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Finance has traditionally been associated with spreadsheets, complicated terminology, and long explanations about savings, investments, and markets. For many young people, learning about money can therefore feel more like homework than something they actively want to engage with.
That is where the gamification of finance comes in. Financial platforms and educators are increasingly borrowing elements from games – quizzes, rewards, badges, challenges, progress bars and interactive simulations – to make saving, investing and financial learning more engaging.
The timing matters: younger Indians are entering the financial system earlier, but financial literacy remains a challenge. A September 2026 NDTV report, citing data from the National Centre for Financial Education (NCFE), noted that only 27% of Indian adults are financially literate. The report quoted educators arguing that interactive and gamified approaches could help make financial concepts more relatable to Gen Z.
“Finance is not necessarily difficult; the way we explain it often makes it feel difficult,” Mahek Tomer, founder and CEO of India’s Future Investors, told NDTV.
But gamification is not simply about making finance more entertaining. The same techniques that encourage someone to learn or save can also make financial risk-taking more compelling. That difference runs through everything below.
What Is Gamification Of Finance?
Gamification of finance means applying game-like elements to financial activities to influence how people interact with money. These elements can include points, coins, rewards, quizzes, badges, leaderboards, challenges, progress trackers, streaks, and simulated environments.
The financial activity itself does not necessarily change. Instead, the experience around it does.
A financial education platform could turn a lesson about stocks into a quiz. A savings app could show a user how close they are to a target through a progress bar. A payments platform could award points for completing transactions. An investment app could use milestones, notifications, or other interface cues to encourage users to continue towards a financial goal.
Not every form of financial gamification looks like a game. The mechanism is simple: give the user an action, provide immediate feedback or a reward, and encourage them to repeat the behaviour.
How Does Gamification Of Finance Work?
Gamification works by taking a financial behaviour and adding a layer of motivation, feedback or reward around it. Instead of just asking someone to save, learn, or invest, the platform gives them something to respond to along the way: complete a task, receive a reward or some form of recognition, see progress, and keep going.
The reward does not always have to be monetary. It can be a badge for completing a financial course, points for making payments, a progress bar showing how close someone is to a savings goal, or a simulation that lets someone experiment without risking real money.
The design leans on well-documented behavioural mechanisms – immediate feedback, variable rewards and loss aversion. Immediate feedback can make an otherwise delayed financial benefit feel more tangible, while milestones and rewards can provide motivation to continue.
Saving ₹1,000 every month does not feel exciting in the moment, because the larger benefit may be years away. A progress tracker showing that a person has completed 40% of a savings goal provides an immediate visual signal of progress.
The same mechanism cuts the other way in trading. A notification showing a stock movement or encouraging another interaction can make market activity more engaging, but frequent engagement is not necessarily financially beneficial.
What Are The Different Types Of Financial Gamification?
Financial gamification falls into roughly four categories.
- Reward-based gamification uses points, coins, cashback, or other rewards to encourage financial activity. CRED’s CRED Coins, awarded for eligible activity such as credit-card bill payments, are the clearest Indian example.
- Learning-based gamification uses quizzes, challenges, simulations, and interactive scenarios to teach financial concepts. Zerodha’s Varsity breaks lessons into bite-sized modules with quizzes, tests and badges attached.
- Habit-building gamification focuses on repeated behaviours such as saving or reaching financial goals. Progress bars, milestones, and other visual indicators make these habits tangible.
- Investment and trading gamification applies game-like elements closer to actual market activity. This is the most controversial form because real risk is involved. Fortune India has pointed to Groww’s SIP progress indicators, milestone notifications and interface cues as a milder version of this.
Earning a badge after completing a lesson about diversification is not the same as being nudged into another trade.
How Are Zerodha, Groww, Fello, And CRED Using Gamification?
India’s financial platforms show how differently gamification can be applied.
Zerodha has largely used it for financial education rather than making trading itself feel like a game. Beyond Varsity, the company’s Zero1 initiative has experimented with interactive learning formats, including a finance board game. The emphasis is on making people interact with financial concepts rather than passively consume them.
Groww takes a subtler approach. Its SIP progress bars, milestone notifications and visual cues sit inside the investment experience rather than beside it, making progress visible.
CRED uses the reward model. Users can earn CRED Coins through eligible credit-card payment activity, which can then be spent within its rewards ecosystem. The game-like element here is not investing or borrowing itself but the incentive attached to completing an existing financial responsibility.
Fello shows how the model can evolve. Its original product let users earn gaming tokens through investment activity and spend them on games such as Cricket, Football, and Tambola for prizes. Financial Express reported in 2023 that Fello had 530,000 users, nearly 80% of whom were first-time investors; co-founder Manish Maryada described the aim as changing how people consume finance through a “gaming-first product”.
Fello’s current product is more focused on investment and automated saving: digital gold, silver and fixed deposits, along with goal-based investing, automated savings and portfolio tracking.
Read more: “What Makes These Apps Disgusting,” Zerodha CEO Posts Dangerous Red Flags Of Shady Loan Apps
Why Does It Appeal To Young Indians?
Part of the appeal comes from familiarity. Points, streaks, badges, progress indicators, and notifications are already common across social media, fitness, shopping, and gaming apps. Applying similar mechanics to money can make financial activities feel less intimidating and more interactive.
There is also a growing appetite among young Indians to participate in financial markets. An August 2026 India Today report, citing the World Economic Forum’s Global Retail Investor Outlook, noted that around a third of Gen Z investors had started investing while at university or in early adulthood, roughly twice the rate at which millennials did at the same age.
