by airlines. This particular technique motivates people to keep flying with the same company to become eligible for special savings rewards and other goodies.

Since then, Gamification has evolved greatly, with digital Gamification methods helping businesses of all kinds elevate retention and loyalty to new heights.

Similarly to traditional video games, gamified apps carry rules, tasks, and rewards carefully designed to keep the user immersed and excited about interacting with your product or service.

What Is Gamification In Fintech?

As described above, Gamification in Fintech is the use of game elements into non-gaming environments to provide a more fun and engaging customer experience.

This usually includes setting goals, keeping track of progress, and completing objectives to win rewards such as financial bonuses, vouchers, and different kinds of large and small gifts. Fintech Gamification apps feature a point system, leaderboards, and badges to motivate customers to take specific tasks, such as saving money and carefully planning their budgets.

Gamification positively influences the following aspects:

Customer loyalty and fulfillment
User retention and acquisition
Brand awareness

Fintech companies can greatly minimize bounce rates and boost revenue by cleverly Gamifying their businesses.

As Dr. Iain Donald of Abertay University – a leading European game design university – lays it out:

"The application of game design and technology to engage new audiences has proven to be extremely beneficial, both in the education and entertainment sectors. Increasingly that potential is being harnessed in other industries from medicine through to finance."

7 Alluring Benefits of Gamification

Here are 7 exciting benefits Gamification gives you:

1. It Motivates Customers To Save More

One of the main benefits of Gamification in Fintech is that it encourages people to think more about the importance of saving up for their future. Allowing them to set certain savings goals and rewarding them for sticking to their plans is a great first step toward achieving this.

2. It Helps Customers Become More Financially Literate

Games have the power to explain complex and mundane financial information in fun and immersive ways. This also helps customers pay more attention and understand important matters more deeply.

3. It Boosts Financial Management Skills

Gamified fintech apps help customers develop self-tailored financial plans for the future, track their spending, and notify them about how much they're spending and when they're going overboard.

4. It Helps Customers Deal With Insurance-Related Risks

Gamification contains the secret recipe needed for influencing user behavior. The ingredients include point collection, score-tracking, exciting rewards gained through the completion of specific tasks, and other fun features that help people smarten up to insurance terms.

5. It Helps Promote Sustainability

Financial businesses that want to be seen as more caring about the environment stand to win big by using Gamification. One popular technique in this field is to motivate customers to complete specific tasks for a worthy cause.

6. It Raises Employee Motivation

Dull employee education can actually become enjoyable by using realistic simulations with Gamification techniques. In comparison to regular learning programs, they help people learn more quickly and minimize frustration.

7. It Helps Build And Strengthen Communities

Gamification can foster a strong sense of community and bring people who use a particular service together. For example, they can receive bonuses or rewards for recommending a bank to someone in their social circle.

The Basic Principles of Gamification

Regardless of where you want apply Gamification, to be effective with it, you need to follow a few basic principles:

User goals need to be achievable with balanced difficulty. If the game is too easy, people will get bored quickly; if it’s too difficult, they will give up and possibly stop trying.
For people to stick around, rules must be clear and fair, as well as motivate instead of discourage people from engaging.
Goals and challenges need to correspond with each other.
Constant and positive feedback is a must and should empower people to work more to accomplish their tasks and reach their goals.

The Holy Grail of Gamification Techniques

As you already know, gamified elements include a points system, badges, and scoreboards/leaderboards, among other things. However, Gamification principles can be applied in various ways, so there's always space to experiment.

Now, let’s look at the most important Gamification techniques for a positive and lasting customer-business relationship.

Personalization

By smartly using precious client data, you can offer personalized financial goals, strategies, challenges, achievements, online courses, educational videos, blogs, and other valuable content relevant to your customers.

Avatars

Giving people the option to choose, upload, and unlock specially customized avatars is a veteran social element in the world of video games. In Fintech, avatars can help you turn blandness into fun.

"Tilting" Prevention

The term 'titling' is used in the gaming community to describe wild behavior that translates to negative results — e.g., a poker player going double or nothing with a bad hand or a pinball enthusiast tilting the machine.

