Why Is Fintech Borrowing Ideas from Casual Gaming?

We’re living in an age in which everything is battling for users’ attention. Smartphones are packed full of different apps, and it’s the developers’ job to try to keep people tapping on them. It seems surprising, but fintech apps are now battling for attention and competing with the likes of entertainment and social media.

That’s why a lot of the leading brands are now implementing gamification techniques as standard. The idea is to make fintech apps as engaging as possible to ensure that people keep using them and spend a lot of time on them.

Apps Competing for Attention in the Digital Age

Fintech apps were traditionally only used when necessary – usually to make payments and check balances. Now, companies are trying to make them more than just utilities. They want people to spend more time on their apps and engage in their ecosystems. This means that they’re employing various gamification techniques to encourage people to keep coming back.

These methods include notifications, savings milestones, and graphs to show how people are spending their money. When users open their fintech apps, they want to have the same kind of engagement instantly. This can appear in various ways, such as showing visual images of spending behaviour or providing information about an upcoming payment. Some fintech platforms even offer budgeting tips that are presented in a manageable way.

Various fintech leaders, such as Revolut, now have gamified features such as missions. There are even casual gaming apps with fintech themes, such as Long Game and Fortune City. In the rapidly growing attention economy, apps are judged on how well they engage their users and how much time people spend on them. Fintech apps need to score high on these metrics to ensure they stay relevant and attract new users.

Learning From Low-Investment Entertainment Sites

Certain entertainment sites set the standard when encouraging people to keep coming back for more. One of the key aspects is availability and the fact that users know they will get almost instant entertainment when they tap the app. For example, on YouTube, viewers are taken directly to the videos that they are most likely to want to see based on their past viewing behaviour.

Keeping options wide to appeal to a vast audience is another element of this. Other online entertainment companies, such as platforms like online bingo sites, offer hundreds of different game options to players. This means there’s likely a themed game or format that will appeal to any player. These sites also implement gamification in their member engagement models, such as implementing leaderboards and daily offers for players.

When people turn on their smartphones now, they’re faced with a plethora of logos of different colours and designs. The question is which one they should open. Fintech companies know that people are drawn towards social media and entertainment apps on their phones and tablets, so they need to make theirs as enticing as possible. As the industry evolves, it may soon become hard to distinguish fintech apps from entertainment options.