The median age of new investors in India has also fallen from 29 in 2019-20 to 27 in 2025-26, according to NSE Market Pulse data cited by India Today.
A 2024 survey by Fin One – a digital-first initiative of broker Angel One, compiled by Nielsen across 1,600+ young Indians – found that 62% of respondents identified YouTube as a primary source of education for savings and financial planning.
This creates an opportunity for financial platforms. Instead of expecting a young user to read a lengthy explanation of compounding or asset allocation, an interactive experience can let them make a decision, see a consequence, and try again.
But accessibility should not be confused with accuracy, and engagement should not be mistaken for a sign of better financial behaviour.
The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly Of Financial Gamification
Gamification itself is neither inherently beneficial nor harmful. Its impact depends on what behaviour the design encourages.
The Good
The strongest argument for gamification is financial education. A quiz can make a complicated concept easier to approach. A simulation can allow users to make mistakes without losing real money. A savings tracker can provide immediate feedback for a behaviour whose benefits may only become visible much later.
A 2026 systematic review in the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, titled “Gamification in finance: A systematic review and research agenda”, examined 43 peer-reviewed studies.
The review found that tools such as points, badges, leaderboards and storytelling can increase engagement and, in some settings, support financial literacy and changes in saving, spending and investing behaviour. But it also identified concerns around user fatigue, ethical issues and manipulative design, particularly when gamification encourages engagement without improving financial decision-making.
Regulators and financial education institutions are also exploring the format. In 2026, the NCFE invited proposals for interactive financial-literacy mobile games.
The potential benefit is therefore not simply making finance fun. It is making people participate in learning rather than passively absorb information.
The Bad
The problem begins when engagement becomes the objective rather than financial well-being. A notification, reward, or progress indicator may encourage someone to return to an app, but returning more frequently is not the same as making better financial decisions.
A reward can make an action feel more attractive. A notification can create urgency. A streak can make someone reluctant to stop. And many financial decisions require patience rather than constant interaction: someone investing for retirement may benefit from checking their portfolio less frequently, while an app built around frequent notifications encourages the opposite.
In a July 2025 post shared across social media and his blog, Zerodha founder Nithin Kamath warned about what he described as “pointless ‘gamification’ and casino-like features” in finance apps.
The Ugly
The greatest concern arises when risk itself becomes part of the entertainment.
Axis Mutual Fund flagged this in 2023 while discussing the rapid expansion of India’s derivatives market. Active derivatives traders had increased eightfold, from fewer than 500,000 in 2019 to 4 million by 2023, while the average holding period for retail options traders was less than 30 minutes.
Ashish Gupta, then CIO of Axis Mutual Fund, pointed to structural and app-design shifts. “Change in contract structure, leverage combined with the ease of onboarding and interface of the new generation trading apps has triggered gamification of this market,” Gupta wrote.
The consequences of excessive risk-taking are visible in SEBI’s FY2026 data: 87.7% of individual equity-derivatives traders incurred losses, with aggregate losses of ₹91,685 crore. The number of active individual traders also fell 18% during the year, suggesting participation may be cooling even as losses remain substantial.
These losses cannot be attributed to gamification alone. Leverage, derivatives, market conditions, social-media influence, and individual decision-making all matter. But the numbers show why there is a fundamental difference between making financial education engaging and making high-risk financial activity engaging.
Is Gamification Of Finance Legal In India?
There is no blanket prohibition on financial gamification. How the rules apply depends on what is being gamified, who is offering it, and what financial activity is involved.
In November 2024, SEBI warned investors about unauthorised virtual trading and gaming platforms, including those offering virtual trading, paper trading and fantasy games based on stock-price data. It advised investors to deal only through registered intermediaries for securities-market activities. SEBI’s investor-awareness material tells investors to avoid trading through online gamification apps.
The regulator’s approach permits game-based financial education while restricting features designed to encourage risky financial activity.
NCFE’s 2026 initiative to develop interactive financial-literacy games is one example of the former. NISM and SEBI also launched the National Financial Literacy Quiz 2026, using an interactive format to teach students about financial markets, investment principles and investor protection.
SEBI has also introduced a practical safeguard for investors. In March 2026, it launched a Verified Label on Google Play for stock-trading apps offered by SEBI-registered brokers, helping users distinguish genuine regulated apps from potentially unauthorised trading applications.
So the issue is not simply whether something looks like a game. The bigger questions are whether the platform is authorised, what behaviour it encourages, and whether users understand the financial consequences of their actions.
The Real Test
Gamification could make finance less intimidating for a generation learning about money through digital platforms rather than traditional classrooms. Used for financial education, simulations, and healthy saving habits, game-like features can make abstract concepts easier to understand and financial goals easier to engage with.
But engagement is not the same as financial well-being. A quiz teaching someone about diversification and a notification encouraging another options trade may both use game-like design, but their consequences can be radically different.
The real test is therefore simple: does gamification make people better at making financial decisions, or simply more willing to make them?
Image Credits: Google Images
Sources: NDTV, India Today, Financial Express
Find the blogger: @diptisadh
This post is tagged under: gamifying finance, gamification in finance, financial apps, fintech India, financial literacy, Gen Z investing, investing apps, trading apps, financial gamification, SIP, Zerodha, Groww, CRED, Fello, SEBI, money management, financial education
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