Play to Pay ~ How Gamification is Revolutionising Digital Banking

February 2025

Fintech & Payments

Daniel Bedford

Senior Research Analyst

Gamification has become a powerful tool for banks and fintechs, transforming customer engagement, boosting loyalty, and enhancing the overall banking experience.

With AI-driven insights, gamification goes beyond just rewards; it empowers customers to better understand and manage their finances, improving financial literacy. In an increasingly crowded digital banking landscape, where neobanks, traditional banks, and fintechs compete for customer attention, gamification offers a strategic edge. By integrating game mechanics into banking apps, financial institutions can create more engaging, rewarding, and interactive experiences that set them apart.

What Makes Gamification?

The game mechanics that are commonplace across examples of gamification include: 

• Rewards: Incentives such as cashback, discounts, or exclusive perks can encourage users to engage with financial services more regularly.

• Challenges: Time-sensitive or goal-based tasks, such as spending a certain amount within a period or hitting a savings target, can keep users motivated and engaged.

• Progress Tracking: Visual indicators like progress bars, spending milestones, or savings goals can provide users with a sense of accomplishment, reinforce positive financial habits, and encourage continued engagement.

• Leaderboards: Ranking systems that display top-performing users based on specific criteria, such as savings streaks or transaction volume, foster friendly competition, and enhance user participation and engagement.

• Badges: Digital achievements earned by completing specific financial actions, like setting up direct debits, using digital wallets, or reaching savings goals can serve as milestones, reinforcing continued usage.

Source: Juniper Research

Monobank, a neobank that was recently ranked #1 in our Fintech Future Leaders 100, presents one of the most elaborate examples of gamification in the market. 

Monobank’s in-app experience is led by a playful cat mascot to create a fun and engaging experience. Its high-level of customisation allows users to personalise their achievement and rewards, further incentivising users to unlock more badges and features. Monobank offers up to 51 achievement badges for completing tasks like filling out their profile or using Apple Pay.

Revolut is another great example of gamification in practice. Revolut is one of the most disruptive challenger banks, which is set to further disrupt the digital banking landscape following its recent acquisition of a UK banking licence alongside its fast growth.

Revolut’s gamification strategy centres around its RevPoints system. Revolut uses a leaderboard to display users’ points and foster competition among users. Users can earn points by making transactions, inviting friends, or participating in challenges; points can be redeemed for rewards or used to enter raffles for cash prizes.

A different example is Aspiration. Aspiration is a ‘climate friendly’ consumer fintech platform founded in 2013. Aspiration offers consumers financial solutions that strive to help combat climate change, and enables users to join in collective action.

Aspiration offers consumers cashback and rewards when purchasing from eco-friendly merchants. Through its Green Marketplace, customers can gain up to 6% cash back on climate-friendly brands, including Patagonia, Thrive Market, Who Gives A Crap, Tesla Supercharger, Misfits Market, and Pact. Aspiration’s marketplace motivates users to make more environmentally conscious decisions.

Implementing Gamification 

Simply rolling out a one-size-fits-all scheme is insufficient on its own; banks must deliberately develop and execute a well-crafted gamification strategy. This strategy should effectively incorporate game mechanics which thoughtfully address customers' psychological needs and preferences.

The most successful gamification strategies found across banking apps focus on increasing customer engagement, to motivate users to use the app. However, these tasks need to be proven to be stimulating and effectively release dopamine. This can be achieved by making sure rewards and prizes create satisfaction and monitoring whether this drives users’ continued engagement.

Points and progress bars can be used, to play on customers’ reluctance to lose progress and encourage continued effort towards the goal. Furthermore, banks should aim to make their gamification deeply immersive, with the aim of inducing a ‘flow state’ which can make financial management tasks more enjoyable and engaging.

Gamification can be utilised to enhance financial literacy, by making educational content more interactive. This includes quizzes and simulations - which can teach users how to budget, save, and invest in an engaging manner. Digital banks can leverage AI and data analytics to personalise gamification based on user behaviour and preferences. This tailored approach increases use, satisfaction, and encourages more active participation in financial management. 

Future Trends in Banking Gamification

As seen with Aspiration, there is a growing trend towards incorporating sustainability into gamification strategies, which appeals to eco-conscious consumers and promotes an environmentally friendly lifestyle.

To build on this, AI is becoming increasingly common across gamification – being utilised to create personalised solutions tailored to customer-specific needs. The future of gamification is anticipated to scale up into mega financial platforms, integrating a wide range of financial services with gamified elements. This is driven by the need to create a comprehensive and engaging financial system, where banks will need to address key challenges such as sustaining engagement overtime. Successful gamification will balance fun and seriousness, whilst ensuring transparency and fairness across rewards and challenges. 

In conclusion, for digital banks to successfully unlock the full power of gamification they require an elaborate strategy that not only leverages game mechanics but also deeply understands consumer psychology and needs.

By focusing on creating satisfying and immersive experiences, banks can effectively motivate users to manage finances more actively. The integration of gamification with educational content can be used as an effective tool to boost financial literacy, while AI-driven personalisation ensures a tailored experience, promoting user satisfaction.

Ultimately, the most successful gamification will be those that successfully deliver fun, learning, transparency and fairness, creating a holistic financial ecosystem that sustains engagement over time. 

As a member of Juniper Research’s Fintech & Payments team, Dan analyses developments in financial and payments markets, and how these interplay with emerging technologies, such as blockchain and AI. His recent reports include QR Code Payments, Fintech Future Leaders 100, and KYC/KYB Systems.