When you reach a savings target, a finance app will make a specific sound. A small chime, perhaps some confetti floating across the screen—the kind of upbeat sound that designers spend months perfecting. It has a pleasant feeling. That’s the idea. And that’s also becoming a bigger issue.
You’ll see badges, streaks, levels, and leaderboards when you browse the finance section of the app store today. These features weren’t present ten years ago. Budgeting tools have features that were taken verbatim from mobile games. Chip and other apps monitor a “WealthScore.” Some people give you rewards for saving money, as though refusing to buy coffee were a tiny act of bravery deserving of online praise. It’s possible that all of this began innocently enough—making saving seem less like a chore—but at some point it began to take on a completely different appearance.
The obvious point of reference here is Robinhood, the app that transformed stock purchases into a slot machine-like experience, complete with falling confetti upon successful trades. Almost immediately, critics took notice. Never one to hold back, Warren Buffett cautioned that contemporary investors had become “entranced by speculative investing,” pursuing whatever felt fashionable rather than what made financial sense. He wasn’t discussing a specialized issue. He was describing a recurring pattern in a whole generation of applications meant to keep users tapping.
Scholars have begun to catch up with what users were already perceiving. Gamification components can actually harm a person’s mental and emotional wellbeing, according to a 2022 study published through Emerald that used data from 429 participants and underwent some fairly extensive statistical modeling. Wear them down, not just irritate them a little. Weeks of checking streaks and chasing badges can lead to stress, disengagement, and a kind of quiet exhaustion. It’s the kind of discovery that, rather than raising a new suspicion, validates an existing one.
Researchers refer to this as “attention cost.” The basic idea is that each badge and progress bar requires a little mental effort to interpret. What does this accomplishment signify? Why did I not receive the expected reward? Why does my checking account balance now have a dragon icon next to it? Not a single one of those efforts is used to make actual financial decisions. It simply sits there, vying for the same small amount of brain space, and eventually it builds up to something that feels more like fatigue than mastery.
It’s difficult to ignore the paradox at the core of fintech’s gamification movement as you watch this develop over the past few years. Businesses claim to be promoting financial literacy. Investors and product teams discuss healthier habits, education, and empowerment. The actual mechanics, however, resemble those of a casino rather than a classroom: streaks that penalize you for missing a day, leaderboards that make saving a contest, and point systems that reward participation rather than good judgment.
To be fair, things aren’t completely dire. Well-designed gamified financial education actually increased young people’s literacy, according to a randomized controlled trial with over 2,000 participants across four countries. Therefore, the tools are not corrosive by nature. The distinction between “engaging” and “manipulative” turns out to be thinner than most product roadmaps recognize, suggesting that design matters a great deal—possibly more than the industry wants to acknowledge.
Beneath all of this is a more subdued, privacy-focused worry. According to some research on gamified platforms, the same engagement mechanisms that encourage daily logins also encourage users to divulge more private financial information than they otherwise might, frequently without fully registering. It’s not the risk that makes headlines. However, it’s the kind of thing that usually comes up later, long after the badges have faded, in a class-action lawsuit or regulatory filing.
Perhaps the truth is that gamification in finance isn’t so much good or bad as it’s unevenly designed, created by teams pursuing retention metrics that don’t really relate to whether users are actually making better financial decisions. Progress bars and price alerts are only useful to knowledgeable, financially literate users; everyone else runs the risk of confusing a dopamine rush for real financial advancement. Although it’s still unclear if regulators will eventually handle these features in the same manner as they have other types of behavioral nudging in gambling, it’s becoming more difficult to ignore the similarities.
