What is gamification in banking?
Banking gamification is the process of making banking a more enjoyable and interactive activity, like one would experience when playing a game. Gamified apps aim to increase customer engagement while also increasing interest in, and knowledge of, the maker’s products, while still ensuring the customer has an enjoyable interaction with the app. The banking industry can use game mechanics to elevate their customer experiences and grow trust in their product offerings.
Like creating a fitness account to track steps, different aspects of the banking industry can be gamified. From learning about interest rates and banking services to tracking money saving increases and decreases in savings accounts, the banking experience can easily translate to a gamified app. Digital banking is highly prevalent on mobile phones, and a gamified banking experience can be utilized in a mobile app or social media platform. However, banking gamification does not necessarily have to be built into a separate app, it can also be built into different sections of existing mobile banking applications.
Banking gamification can be especially beneficial for personal financial services. Gamification can help customers better understand spending trends, track bank accounts across services, and help with personal budgeting management. With a well-designed interface that focuses on ease-of use, customers can enjoy their banking experience in new ways. With open banking spreading throughout the globe, consumers will soon have more options than ever before for how to interact with their financial data. By utilizing banking gamification, financial institutes have new ways to engage customers, who are more and more frequently relying on digital banking options rather than traditional retail locations.
What are the business benefits of gamification in banking?
While retail banking locations are seeing a decrease in customer interaction, digital banking continues to grow. Banking gamification can benefit the financial industry in the following ways:
- Lower costs:While physical institutions need to worry about high overhead costs, digital banking has much lower associated costs, especially after the application exits development. Banking gamification can help ensure app utilization to increase the cost-benefit ratio of the application.
- Increased customer awareness: By creating an application that is entertaining to interact with, financial institutions can benefit from increased customer loyalty, as well as word-of-mouth advertising. Additionally, banking gamification can allow for real time input of new information, and help increase customer’s awareness of their own financial situation, which can simultaneously increase their buying power and brand loyalty.
- Cloud architecture: Banking gamification lends itself to being built on cloud services. By doing so, developers can ensure that the application will work on multiple platforms without having to worry about using legacy software and infrastructure.
- Differentiation:Although digital banks are commonplace, banking gamification is much less so. The use of game mechanics can give financial institutions an edge over their competitors and help encourage customers to switch to their banking services. By providing an enjoyable experience, financial institutions can expect increased application usage.
- Increased data insights:The more users interact with mobile applications, the more data the app can gather. Financial institutes can then use this data to better understand their customers and offer custom solutions and services, while also looking at broad swaths of customer data to determine areas for future growth and expansion.