Fintech Gamification: Mastering Gamification in FinTech with Interactive Experiences

Even today, many people across the world, especially marginalized genders and communities, are away from being financially independent. According to the 2023 Global Financial Literacy Survey, only 30% of women worldwide are considered financially literate compared to 35% of men, highlighting a persistent gap. That’s because the first step to such independence is to become financially literate. But becoming one is easier said than done as modern finance is anything but easy to navigate.

To make something like dealing with finance easy, one can opt for implementing concepts like gamification into their FinTech products.

Gamification involves incorporating game-like elements into non-gaming environments, like finance, to simplify and create engaging user experiences. In fact, a recent reportthat 89% of consumers said gamification made financial apps more enjoyable and easier to use.

For a nascent industry like financial technology, this concept holds immense potential, where it can transform mundane financial interactions into engaging and rewarding experiences – read more to learn how.

What is FinTech gamification?

Traditional financial activities often carry a sense of seriousness and formality. Paying bills, monitoring expenses, and saving for the future is essential but can be perceived as mundane or even daunting. Now, add to the aspect of how today, one uses technology to perform these tasks, so for a technically challenged person, this becomes even more difficult.

FinTech gamification seeks to disrupt this perception by introducing game design elements that make using financial apps easier, approachable, and even fun.

Imagine a scenario where budgeting becomes a game of strategy, or saving money is a challenge to overcome. By incorporating game-like features, FinTech apps can turn otherwise routine transactions into activities that users look forward to, making financial management not only efficient but also enjoyable.

How does gamification in FinTech work?

FinTech gamification goes beyond merely facilitating transactions; it plays a pivotal role in shaping user behavior and building positive financial habits.

At the core of FinTech gamification is the focus on user-centric design to help change behavior.

Whether it's encouraging regular savings, promoting responsible spending, or guiding users toward long-term financial goals, gamification acts as a catalyst for behavioral change.

“We’re witnessing the creative destruction of financial services, rearranging itself around the consumer. Who does this in the most relevant, exciting way using data and digital, wins!”

– Arvind Sankaran, Senior Advisor- Asian Banking Practice, McKinsey & Company

The goal is to create an intuitive and user-friendly environment that fosters financial literacy while reducing the intimidation often associated with financial tasks. Game elements such as points, levels, and rewards are strategically integrated into the user interface to guide users through their financial journey seamlessly.

Looking to make finance more exciting for your users? Nudge is your ultimate partner. Through smart personalized gamification techniques like challenges, points, and rewards, we help FinTech brands turn everyday financial tasks into engaging milestones, keeping users motivated, loyal, and eager to achieve their financial goals.

Why use Gamification in FinTech apps?

There are five key benefits of implementing gamification in FinTech apps:

Gamification helps adapt to changing user preferences

“Financial institutions must be able to deliver an easy-to-navigate, seamless digital platform that goes far beyond a miniaturized online banking offering.”

– Jim Marous, Host of Banking Transformed Podcast

The Fintech landscape is dynamic as user preferences evolve over changing generations. For example, a Gen-Z user will not prefer an ancient banking website with multiple forms or slow site speed for their banking work.

Gamification provides a flexible framework that helps adapt to changing trends and preferences. For example, you can use Nudge’s user insights and feedback tools to gather data about the impact of your gamification tactics. By staying attuned to user engagement metrics and feedback, Fintech companies can continuously refine and evolve their gamified features to align with the evolving needs of their user base.

Boost customer acquisition and onboarding

When potential customers see how easy your app makes their life, they tend to get attracted to at least downloading and checking out your app.

For example, you can use Nudge’s onboarding tour experience to transform complex financial tasks into easy and manageable chunks. It makes the onboarding process more intuitive and enjoyable. This positive first impression not only increases the likelihood of users adopting the app but also facilitates a seamless transition into becoming active and loyal customers.

Differentiate in a crowded FinTech market

In a market saturated with Fintech solutions, standing out is a formidable challenge. Gamification provides a unique opportunity to differentiate your app from the competition. Apps that offer more than just transactional capabilities become memorable experiences for users.

For example, Robinhood is an investing app popular among new-age stock market investors. It celebrates your small wins across the app with a ‘confetti’ interface that makes the user feel ‘successful’ in a complex environment like stock trading. 

Its simple and gamified interface makes it easy to perform a complex task like buying or selling shares. Adopting gamification concepts helps it stand out from any other broker or banking website that facilitates the buying and selling of stocks.

