Fintech gamification - best practices and lessons

For a fintech company to grow its customer base, a customer’s initial excitement must generate enough momentum to ensure they onboard successfully and start engaging with the product.

In this blog post, we'll cover:

Gamification uses game-like elements to make an experience more compelling. Fintech apps like Fortune City use it to grab customers' attention and prolong their interest. Gamification also has to be implemented very carefully, giving consideration to both business aims and what motivates and interests customers.

Fintech services can be quite set-up intensive. They often require the submission of documents, building financial literacy, and integration with a bank account. It can be difficult to maintain customer momentum during the sign-up process. Fintech gamification is a powerful tool to address onboarding roadblocks, reducing friction so the customer can complete the process without getting distracted or waylaid.

Just like a checkout process, such as Amazon, a progress bar is the most simple form of gamified encouragement to complete a process. It shows a customer their progress, reminds them of their goal, and quantifies their investment in the task so far, something they would lose if they gave up. 

Such companies have gone much further. Portfolio and investment tracking app Nevexa takes a very clever approach to in-app incentives. Their reward system for completing tasks addresses every step of the customer journey. Each step a customer progresses on their onboarding journey increases the duration of their free trial.

This ensures a Nevexa free trial period will not be wasted on set-up alone. It also rewards engaged customers by giving them more time to test the app, boosting the conversion rate. In this interview with David Jones, Nevexa founder Navarre Trousselot gives an in-depth insight into what motivated this design approach.

Often a fintech service requires a customer to change ingrained habits like paying with a specific credit card, to really get the best out of a service. Giving a customer incentives by rewarding their behavior is a great way to encourage them to try something new and stick with it.

Revolut offers a number of financial services to its customers, including currency exchange, debit cards, virtual cards, Apple Pay, stock trading, crypto, and other services. Revolut’s gamification strategy encourages customers to switch over to using their Revolut debit card for in-person transactions. 

With the Revolut Perks program, a customer gains a reward for every tenth time they use their card. There are two kinds of rewards.

These benefits are also timed, creating more incentive to use them. Clicking on a perk in the Revolut app leads to a counter on it showing how long it will remain active and a link to the relevant site.

Revolut has also tiered loyalty rewards so that customers who have invested more with the company, ie those who have applied for a metal card, will receive greater rewards. This tiered, countdown approach provides medium-term benefits that can be refreshed through consistent user engagement. This is a great motivator for converting short-term promotions into long-term loyalty.

Sometimes a simple strategy is the most effective. For a banking app that is encouraging customers to save, measurable progress can often feel abstract as numbers sitting on a page. Adding progress bars enhances the user experience, setting a more tangible goal.

A streak could be checking on investments each day or adding to a savings account each week. A progress bar measuring the length of a streak will encourage a customer to keep up consistent behavior.

Like most simple strategies, progress bars have their complexities. It's important to prioritize stats in a way that makes sense to the customer. Does your progress bar have the right increments to encourage a user?

Progress that appears too fast could cause panic yet progress that seems too slow could make customers feel hopeless. If the bar reflects information that accumulates in a linear fashion, like savings, it’s worth considering adding incremental progress markers too. A goal feels more achievable when split into constituent pieces.

There are also several basic technical concerns. An app should not feature progress bars that can be clearly and quickly understood by someone who is colorblind or using a screen reader. It is also important a breakdown of the data being reflected in the progress bar is easily available, otherwise, it could be construed as deceptive. 

Mint is an online budget planner and does a great job of showing its users their progress and their consistency. As you can see from the image above, a single-sentence summary of the data reflected on that page of the app is shown at the top of each screen. Progress bars give customers an eye-catching overview of how their progress is going with more in-depth information available below.

Fintech app development hinges on cleanly conveying high-density information. Mint has worked hard to incorporate gamification features that encourage customer engagement while also improving customer understanding of financial data. 

Using Talon.One’s Rule Builder is a great way to build a loyalty system. After set-up, it’s easy to determine different effects for users of different levels on your loyalty program, encouraging members to progress to the next level. Rewarding customer loyalty and attention is a sure path to grow your customer base while improving retention.