Railsr

Dan Bedi

People like games and it’s not just for kids. Gamification is a major trend. It is changing the way consumers interact with businesses. With a CAGR of 24.2% from 2020 until 2030, gamification is an increasingly important tactic for brands to adopt to stay competitive. 

It is well-known that when a business incorporates elements of gameplay into a non-game setting - like tracking progress, adding goals, and completing tasks to earn rewards such as bonuses, cash incentives, and gifts - consumers engage more. Gamification has long been used as a marketing tactic to increase customer engagement and loyalty. By combining this obviously powerful trend with fintech infrastructure and consumer financial data, the experience can be uniquely elevated. 

Today, businesses are encouraging consumers to save money, plan budgets, and interact with their products with fun, smart, and sometimes subtle elements of gameplay. In this way, it enables businesses to build engagement, loyalty and satisfaction with customers, and is also driving revenues. 

Gamification has become prolific amongst embedded finance offerings; where financial services like payments, rewards, or lending are seamlessly integrated into a customers’ digital experience. Organisations in finance are now looking to leverage specific gameplay principles, design elements, and reward schemes through gamification. 

You can see this trend in everyday life, if you look close enough. 

Some incumbent banks use quizzes and puzzles to educate their customers about their finances, to create more opportunities to interact with their customers. As an example, BBVA was one of the first to educate its customers via videos and tutorials, which resulted in points that could be redeemed for music downloads or movie streams. 

On the other hand, neobanks have started to use several gaming elements to curate better experiences by including innovative game-like payment features. These are typically integrated in the user flows of a banking or insurance app, allowing further engagement and retention of the end-user. Monobank in Ukraine uses several gaming elements, such as animated characters and innovative game-like payment features, (e.g. Shake of Monobank allows you to initiate a peer-to-peer money transfer by shaking your phones when standing nearby) to increase customer interaction.

How do they do it? Some banks and insurers seek to boost engagement with existing customers and new prospects through embedded financial services via a third-party platform. Working with embedded finances specialists gives brands a plug-and-play solution that sits directly on top of their own infrastructure and utilises their data via APIs. 

Go Further: With Fintech and Gamification 

Fintech is now enabling all types of brands to access gamification to unlock consumer benefits. Take for instance, Maslife, a finance app that combines financial health and mental wellbeing. Maslife recently partnered with Railsr to launch a finance app that uses an ingenious mix of gamification and artificial intelligence to inspire users to make simple changes to their daily routines that lead to long-term positive results. The app places a strong emphasis on fitness, offering exercise trackers, yoga tutorials, and meditation workshops specifically devised to keep users moving and motivated.

The Maslife app combines a full suite of high-tech mobile bank functionalities with integrated budgeting tools. Through Railsr’s embedded finance experience platform, it enables Maslife to provide its customers with a number of services including card issuing and processing services, Banking-as-a-Service and licensing, virtual and physical cards, and dedicated accounts. 

However, for gamification to be successful, businesses need data from their customers to personalise products, services, and advice. This value exchange between a business and the consumer gives the end user a more tailored experience whilst allowing businesses to have a deeper level of engagement with customers.  

But there are many challenges when it comes to data integration, such as costs and difficulty to maintain in house. The use of APIs as a method of integrating data is key here as it unlocks the value of the data. Specific APIs can then be used to enable businesses to harness that data for a ready-made gamification offering.   

If You Can Overcome Your Data Challenges, Gamification is the Future 

Looking forward, gamification is increasingly likely to be done through partnerships in order to create even more compelling loyalty schemes and richer experiences. Many have questioned if gamification is a fad, but we are seeing continuous demand for loyalty programmes in particular as retention is more important for brands across all industries.  My view is that it will continue to play a major role as companies continue to refine their customer relations strategies. As customers' expectations for financial service rewards change, gamification will continue to be essential to brands to build loyalty and increase customer retention, whilst standing out from competitors. 

Fintech will continue to be the powerhouse behind gamification. If businesses pursue this approach, they will be able to profit from it in numerous ways; but only if they crack the data integration puzzle.