Such distinctiveness not only attracts new users but also contributes to brand loyalty, as users are more likely to choose an app that provides both utility and enjoyment.

Facilitates viral growth through referrals

Gamification helps you turn satisfied users into brand advocates. The rewarding and enjoyable aspects of gamified features prompt users to share their positive experiences with friends, family, and colleagues, or via social media. This organic word-of-mouth marketing not only contributes to the app's virality but also establishes a sense of trust, as recommendations from peers are often more influential than traditional marketing efforts.

Otherwise, you can also implement viral growth strategies like referral marketing which make use of network effects into your overall gamification strategy.

Drives user engagement and retention

Gamification introduces an element of excitement, encouraging users to explore features, complete challenges, and stay active within the app. The habitual nature of gamified elements contributes significantly to increased user retention rates.

It also incentivizes users to interact more frequently with the app – and with this, you get a continuous stream of valuable user data. You can gather insights into user behaviors, preferences, and patterns. With a deeper understanding of user activity, FinTech businesses can refine their retention strategies, personalize offerings, and ultimately enhance the overall user experience.

5 examples of gamification in Fintech apps

Here are some real examples of FinTech brands implementing gamification in their product design for your inspiration:

1. Making paying bills fun with the CRED app

CRED is an Indian FinTech brand that helps its users pay bills across credit cards, utilities, rent, and more in a single platform. 

When you use CRED to pay your bills, it rewards you with ‘CRED coins’ which you can spend to get exclusive discounts and vouchers with its partner brands.

It doesn’t simply give you the coins – but asks you to play engaging games like ‘Spin the Wheel’, participate in a lucky ‘Jackpot', make ‘Referrals for cashback’, or use coins in exchange for ‘Booster Offers’.

Thus, you can see how the CRED app has turned a mundane task like paying your bills into a rewarding game using the concepts of gamification.

2. Making savings fun with Gullak app

The Gullak app is an automated saving app that invests spare change from your online transactions or custom amounts decided by you in digital gold. You can set goals on how much you wish to save – and the Gullak app helps you achieve them.

It uses goal setting to gamify the experience of saving a small amount of money and getting rewarded for it via asset appreciation and interest. Knowing that the money spent is in pennies, people feel comfortable setting up recurring payments too to invest in safe instruments like digital gold.

“Gullak is made for Bharat; the design and features are all built for Bharat users. The product is easy to use, and users can start their savings journey in just 30 seconds. The initial feedback from users has been great, and they love the UI/UX”

– Manthan Shah, co-founder Gullak app

3. Avoiding onboarding drop-offs with Revolut 

Revolut is a neobank that simplifies international payments across 160+ countries. To onboard university students, one of its key target audiences, it launched a ‘University Challenge’ across European schools. Students have to sign up for the Revolut app and gain points by inviting their friends, while also racing against other universities via a leaderboard. This made students participate to make their university win, while also getting rewarded with Revolut’s premium plan.

Their app also includes various gamification growth strategies like setting up a savings goal and using progress bars to visualize them.

It also delights its users by allowing them to set up ‘vaults’ to save money and earn rewards – and this, in turn, led to customers advocating for Revolut on social media:

4. Organizing sweepstakes like Coinbase

Coinbase, to promote the purchase of cryptocurrency on their platform, organizes regular sweepstakes. Here, the user has to do nothing but sign up for their app while lucky winners are chosen with below prize pool on offer:

The users need not make any purchases – hence, it makes them more comfortable to participate. The popularity of these sweepstakes also promotes app signups, thus increasing their user base. Winners also get introduced to owning ‘Bitcoin’ with no investment, thus making it more likely that they will continue to invest.

Coinbase also organizes these sweepstakes regularly to maintain its download rates and community engagement.

5. Gamifying investing with Robinhood

Robinhood is the frontrunner when it comes to gamifying finance for the common and young people. It turned investing in stocks into a ‘game-like’ experience using various tricks like showing a ‘confetti’ screen whenever the user invested. Thus, it celebrates small wins or a positive step taken by the user that aligns with the business’s goals – making people invest more.

Robinhood also shows ‘trending stocks’ which incites users to know what people are buying the most and generate ‘Fear of Missing Out’. These trending stocks are usually in ‘green’ – which makes users feel more confident about making a purchase or at least checking out the stock.

The use of brighter colors is also a useful way to align with the ‘easy’ and ‘game’ experience.

Image source: Abhishek Shah on Better Marketing 

Since red is associated with the feeling of ‘failure’, Robinhood uses lighter red shades or orangish color so their users don’t panic.

