Gamification in FinTech
and why my cousins are hopelessly addicted to ‘Go India’ in GPay
“You give me Puri, and I’ll give you Dastar”, chimed in my sister as my brother bellowed “Give me Dastar!!” — Never before had I ever seen my cousins bicker over something as trivial as a game. And there it was.
Puzzled, I was wondering, “What indeed is up with these guys? Have they fashioned themselves a new code language?”. Besides, why were my cousins glued to their screens even as we were all busily celebrating Diwali at home?
Further, as if in response to my reaction, my sister showed her smartphone screen to me; proudly grinning and displaying a map of India with all the cities she had toured in a game called ‘Go India’.
Still confused, I enquired if she had been to all these cities as my sister is an avid traveler. “No, these are all the cities I virtually toured in. It’s a game on Google Pay!!”, grumbled my sister, aghast, that I was not catching-up to her pace.
GPay — its experiments, failures, and some wins:
Before we delve deeper into the dynamics of ‘Go India’ and how GPay made it viral, below are some snapshots of their experiments, failures and wins in the past years.
Experiments: Did not levy a transaction fee for in-store payments in hopes of faster adoption, unlike Apple Pay which negotiated a fee for each transaction in the US and still came out a winner.
Failures: Got roughed up by PayPal (~ 60% market share in online payments) in international markets. Did nothing and launched only a year after Paytm emerged as an online payments champion and blew its trumpet during Demonetization in India in 2016. Received constant jeers from an irate Twitterati for its miserly cashback in comparison to its fierce competitor PhonePe.
Some win: Built an entity based UX set-up that lets users easily trace the latest chat heads against whom they made the recent payment vis-a-vis date and time transacted— drove adoption due to simple usability. Introduced Spot platform for small and medium businesses that helps businesses offer exclusive payment options to customers. Ultimately, built a viral in-app game called ‘Go India’ for its Indian User base. With this, finally, Google Pay seems to have struck Gold — post 5 years of drilling through arid fintech lands.
At least, for now, it’s apparent that GPay is giving ‘increasing user adoption’ a serious thought. And why would it not —if GPay continues to grow its user base, there are some significant revenue earning opportunities that can be tapped a few years from now. Earnings by levying fees per transaction, by displaying ads for viable financial products, by facilitating in-store payments at a marginal fee, by enabling storefront payments for businesses, etc — All of which they are doing for free now.
The Construct of Gamification in Fintech
Well, the results are out. And, ‘Go India’ has gone viral! Its innovative flurry of virtual cities is leaving its fierce competitors in a state of worry.
With a click of a button, one gets to virtually tour an Indian city. And, the more cities one collects and the more virtual KMs one accumulates, the higher are the chances to receive coupons and cashback. Consequently, the more hooked a player is — Especially when one’s friends are constantly posting updates about it all the time. It’s a vicious, and yet a fun cycle.
The issue is not just about one winning the coveted “Go India championship reward”, which is a paltry sum of 101–500 INR, but rather about not virtually touring all the cities one’s friends have visited.
My sensible cousins are still busy haggling with their friends, scrounging for any bills to be paid, doing mobile top-ups for the whole family in bulk, exchanging money amongst themselves, etc. for tickets to unknown cities. Some Social pressure of new heights, this.
But, encouraging close-knit friend circles to fight it out and play is a great way to growth-hack larger audiences. (Hello, Ludo King!!)
Previously, the only other app that had reaped rewards by leveraging rich behavioral insights, from gleaning extensive user data, was WeChat. WeChat reports that the number of users who used its forums more than 4h per day increased from 16.3% in 2015 to 33.9% in 2016.
First released in 2011, it became the world’s largest standalone mobile app in 2018, with over 1 billion monthly active users. You don’t see many apps boast such good numbers in a relatively short time. WeChat was able to achieve this herculean feat by introducing unpredictable cashback for transactions.
