Banking is one of the few industries where almost every adult is a customer, whether they want to be or not. You need a bank account to receive a salary, pay bills, or save money. That universal reach makes banking an especially fertile ground for gamification. Few products touch as many people as frequently, and few have as much data about their users’ daily behavior patterns.
The numbers are already there. Every banking app displays a balance, a transaction history, a credit score, and a spending breakdown. Customers check these numbers habitually. That habit is itself a form of implicit gamification. Progress tracking, one of the most basic engagement mechanics, is already built into every banking experience. The question is not whether banks can use gamification. They already do. The question is whether they do it intentionally.
The Neobank Challenge
The banking industry has felt real pressure from neobanks over the past several years. Companies like Revolut, Chime, and N26 grew from zero to tens of millions of users in less than a decade. Revolut alone reached 65 million customers by 2025, up from roughly half that in 2022, as documented on its Wikipedia page. These digital-only banks did not compete on rates alone. Interest rates across the sector were low across the board. Instead, they competed on experience.
Neobanks borrowed patterns from consumer apps. They added spending categories with color-coded charts. They sent push notifications when a subscription renewed. They offered vaults or pots where customers could set aside money for specific goals. Revolut’s Savings Vault, introduced in 2022, let users track daily interest accrual: a small but visible feedback loop that turned saving into a more engaging behavior, as PYMNTS reported.
These are explicit gamification mechanics. They use scarcity (limited-time offers on premium tiers), unpredictability (cashback surprises, referral bonuses), and social proof (leaderboards for spending challenges). For younger users who grew up with mobile games, these mechanics feel natural. A banking app that offers a saving challenge with a progress bar and a reward at the end behaves more like a fitness app than a traditional bank statement. That familiarity is the point.
Where Explicit Gamification Works Best
Core Drive 6: Scarcity & Impatience drives much of the neobank playbook. Limited-time interest boosts, early-access features for premium accounts, and countdown timers on promotional offers all create urgency. Revolut metal card tiers used tiered access to create a sense of exclusivity. Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity appears in cashback surprises, random reward drops, and referral bonuses that vary in size.
These mechanics work well for acquisition and initial activation. A new user sees a limited-time offer and signs up. They get a surprise cashback on their first purchase and feel delighted. The StriveCloud breakdown of Revolut gamification describes how the app uses social challenges and progress tracking to sustain engagement. But explicit gamification has a ceiling. Once users have seen the surprise, claimed the bonus, and reached the tier, the novelty fades. Retention requires a different approach.
The Trust Advantage of Traditional Banks
Traditional banks hold two assets that neobanks cannot easily replicate: trust and data. Customers store their paychecks, mortgages, and retirement savings with traditional banks. That creates a relationship with a longer time horizon. A neobank might know what a customer spent on coffee last week. A traditional bank knows what that customer has been saving every month for the past decade.
That longitudinal data is the foundation for implicit gamification. Implicit gamification does not add badges, timers, or leaderboards. It works with the existing user experience, making it more motivating without announcing itself as a game. Progress tracking is the most obvious example. A dashboard showing a customer how their savings have grown over five years activates Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment. The progress is real. The customer did the work. The dashboard simply makes the progress visible.
Another implicit mechanic is ownership. When a banking app lets customers name their savings goals, set custom targets, and see their names next to each goal, it activates Core Drive 4: Ownership & Possession. The goal becomes personal. It is not just a number the bank assigned. It is the customer’s vacation fund, their emergency cushion, their child’s education account. The sense of ownership makes the behavior self-sustaining without external rewards.
Richard Thaler, the Nobel laureate who defined behavioral economics, demonstrated that people do not treat all money as fungible. Mental accounting means a dollar in the vacation fund feels different from a dollar in the checking account. Banks that let customers create and name multiple savings goals are designing for this psychological reality. The University of Chicago Booth School profile of Thaler outlines his decades of work on how real humans make financial decisions. These are not people who optimize utility. They are people who need a story for their money. Implicit gamification provides that story.
