In Nir Eyal’s book Hooked, he explains a 4-step Hook model (trigger, action, variable reward, and investment) as key to building habit forming products. This can help customers get the service they seek in a more rewarding and engaging manner and can help organizations meet their business goals. Gamification is one of the tools that can help organizations in executing such a model. So, what is gamification? It is the strategy of deploying concepts in games (say for example: points, levels, leader boards, etc.) to products and services in any industry. The purpose of this strategy is to increase revenue (from existing customers, while also attracting new customers) by increasing customer engagement.

If designed and deployed well, gamification can make the experience of customers meeting their needs much more fun, more engaging, and simpler. Gamification, in essence, satisfies the psychological needs (belongingness needs and esteem needs as per Maslow’s hierarchy) while helping them meet their objectives.

One particular aspect of gamification, which many industries have deployed successfully are loyalty programs. Be it airlines, hotels, online shopping and many more. Introduction Other industries that have tapped into gamification includes fitness, education, learning and development among others. Banking industry is no different, where gamification can be a game-changer in engaging customers more. However barring credit cards businesses to an extent, gamification has not had the intended impact in banking.

There are various reasons contributing to this including:

In short, to increase the customer adoption of gamified offerings, banks need to pivot the purpose of gamification. The purpose needs to change from only encouraging more usage of banking products to facilitating the lifestyle goals of customers.

How can customers and banks benefit from gamification?

Banks can leverage gamification to:

In this process, customers get to understand their own needs better and to understand how their bank can help them. One use case in banking that can be made interesting and rewarding to a customer and to a bank is helping customers achieve their financial goals.

Achieving financial wellness is the holy grail for any customer. Planning for the same is mostly considered to be a painful & complex exercise and executing the plan even more so. It inherently involves maximising savings and minimising expenditure to various degrees and varying durations depending on the goals set.

Gamification in financial goals can not only help the customer meet the goal but also make the journey more rewarding and enjoyable. Banks also stand to benefit from this. They get to understand the customer and their goals better, which in turn, provides banks an opportunity to tailor personalized recommendations in the context of the goal of the customer.

In this journey, banks can also inculcate better savings and investment habits in customers by ‘doing’ and not just ‘showing’. As customers meet their goals with a bank providing such services, customer engagement and loyalty increases. Such customers tend to use more products of the bank which in turns makes the bank business more profitable and sustainable.

To further understand how gamification can be successfully deployed to help bank customers meet their financial goals, click here and read the detailed thought paper on gamification.

Sriranga: Hello Tapas! Let’s start with introductions about your bank and your role at the bank.

Tapas: RAKBANK is one of the most dynamic financial institutions in UAE, founded in 1976. The bank caters to various customer segments, ranging from retail, business banking and corporate. Business banking is one of our most successful enterprise areas, in which we deliver a comprehensive set of products. We also cater to conventional and Islamic banking. I head the architecture department at RAKBANK.

Sriranga: Thanks for that – change is the only constant. While clichéd, this can’t be truer in the banking industry today than ever before. What are your observations about the evolving trends in banking today?

Tapas: Banking is undergoing significant changes at a pace never seen before. It is driven by rapid advancement in technology, changing customer expectations and continuously evolving regulatory landscape. Competition is emerging from all directions with fintech offering innovative financial propositions to challenge traditional banking models. One would have never expected Apple, Facebook or Google to play such a dominant role in finance. However, upon reflection we can see that this is happening due to their deep involvement in consumer’s day-to-day life, where they have access to a real and relevant data about consumers, which they churn to improve services, provide personalised recommendations and targeted advertising. To top this off, all these companies have excellent user experience in their DNA. To me this combination of Data and user experience (UX) is extremely powerful as it allows them to influence customer behavior.

When we collaborate and compete with such players in the market, we need to better understand how we can further strengthen our customer journeys, data & analytics capability and ultimately attain actionable insights. These actionable insights allow better customer engagement, timely action, cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. Hence, building personalised customer engagement strategies, backed by data and customer events, is essential to stay competitive and relevant in today’s market.

Lastly, generative AI is poised to be a major game changer for all industries including banking and it would be appropriate to accept that most of the existing processes can be enhanced. Simultaneously, it opens doors for a technology leap – virtual assistance, financial planning/Robo advisor, fraud investigation to name a few. There’s enormous opportunity for us to capitalise on these trends.

Sriranga: What are the implications for banks like yours? How is RAKBANK evolving with these trends?

Tapas: Our bank’s vision is to be a digital bank with a human touch, to be with our customers in key moments of truth. We believe that customer obsession is the most important aspect. In this approach, we need to understand that it’s not a finite game with fixed rules. We are in for an infinite game where we need to keep evolving to meet our understanding of customers’ needs, with an efficient feedback loop to improve our products & services by leveraging latest technology and data. This is in line with our objectives to become the most personalised bank in UAE, with brilliant customer experience.

Sriranga: That’s great. Now, coming to RAKBANK’s digital transformation journey. Can you elaborate on RAKBANK’s vision for your digital transformation?

Tapas: RAKBANK is currently undergoing a significant digital transformation, and this is an ongoing process that we are committed to.

If you look at digital transformation, it is a combination of various things, not merely about innovative technology adoption. Transformation is about changing the way we think – a mindset that challenges the status quo. It’s about how we change things to deliver value and cutting-edge banking innovations to our customers; leveraging technology to simplify our processes and deliver brilliant customer experience. Finally, it should lead us towards achieving a sustainable competitive advantage.

We aim to be digital outside-in with our transformation. This means that we start with the customer and work our way back, using technology to create a seamless and enjoyable experience for them. To achieve this, we are focusing on enhancing UX across all the customer touchpoints, integrating our systems and processes to provide a unified experience. In addition, we are leveraging cloud capabilities for faster innovation. Finally, we are building data and analytics capabilities to provide deeper insights into our customers’ needs and behaviors. By using data-driven insight, we are able to better understand our customers and create personalised experience that meets their unique needs.

Sriranga: We have a long-standing interaction between RAKBANK and Infosys Finacle. Can you elaborate on your experience of working together and expectations going forward?

Tapas: It is a strong partnership, and we utilise quite a bit of your technology in our digital transformation. Finacle is deployed as our core banking solution. We are leveraging Finacle solution in our channels, and our digital onboarding journeys are built on top of Finacle’s digital engagement hub. It is a close collaboration between internal and Finacle teams to deliver an end-to-end solution.

Sriranga: Thank you Tapas. This was a great conversation and it’s always been a pleasure working with you. We look forward to inspiring the next for RAKBANK.

This piece was previously published as an interview in the MEA Finance.