Nudge transforms FinTech experiences by weaving powerful gamification elements into user journeys. With badges, progress tracking, and engaging reward systems, we help financial apps make complex money matters feel simple, motivating, and fun. Drive higher engagement, boost retention, and make financial literacy an adventure with Nudge’s tailored gamification strategies.

Fintech and opportunities for gamification

If you’re looking to get started to implement game design elements for your FinTech app, here are five major use cases for your inspiration:

Educating users about financial budgeting

It takes a lot of discipline to track expenses and savings diligently on paper or traditional budgeting software. By incorporating game elements, Fintech apps can make financial education more accessible by fostering a sense of accomplishment and understanding of budgeting concepts among users.

For example, your Fintech app could introduce a simulation game where users navigate through different financial scenarios, making decisions on investments, expenses, and savings.

Then, you can incorporate rewards and badges for completing challenges or achieving financial milestones within the game. Such tactics serve as positive reinforcement, where users get motivated to apply these lessons to real-life financial management.

You can also include ‘Progress Tracking’ elements which help users track and visualize how their financial decisions impact their virtual journey. This provides a tangible representation of their financial growth and encourages continuous improvement.

Investment leaderboard challenges

Many users, especially those new to investing, may find the world of stocks, bonds, and portfolios overwhelming. Organizing leaderboard challenges will encourage users to explore investment options, engage in healthy competition, and also get educated about various investment strategies.

For example, your FinTech app can create a monthly investment challenge where users can compete to achieve the highest returns. Feature a leaderboard showcasing the top-performing investors for them to compare and get motivated to perform better. You can create monthly challenges, and dynamic leaderboards, provide insights on users’ performance in contests to help them improve, and more.

The introduction of leaderboards and challenges fosters a sense of community among users, creating a space for knowledge-sharing and collaboration. For best performing players, you can offer good rewards to recognize their achievements and efforts of engaging using your app.

Allow goal-setting and provide rewards for achieving them

Help your users set ambitious goals regarding their finances and surprise them by providing rewards when they achieve them.

One effective way to reward financial milestones is by introducing a badge or trophy system within the Fintech app. When a user manages to spend within a decided budget, saves the desired amount to achieve a goal, gets a good credit score, or completes any financial literacy course by using your app – you can reward them with freebies or collaborate with other brands for exclusive discounts. Another trick that works to further incentivize users, is to introduce unlockable rewards tied to specific financial milestones. 

Your FinTech app can also implement a social element to the reward system to increase its impact. Provide users the option to share their earned badges or trophies on social media. This will foster a sense of pride and potentially encourage their peers or network to start using the product.

Allow users to create ‘financial avatars’

Based on how a user is interacting with your app or achieving badges, you can assign them interesting avatars or allow them to choose.

For example, users can start by creating their financial avatars. They can customize features such as appearance, clothing, and accessories. The initial state of the avatar could reflect the user's current financial standing. On achieving set goals, the avatars could undergo a transformation in their appearance based on the nature of the goal. For example, let's say the user has achieved a savings goal – then the avatar might be rewarded with a new outfit or accessory, symbolizing financial discipline. You can further include a dedicated section where users can view their avatar's progression over time, providing a sense of accomplishment and motivation.

Such gamified tactics allow users to visually witness the impact of their financial decisions. People usually feel good when they are assigned ‘personality avatars’ that are relatable and help them understand their financial behavior better. There are high chances they may share their avatars across social media or discuss among friends – thus helping you promote the app.

Interactive financial quizzes

Implementing financial quizzes not only playfully engages users but also serves as a powerful educational tool. It helps improve their financial literacy while keeping them entertained.

For example, organizing quizzes for basic financial terms of your app’s industry is a great start. Design quizzes that span different financial categories, allowing users to gradually expand their knowledge and expertise. Start with basic quizzes covering fundamental concepts and gradually increase complexity. Users can unlock higher difficulty levels as they complete challenges.

To make it more entertaining, you can include real-life examples or scenarios to make the learning experience more practical and applicable. For example, create scenarios such as managing a budget for a fictional character, making investment choices, or solving credit-related challenges, allowing users to apply theoretical knowledge to practical situations.

How to gamify your FinTech app?