No matter what fintech solution you have chosen, it should be designed with anti-tilting in mind so that clients won't make poor financial decisions. Various fintech applications with gamification elements use bots powered by artificial intelligence professionally trained to spot tilting behavior and send automated messages to clients before they've dug themselves into a hole.

Teamplay

The money-trading applications of today are doing wonders when it comes to creating a strong sense of community. Apps with smart Gamification mechanics like Fortune City are proof that customers are excited about the chance to connect with friends and family.

Giving people the option to interact, join forces in challenges, and take part in healthy competition against one another for rewards, can create a super engaging and immersive customer experience for all.

Customization

Gamification allows you to customize your clients’ experience in great detail.

This has been observed for decades in video games; people spend lots of time building their online persona and even spend money on virtual clothing to suit their tastes.

According to studies, people tend to immerse themselves more in an experience if they are given a certain amount of control and autonomy.

Your Fintech site or app can also take advantage of this. By adding additional options to choose background elements, colors, night and day modes (for better eye comfort), and other customization options, you can give people an experience worth sticking around for.

Progress Bars

One of the leading elements of a successful financial app is the ability to help people save money.

That’s why it’s important to guide them through their tasks and be transparent about their progress. Progress bars are a great way to achieve this, but that's not all they can do.

This ageless tool can help people stay motivated by giving them a dopamine kick every time they see the bar moving closer to their end goal. In turn, this translates into retention, loyalty, satisfaction, and ultimately, revenue.

When it comes down to helping people be consistent with their savings, you should give them a specific result. For example, you can show users how much money they can get in return for investment.

Lottery

The only thing required from someone to have a chance at scoring a win in a game of lottery is to participate. A lottery win requires no effort from users, yet it’s a great way to excite them and keep them engaged with your website or app.

Leaderboards

Leaderboards are a compelling Gamification feature that Fintech companies should highly consider when creating an app or site. In short, leaderboards represent top score lists allowing users to participate in friendly competitions.

You can increase engagement, productivity, and client satisfaction by allowing people to keep track of their scores and how well they are performing compared to others.

Streak Challenges

Another fantastic feature for helping people be consistent is 'streaks'. This user interface pattern can be applied to any repetitive action of choice. For instance, a savings app can have a feature that monitors how often users meet their saving goals.

Points, Badges, Rewards

Reward systems are a great way to attract and retain customers. By providing incentives for effort, a fintech company can deliver a better customer experience while boosting return on investment.

Hence, Fintech apps and sites can benefit greatly from gamified elements like points, badges, and other pride-stimulating techniques.

For example, a company can allow clients to earn unique coins for buying products or services from partner retailers and later redeem them for tasty discounts and gift vouchers.

Another way to do this is to hold a prize drawing for the most active users, encouraging them to engage with the app more often.

Gamified Educational Content

To successfully raise client awareness about financial content, including products and services, you should try gamifying educational content. Businesses can implement various techniques that involve quizzes, puzzles, videos, and games to improve financial literacy and customer engagement.

For example, your app can provide educational content and a point system allowing people to win rewards such as movies, music tracks, tickets to social events, and so on, for completing video tutorials or tests.

Social Media

To improve customer engagement and keep churn to a minimum, you can give people the ability to share their accomplishments, favorite features, and other fun in-app content through social media.

Also, this type of Gamification helps you attract new customers and increase awareness.

Your app can encourage people to share gifts and money with their loved ones, as well as receive personalized rewards based on activities such as money remittances.

Animations and Interactions

Successful businesses understand the value of investing in product authenticity. This can include product surface texture, sounds, smells, shapes, etc. For example, have you noticed that all KFC and McDonald’s restaurants smell the same? This is done by design.

Although such subtleties often go unnoticed, they bring great value to the experience. These principles can also be applied to digital products. Smooth and unique interactions, animations, and beautiful visuals help apps become more engaging and valuable to the customer.

Illustrations

Illustrations work like magic when it comes to humanizing the user experience for your product or service. They help explain complex information and bring a touch of color and enjoyment to the functionality of the user interface.

Tone Of Voice

The words users are being greeted, informed, and entertained with play a key role in their overall experience with your product or service. And while writing and branding are deep subjects in themselves, copywriting is an extremely powerful tool that introduces an element of psychological engagement for the user.

