Adapting Gamification for investment banking

Gamification takes the essence of games, attributes such as fun, play, transparency, design and competition and applies these to a range of real-world processes inside an organization, including learning & development. According to a study, the Gamification Market is estimated to reach up to $5.502 billion by 2018 at a compound annual growth rate of 67.1% from 2013 to 2018.

According to Gartner Inc.’s Brian Burke in a contribution to Forbes, “When designed correctly, gamification has proven to be very successful in engaging people and motivating them to change behaviors, develop skills or solve problems.”

Using gamification technology, banking and financial planning can be turned be turned into a more interactive experience. It can help clients to run a variety of scenarios in a simulated environment with the goal of determining the best options for saving and investing given market volatility and unforeseen market conditions. It is proving to be a good way to engage and retain consumers.

Getting millennials to embrace “traditional” financial services isn’t easy. The new-age customers are more dependent on technology than any other previous generations. And banking was never a smooth experience as many face on regular basis. However now financial technology companies have transformed to offer whole new ways to turn bill payments (and other services) into a smooth and seamless, almost one-click process. This relationship can further be improved by gamification of application.

The idea of gamification is to bring the elements, design and principles of a game into non-game environments in order to engage, educate and bond with customers. In addition to increasing engagement, establishing loyalty and improving financial literacy, gamification is believed to be one of the ways of painless and cost-effective transition to intensified usage of digital channels instead of physical. As a result, banks can significantly reduce operational/processing costs.

Banks can gamify the customer-facing tools to enhance customers’ understanding of their own financial health and allow them to monitor progress towards personalized savings targets, among other examples. Gamification could also be used as an educational tool to inform and educate people about many financial aspects that would otherwise usually require a one-on-one session with their relationship managers.

Here gamification in banking can operate on a similar model as those fitness apps. Instead of getting points on burning a certain number of calories or walking a specific number of steps in a day, users can get points when they perform a certain number and type of transactions using the gamification platform. It could be anything from watching videos about financial aspects such as investments or savings to even transferring funds to purchase new stocks. The point is to make sure the journey is as awesome as the destination i.e. users should enjoy this experience which is the only way to ensure they continue using it. Besides gamification platforms will not only eliminate some of the capital investment and implementation challenges of large-scale deployment but also help reduce the complexities that otherwise discourage users.

Benefits of Gamification

The biggest benefit of gamification is that providers can guide a new customers to the markets through all stages of trading i.e. right from analysis to trend identification to trade placement and finally onto risk management. This is essential because it is going to be in a lot of cases the investors first experience in the financial markets and that first experience can determine if the investors remains in the markets with confidence and thus becomes a great benefit to the financial markets and all its participants. On the other hand, if the investors are not able to understand how to proceed then they may abandon the process and look for better alternatives. So providing an excellent UI is of paramount importance in gamification.

Gamification has a strategic role to play in the digital banking era. As banks make the shift from enabling transactions to creating experiences, they can find in gamification a powerful tool to engage, educate, motivate and influence their digital customers.

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