Superhuman is a gamified email software that directly competes with traditional email providers like Gmail or Yahoo. Here’s a quote by Rahul Vohra, the Founder and CEO of Superhuman about getting gamification right by balancing skill and challenge with an example of Superhuman:

“The thing that I'm most excited to share is this balance between challenge and skill. This is the experience fluctuation model. For most people, Gmail is the left-hand slice. Some people feel apathetic or worried the skill level is low to medium but their email doesn't matter that much. Some people feel further up the left-hand side the skill level is low to medium but their email does matter. Many people feel anxious that their skill level is low to medium but the email really does matter and they are failing at it.”

“This is actually how most users come to us at Superhuman – we massively increased the skill level for almost everybody but what happens if your email wasn't that challenging to begin with? Or you were already highly skilled? Well, this is going to sound crazy – we increase the challenge level, and we give you a really challenging goal – hit inbox zero without ever touching the mouse. And this bounces your perceived skill with the perceived challenge, thus resulting in a flow.”

While balancing skill and challenge is important, getting gamification right requires a thoughtful and strategic approach. The idea is to ensure that the integration of game mechanics aligns seamlessly with your overall objectives. It should enhance the user’s experience, and not become a distraction.

Here’s a three-step approach to designing, implementing, and aligning gamification strategy for your FinTech app:

Step 1: Define clear objectives

It’s easy to think about implementing gamification – but a fine balance between your FinTech app’s goals and game design elements has to be there. 

Thus, it's crucial to establish clear goals for your Fintech app. Consider specific user actions or engagement metrics you want to improve. Are you aiming to increase user onboarding, boost transaction frequency, or encourage users to explore advanced features?

Defining these objectives provides a roadmap for your gamification strategy, ensuring that every game element contributes meaningfully to your app's success.

One common challenge is setting vague or overly broad objectives. Instead of a broad goal like "improve user engagement," opt for specific metrics such as "increase daily app usage by 20%" or "boost referral rates by 15%." Then, think about how your gamification strategy will help you achieve them. You can design the necessary methods to measure the effectiveness of the gamification strategy and how they align with your business goals.

Step 2: Map user journeys and touchpoints

You must have a thorough understanding of user journeys and have a comprehensive user journey map ready before applying game design. Identify entry points, exit points, and critical touchpoints to understand the flow of user interactions. To take a step further, product managers can initiate user behavior analysis through tools like heatmaps, user session recordings, or analytics data. By gaining insights into the paths users take within the app, you can pinpoint areas where gamification can make the most impact.

Now, based on decided objectives and user journey maps available, find out at which touchpoints you can truly implement gamification tactics. Conduct a thorough analysis of user touchpoints, focusing on critical moments such as account setup, first transaction, or goal achievement. Integrate gamification elements strategically at these touchpoints to provide positive reinforcement and encouragement.

For example, it’s a good practice to implement game elements during the onboarding process. You can guide users through interactive tutorials or challenges to familiarize them with the app's features in an engaging manner.

Step 3: Choose appropriate gamification mechanics

When implementing gamification mechanics, the challenge lies in choosing features that align seamlessly with your goals and resonate with your target audience. Whether it's challenges, rewards, or progress tracking, each mechanic should serve a specific purpose tied to your goals.

For example, if your goal is to increase user engagement, consider implementing challenges that encourage users to perform specific actions within the app, rewarding them for their participation.

Another common pitfall is implementing overly complex gamification features may confuse users, leading to frustration rather than enjoyment. Users should easily understand and engage with gamification mechanics. If you're incorporating a points system, ensure it's transparent and intuitive. If it is a leaderboard, then it should be visually appealing and straightforward, encouraging healthy competition among users.

Another important point is to ensure your gamification features seamlessly integrate into the app's existing flow. For this, you can use Nudge which helps you build out gamification features that look native to your app, thus seamlessly fitting into the app's flow.

Challenges  to consider when implementing a gamification strategy

Gamification involves a fine balance between entertaining users and engaging them in tasks that benefit your FinTech business. Here are some potential disadvantages you must consider before adopting game design elements:

Cost of development and maintenance

Creating and integrating gamification features into a Fintech app demands a significant initial investment in terms of development hours, design, and testing. Developing gamification features in-house, especially those involving real-time interactions or intricate mechanics, can get technically complex. This complexity may require specialized skills and additional development time – thus, contributing to increased costs.

On top of it, as mentioned in the advantages section, an iterative development approach is essential to truly experience the conversion rate benefits and translate them into revenues. This further requires investment of resources.

Also, as the user base of a Fintech app grows, the demand for scalable gamification features increases. Ensuring that gamified elements can seamlessly accommodate a growing user base without compromising performance requires ongoing optimization. This will result in additional development costs.