They tapped into the Octalysis framework’s 8 core drives and gamed WeChat interactions in such a way that the erratic cashback received, with torturous breaks (come back an hour later to get your reward) forcing a typical Chinese user to constantly frequent the app in hopes of receiving further cashback.
When you encounter an unpredictable scenario with erratic outcomes, your brain kicks into high gear and pays attention to the unexpected. Also, the fact that people can’t get something immediately motivates them to think about it all day long. As a result, they return to the product every chance they get.
Furthermore, with increased adoption of the app amidst the local population base, a congregation of otherwise offline merchants signed-up rendering their services at lower prices exclusively through WeChat — an Amazon flywheel concept on play in a single app. All other businesses still quickly adopt WeChat, probably for fear of missing out.
Some financial institutions, like Charlie Finance, use chatbots and gamified set-ups that engage users and help watch their users’ spending habits. Their target base is mostly millennials or young Americans who struggle with their savings. Leveraging AI, Charlie Finance’s penguin-shaped chatbot, for instance, helps reinforce positive behaviors and claims to help users make better financial decisions on their behalf.
Other financial institutions, depending upon their user-demographics, launch in-app games to appease their customer base. Contingent on how the app’s customer base is, a game is built — if leaning towards Gen-Y, a particularly high-engaging but short-lived game is built, and if Gen-X a roulette or a poker-like game is built; by shelling coupons and gift-vouchers to boost their engagement.
What is interesting to note is the rate at which such games go viral. The more ravished a crowd is for games that engage them while appearing to pay them simultaneously, the more easily adopted the game is.
Now, to the interesting part — why exactly are my cousins addicted to Go India? And, how did GPay manage to make their in-app game viral?
The below is a diagrammatic representation of the core drives fueling my cousins’ obsession with Go India in GPay. This is an instance of the Ocatlysis Design Framework for Gamification to increase user-engagement, ROI, and motivation.
Notice how GPay has integrated all the 8 core drives of gamification and weaved it all together. While the narrative of the game borders on the trivial at the outset, the planning, and the execution of the game that has gone viral is definitely non-trivial.
The core drives which GPay seems to be concentrating heavily on are the elements of Accomplishment, Ownership, Scarcity, Unpredictability, and Social Influence.
Accomplishment, because of the way the game is designed to collect cities and accumulate virtual KMs and using those to progress upwards on the leaderboard. A complete map of India with few greyed out areas signifying the cities toured in.
Ownership, because my cousins and their friends desire to earn more cities and hence more exclusive cashback, rewards, and coupons.
Scarcity, because collecting rare cities is hard — My cousins were arguing amongst each other and fighting it out with friends who owned these rare cities.
Unpredictability, because anyone can get a ticket to any city at any given point in time depending upon the nature of transaction initiated via GPay. Introduction of Torture Breaks or time bubbles for disbursal of tickets.
And, finally, Social Influence for the viral updates. Everyone shares updates of all the cities virtually toured in. Need I say more?
Closing Thoughts
While GPay calls ‘Go India’ a game, it’s more of an intriguing design system rather than a game, that is focussed on aiding the user to understand the various product offerings of GPay (Bill Pay, Recharge, in-store payments, Peer-to-peer transactions). More like a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. The end, in this case, is increased user adoption and enhanced feature discovery of the various GPay product offerings.
Likewise, Amazon’s spin wheel is a gamified set-up that allows users to discover discounted offerings and cashback.
GPay has just shown how gamification can be an interesting solution to drive user adoption at scale in FinTech. I guess gamification as a strategy/experimental set-up is already being employed in a number of other avenues — healthcare, fitness, education, and e-commerce. Perhaps, we can take a leaf out of them and develop similar experimental designs for other fintech applications as well.
Moreover, with the latest technological advancement in cryptocurrencies making transactions safer and attracting heavy investments, the future of gamification in fintech seems to have started on a rather high note. So, let the games begin!!
