How Revolut Neobank App Grew to 30 Million Users with Gamification
Updated: Jul 8
I’m guilty of viewing all Instagram stories.
For example, one of my friends recently joined IIM Kozhikode and since he’s new to the beautiful campus and MBA journey, he posts tons of stories.
Now the thing is I know what his stories will mostly contain and yet, I somehow end up blindly tapping through the stories, feeling like Darla from Finding Nemo.
Just replace the fish tank with a phone screen.
So I did some thinking as to why I do it and realised that,
It’s a habit to tap forward
I don’t want to miss out on any stories for no reason
As I tap on each story, it takes me closer to viewing all of them
I feel satisfied when all stories are viewed
However, I still wasn’t satisfied with my learning as this was from my point of view. I wanted to understand this from a product’s perspective as well and what I found next made sense.
Transparency.
Yes, when users see that there are 10 stories to be viewed, they know that they can go on tapping forward through them till they feel satisfied with the end goal of completion.
“Progress bars!” shouted my mind and everything fit well. Social media stories be it on Instagram, Snapchat or WhatsApp use progress bar gamification to make users stick.
But then, I was recently surprised to come across a Neobank that uses this same feature to gamify its onboarding process and avoid sign-up drop-offs.
I dug deeper and realised this digital banking app hasn’t just used a progress bar but also a leaderboard, raffle etc and built 15 million in just 6 years.
Impressed? I was too and hence decided to understand how they did it with gamification being a key part of it.
Check out what I found and I’d be the happiest if you could learn and apply some of the below gamification strategies to your financial business.
Revolut - A Classic and Comprehensive Gamification
Founded in 2015, Revolut is a global financial super app which allows users to manage finance by spending, saving, investing, exchanging, transferring and more.
The Neobank app has grown leaps and bounds and I’m not surprised because they surely know how to both acquire and retain customers. Here’s how.
1. The Progress Bar Effect
Revolt app’s gamification revolution comes into action as soon as you install the app.
Upon opening it, you’re taken to a Login/Sign Up page which consists of 7 progress bars like that of an Instagram story which you can swipe through, to learn about the app services.
While it may not seem like a rocket science strategy, it does make one want to tap forward till the end for the reasons I mentioned above.
Once you’re done viewing its features through the progress bar, you can go ahead and click on Sign Up (which by the way you could have done long back but couldn’t or at least I couldn’t).
This is a great way to gamify onboarding where instead of making a user simply fill in details, an app can grab their attention with an interesting engagement layer like a progress bar or even a narrative.
2. The University Leaderboard
In college, I’d notice many companies visit our campus, trying to promote their products and services in order to acquire students as customers.
However, what I also noticed is the fact that our professors had to literally force us to attend such visits because for us it had become a norm, sitting for hours learning about them.
If you’re wondering there must be something in it for the students, of course, there were — offers, discounts but we were still not interested.
On the side, if someone told us there was going to be a college-level competition across academics/sports/art or any co-curriculum activity, we’d walk up to professors to enrol.
See the difference? Because in this case, we were excited by the opportunity to see our college win and Revolut applied this logic very smartly by creating a University Challenge. In 2017, this Neobank app encouraged students across European universities to sign up on their app to join the University race and gain Points by inviting their friends to sign up too.
By doing so, students would get a chance to not just compete against other universities on a leaderboard but also stand a chance to get a free Revolut premium plan as a reward.
3. The Revolut Raffle
With a goal to reward customers for choosing the Revolut app, the all-in-one digital banking app offers loyalty Points to customers for various actions within the app.
These actions transactions, money transfers, referrals etc upon completion of which, customers get to accumulate Revolut Points.
Now you may think that this is any standard loyalty program tactic — reward customers with points on certain activities but I’ll tell you something.
Gamification comes into play when you gamify such points redemption in such a way that customers are not only motivated to earn such points but burn as well and Revolut does it with a raffle.
As part of the Revolut raffle contest, customers can use their Points to enter a weekly prize draw and earn from £1 to £10,000 in cash.
Moreover, Revolut also shows a Points leaderboard for customers to beat others by collecting more points and moving up the leaderboard
Starting from Instagram story-like onboarding to leaderboards to raffles to redeem points, Revolut neobank is one of the best gamification examples in banking.
But as I mentioned before, gamification goes beyond just using game-like elements and also involves using human psychology to increase product usage.
To explain this better, take a look at how Monzo Bank got 70,000 Beta cardholders with waitlist gamification.
Monzo Viral Waitlist Pre-Launch Campaign
In 2016, Monzo, a 7 million customers strong online bank based in the UK launched an early prototype and asked people to join the waitlist.
In order to create scarcity, Monzo said that people could get early access to them by moving up the queue and one way to do this was by inviting friends via referrals.
The major reason why the Monzo waitlist campaign went viral was that they
Showed how many were ahead on the queue, creating a fear-of-missing-out effect
Said only 4,000 would get early access to the card
Made referral made to reset to zero after a couple of weeks
As a result, the waitlist campaign was a success and got Monzo 200K sign-ups.
Gamification in Digital Banking is Booming
I’m going to be upfront when I say that banks need to do more and that includes going beyond loyalty rewards.
There are many banks out there who offer points or rewards for using their services but how do you stand out in such a case?
Gamification in banking is hence a highly potential magnet to not just attract but hold existing customers back.
If you’d like to join banks such as Revolut and Monzo in the gamification league while saving technical costs and resources, a gamification tool like Flyy can help you implement the aforementioned campaigns via its plug-and-play dashboard.
Want to learn more? Book a demo today..