Thus, it is essential to remember that gamification is not a one-time investment – at each stage of your FinTech app’s growth, gamification will continue to incur costs. Using dedicated user experience platforms like Nudge helps reduce such development costs. Such platforms are great if you have no or limited development bandwidth. You get a single platform to manage gamification elements, build native experiences, while also analyzing their impact.

Some users may not appreciate gamification

Finance, in the end, is a serious business. If your target audience is people who want to do straightforward business, they may not appreciate the gamified elements. Further, it may even serve as a distraction or users may consider it ‘unnecessary’ or ‘unprofessional’. Have a clear understanding of your target audience before implementing gamified elements.

Nudge helps you segment your audience into cohorts through which you can choose to show the gamification experiences to a group of users who would benefit the most from it. Doing so helps you avoid disturbing users who may not enjoy such interfaces and target the right people.

Your Fintech app can get addictive

Robinhood faced a lot of criticism due to its oversimplification and gamification of investing in stocks. Since it made investing in stocks very easy and used design psychology to make it feel ‘easy’, it resulted in many people investing without proper guidance or seriousness. Such practices can result in better revenues for brokerages, but may not be in the best interest of your users (investors).

By leveraging psychological principles related to motivation, rewards, and competition, gamification can create a compelling user experience that users find difficult to resist.

While creating an addictive app can boost user engagement, it's essential to strike a balance that doesn't compromise user well-being. Thus, use gamification elements, but at a level where it makes sense for the product and the end user.

How to measure gamification ROI and determine success for FinTech apps?

Traditional features have direct monetary outcomes and hence are more straightforward to measure.

Defining and tracking specific KPIs related to gamification can be challenging, especially when the goals are nuanced, such as improving user engagement or enhancing the onboarding experience. 

Here are some methods you can use to measure the impact and ROI of your gamification strategy:

User engagement

Traditional metrics like app downloads or page views may not adequately capture the depth of user engagement with gamified elements.

One way to measure is to check for time spent (or session duration) on engaging with your gamified elements and the frequency of interactions. You can consider metrics like Daily Active Users (DAU), Monthly Active Users (MAU), and user feedback – better numbers here means your users are engaged and satisfied.

Conversion rates

It can be challenging to directly attribute conversions, such as account sign-ups or transactions, to specific gamified features. To understand the impact of gamification, consider conducting A/B tests where you compare gamified and non-gamified elements and measure conversion rates for each. 

You can also consider using analytics tools to examine the user flow within gamified sections. Identify whether users who engage with gamified features are more likely to progress through the conversion funnel. Explore Nudge’s analytics and reporting capabilities to track conversions and make changes in your flows if required to improve them.

App retention rates

Gamification may initially attract users, but sustaining their interest over the long term is crucial for retention. The users should not feel bored or overwhelmed with your initiatives to engage them over time.

A way to determine this for gamified elements is to conduct a cohort analysis. For this, track the retention rates of users who engaged with gamified features over time. Then, compare these cohorts to users who did not participate to identify any significant differences.

Completion of gamified tasks

Users may abandon challenges or goals, impacting the overall success of the gamification strategy.

You can implement progress tracking features and visualize how many users are completing their set goals, tasks, or gamified journey. You can also consider offering ‘tiered rewards’ for different levels of challenge completion. Then, you will know how many users are truly progressing in this system, determine budgets, and align incentives.

Customer satisfaction surveys

A direct way to understand if your users are truly finding gamification helpful is to ask them via feedback mechanisms. Conduct regular customer satisfaction surveys and implement their suggestions if found relevant. You can also use NPS surveys to gauge users' likelihood of recommending your FinTech app to others. A positive correlation between gamification engagement and NPS indicates a successful strategy.

Overall, gamification should help reduce churn rates over a period of time, improve engagement on the app, and increase acquisition of users. 

Get started with implementing gamification for your FinTech app using Nudge

Gamification successfully impacts user engagement, retention rates, and conversions to help your business grow. Apart from this, embracing gamification becomes a key differentiator, offering a competitive edge in a crowded market.

Nudge helps you design custom user experiences – which includes implementing gamification within user flows. By using our platform, you can design, implement, and track gamified experiences without using dev bandwidth. We also help you track your implementation via our analytics dashboard to help you make on-time optimization decisions.

Not just that, we also help you add direct games like chess, tambola, carrom, etc in your app via our Game Zone features. Book a demo with our team and we can help you understand how to make the best use of Nudge for your gamification strategy.