The Hybrid Strategy: Explicit for Acquisition, Implicit for Retention
The most durable approach combines both types of gamification. Use explicit mechanics to attract new users and drive early activation. Then shift to implicit mechanics to sustain engagement over the long term.
Acquisition responds well to Core Drive 6 and Core Drive 7. A limited-time bonus for opening an account. A referral program with surprise rewards. A gamified onboarding flow that turns KYC verification into a progress checklist. These mechanics create the initial hook that traditional banks struggle with because they rely on brand awareness and branch presence instead of behavioral triggers.
Retention responds to Core Drive 2 and Core Drive 4. Annual savings summaries that celebrate progress. Personalized milestones that reflect the customer’s actual financial journey, not generic targets. Ownership mechanics that make the customer feel their account is truly theirs, not just a database entry at the bank.
Consider mortgage payments. A traditional bank could show a homeowner a visual timeline of their mortgage balance declining month by month, with celebrations at key thresholds (25% paid, 50% paid). That is pure Core Drive 2: the customer sees real progress toward a meaningful goal. No badges needed. No leaderboards. Just a clear representation of reality that the customer finds motivating. Neobanks rarely have mortgage data. Traditional banks do.
Consider retirement savings. A dashboard that projects future income based on current contributions, with sliders the customer can adjust to see how small changes compound over decades, activates Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback. The customer experiments with different scenarios and sees the results immediately. That is feedback on a decision that matters. No game layer required.
A TOG Case Study in Banking Gamification
The Octalysis Group partnered with DBS Bank to develop a company-wide gamification strategy addressing the specific engagement challenges of digital banking. DBS, recognized as a global leader in digital transformation, worked with TOG to move beyond conventional usability approaches toward designs that motivate repeated interaction. The full engagement is detailed on the DBS Bank case study page.
The DBS partnership is a good example of the hybrid approach in practice. Rather than adding superficial rewards on top of existing banking features, the engagement design focused on identifying the moments where motivation was most likely to drop off and constructing mechanics that kept users moving forward. This mirrors what behavioral scientist and author Nir Eyal describes in his book Hooked as the internal trigger: the point where an external prompt connects to an internal motivation. For banking, the internal trigger is often financial anxiety. The design challenge is to replace anxiety with a sense of control.
Another TOG banking client introduced an automated savings mechanic that transferred a percentage of every deposit into a locked account. Customers could see the money growing and feel it was theirs. The design removed the moment of choice where short-term spending impulse would override the long-term saving intention. This approach contributed to what one banking client reported as over a billion dollars in annual profit through improved customer engagement, as noted on the TOG case studies page.
What This Means for Bankers
If you work in retail banking or digital product management at a financial institution, the takeaway is straightforward. You already have the raw materials for effective gamification. Your customers check their balances daily. They set financial goals. They feel anxiety about money. Those are not problems to solve. They are starting points for design.
First, audit your existing data for progress signals. Can a customer see how their net worth has changed over the past year? Can they see their savings rate trending upward? If not, you are sitting on an engagement asset that costs nothing to surface.
Second, separate acquisition mechanics from retention mechanics. Use explicit gamification (limited offers, referral rewards, achievement badges) to bring users in. Use implicit gamification (progress dashboards, personalized milestones, mental accounting tools) to keep them. Do not use the same set of mechanics for both phases.
Third, respect the trust you have earned. Traditional banks have something neobanks spend millions trying to build: a long relationship with the customer’s financial life. Do not undermine it with flashy mechanics that feel like a mobile game. Use the trust to enable deeper engagement mechanics that require longitudinal data. A neobank cannot show a customer their 10-year savings trajectory because it does not have 10 years of data. You can.
The hybrid model is not a compromise. It is a strategy that matches different motivational tools to different stages of the customer journey. The Octalysis Framework, with its classification of explicit and implicit Core Drives, provides the structure to make those decisions systematically.
Our team at The Octalysis Group has applied this approach for clients across banking, airlines, and enterprise software. Contact us if you want to audit your customer engagement strategy through the lens of behavioral design.