To find success in this area, you must write with clarity and purpose, stay away from jargon, and avoid addressing people in a monotone voice. Be playful, use tasteful humor when you can, and try to make your customer the focal point of the experience.

Real-World Examples of Gamification in Fintech

Below, we’ve listed some of the coolest examples of Gamification in the Fintech sector.

Cake

Cake uses a powerful Artificial Intelligence system to perform all customer transactions. It then makes a decision based on your personal preferences about which cashback rewards would best suit your particular needs.

Cake's personalized system makes for a more relevant customer journey, and the rewards also serve as a form of immediate feedback — the perfect example of positive reinforcement that keeps people wanting to return for more.

Spindy

Here, we have a business that specializes in creating gamified software for customer acquisition, loyalty, and engagement. Spindy needed to create such software for a customer retail sector business, but they were faced with some challenges.

The client's bank did not have an API, so the team at Spindy needed to develop an algorithm to create encrypted files that the bank could use. They also created a reward-balancing algorithm, which allows people to win up to 100% in cashback.

Paypal

Good old Paypal uses a plethora of techniques to attract and retain customers, but one stands out in particular. The company gives anyone who receives money from clients or friends a complimentary customizable landing page they can use to collect their Paypal.me money.

This gamified technique also helps freelance workers get paid more quickly, as well as making their experience easygoing and hassle-free.

Emirates NBD

This app is living proof that Gamification in Fintech can strongly benefit customers when it comes to being financially smart while keeping fit.

Emirates NBD motivates people to connect a gym account to monitor their day-to-day physical activities. It comes with various challenges and levels and allows users to earn points they can later redeem, as well as a progress bar to track their progress. For example, if a customer walks a certain amount (let's say 12,000) steps in a day, they get a 2% interest rate.

The First to Ever Do it

When it comes to Gamification, Smartico.ai is a trusted and globally recognized leader in the field. And while it has a tight focus on the iGaming, Casino, and Sports Betting industries, Smartico.ai can be integrated with and help any business reach new levels of success, including Fintech.

Smartico.ai is the first unified Gamification/CRM Automation platform in history, holding immense experience, and a massive bag of powerful retention-boosting tools. Its CRM tool combines customer analytics data with machine-learning algorithms to help businesses of various industries gain a deeper understanding of people and their needs while also providing valuable data insights to ensure loyalty and revenue-scaling.

As a leader in Gamification & CRM Automation, Smartico offers the following:

Various intuitive challenges and gaming techniques.
High-value incentives that encourage long-term loyalty and retention, elevate player value, strengthen engagement, and boost user acquisition.
Multi-Currency/Language/Deep Brand Support.
Missions – Engage players with fun real-time solo or multiplayer tasks.
Points – Encourage players to keep coming back through point-based incentives and unlockables.
Badges – Stand out from the rest with sleek badges and earn free spins for each earned badge.
Levels – Players gain experience and special perks after each successful level or tournament completion.
Incentives – Motivate players to come back for more with unique rewards and bonuses.
Marketplace – Players can actualize their points by cashing them in for free game spins or other awards, such as online shopping vouchers.
Mini-Games – Players can reset their senses through short, award-earning games.
Tournaments – Set your own qualification rules and offer your customers a powerful endorphin rush with Smartico's special tournament system.
Leaderboards – Set daily, weekly, and monthly prizes and watch your user engagement skyrocket.
Bonus Engine Integration – Cash bonuses, free spin bonuses, and more.

And that's just a small sample of what's on offer. Smartico can supply the solutions needed to help your Fintech company get shoulder to shoulder with the giants of the world.

Want to find out how our event triggered campaigns can bring customer engagement through the roof? Contact one of our experts for a free, in-depth demo today.

Conclusion

Gamification can be of immense value to financial institutions as it has the power to improve customer interactions and make banking activities feel seamless and engaging. By gamifying their operations, Fintech businesses can boost their social standing while promoting useful and healthy customer habits — e.g., saving money and handling invoices more efficiently.

The ultimate aim of Gamification is to motivate and encourage customers to use financial products and services on a more regular basis with the help of point-collecting, badges, score systems/leaderboards, prizes, coupons, vouchers, and more.

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