Digital banking has become the primary touchpoint through which customers connect with their financial institutions, yet that engagement often remains shallow. Customers log in frequently, but rather than make full use of the growing range of digital tools available to them, they spend most of their time reviewing transactions and cash positions.
Banks have tried to encourage greater interaction through gamification, strategies that make the activity fun and entice the user to keep coming back. A new report from Javelin Strategy & Research, Designing Gamification for Ongoing Digital Banking Engagement, discusses the most successful approaches in these efforts and shows how novelty, visuals without an underlying attachment to engagement, and short-term activity are no match for behavior, trust, and habit formation.
Attracting the User
When gamification is grounded in behavioral design, it can help consumers deeply understand their financial lives and build confidence through visible progress. It also allows them to engage more consistently in ways that benefit the customer and the bank.
It starts with the bank offering something interactive that catches the user’s interest. The bank might say since the user performed a certain activity, such as checking a balance, they get five points. When they do this particular activity again, they would earn another point. After doing it five days in a row, the user might get even more points. But without a greater objective, this can fall flat.
“Many times this is distracting to the user,” said Disha Bheda, Digital Banking Analyst at Javelin and a co-author of the report. “Sometimes the user doesn’t know why they are doing a certain thing. When they don’t know what the end purpose is, that’s where a lot of banks are failing.”
The most successful gamification approaches emphasize customer goals, illustrate progress, reward effort, and inspire repeated behavior. When designed around behavioral finance principles, gamification turns engagement into a habit rather than a momentary interaction.
Elements like visual progress and goal setting lend themselves naturally to gamification. The entities that have grounded them in behavioral finance are the ones using gamification in savvy ways.
“Look at the language learning program Duolingo,” said Craig Lancaster, Senior Analyst with the Digital Banking team at Javelin and the report’s co-author. “Duolingo has taken the position that showing up every day is the point, moreso than the progress. Anyone who’s tried to learn another language would probably say, yep, that’s it precisely.”
Creating Habits
To reinforce the engagement that banks and customers want to see, it’s less about badges and leaderboards and more about experience inside the app. Creating habits is extremely important for financial fitness.
“If you have a savings goal and you save consistently, no matter how small it may be, you can see the progress toward your goal,” Bheda said. “The customer has to understand how gamification is helping them to achieve a goal and how it is benefiting them. If the customer is not clear there, the whole purpose of gamification fails. When they see that a step is helping them progress toward their goal, that helps them come back again.”
That especially helps when real life intrudes on their plans, and customers who have embarked on a savings challenge have to put it on pause because of a life change or emergency. Even after they take two steps back, they can take three steps forward and keep their plans on track. The ability of gamification to visualize the progress that the customer is making gives them the motivation that they’re making inroads and helps them to come back again.
One of the dangers is making the gamification elements so flashy that the customer loses the sense of why they are doing this.
“Flashy is OK,” said Lancaster. “Flashy without substance or underpinning is one of the things that we cautioned against in this report.”
Leading Users to Security
Security is one of the most serious and important aspects of digital banking, and it lends itself to gamification. Users need to take several actions to set up the security measures that protect them. For instance, they can enable two-factor authentication for their login and password. They can be aware of how to respond to a call from an unknown number, what measures to take, and how to protect their identity online.
Many customers are not aware of the most secure ways to protect their banking account. Even if they know what they should be doing, their busy lifestyle often means it gets put on the back burner. Gamification can help ensure the customer performs all their necessary security actions.
Security gamification should inspire informed vigilance rather than fear, competition, or compliance fatigue. Gamification in security matters should be geared toward building consumers’ confidence that they can be effective partners in safeguarding their accounts. Guide them to best practices, then reward them for taking necessary measures and precautions and present compelling challenges to do more.
Ally Bank, for one, employs a social approach to gamification of its security centers, offering a badge to those who complete the security student program. The sober, confidence-building approach strengthens trust and deepens the banking relationship.
“You have to make them take the steps,” said Bheda. “It’s mandatory. We’re just trying to make it fun.”
Where Gamification Makes a Difference
Financial fitness may be the strongest opportunity for gamification. Most large banks offer few financial fitness features. Gamification can help drive the adoption of those digital features by helping customers understand the value that those features can bring to their financial lives. Emphasis should be on progress, consistency, and effort.
British online bank Monzo gamifies savings with its 1p Saving Challenge feature, designed to create a habit that sticks. Credit Karma, owned by Intuit, has used gamification to turn the consumer credit score from a black box into a follow-along journey, emphasizing behavior (reduced credit usage, paying down balances, making on-time payments) over outcomes.
“Financial fitness, feature adoption, and security were the three big areas where well-done gamification can help,” said Lancaster. “It really is experiential. What banks want from customers and what customers probably want from themselves, even if they haven’t articulated it, is feeling capable and deputized in their own protection. Deputize the customer, help create an experience where the customer feels not only part of it, but capable of doing his or her part in it.”
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