Game Over? Assessing the Impact of Gamification Discontinuation on Mobile Banking Behaviors.

This article investigates the impact of discontinuing gamification in a financial services mobile app operated by Banco Capital, a prominent Latin American bank, focusing on incentivized behaviors such as app logins, bill payments, and on-time loan repayments. Leveraging a natural experiment caused by a 50-day unexpected shutdown of the bank’s reward module—which included game-design elements like prize wheels and raffles—the study uses age-period-cohort models to establish that removing gamification led to significant declines in these behaviors (20% fewer logins, 18% fewer bill payments, and 31% fewer loan repayments). The findings indicate that continued gamification is necessary to sustain these behaviors, especially for newer users, and that engagement with the reward module, particularly winning cash prizes and participating in raffles, plays a key role in maintaining user activity. The study also highlights differences in how various game elements affect engagement, with raffles fostering longer-term involvement and prize wheels having mixed effects, and discusses implications for financial institutions considering gamification strategies.