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Gamification has been a buzzword in consumer fintech for a long time.
The first wave of gamified fintech took off by tapping into basic human psychology. They made boring financial tasks feel exciting.
Acorns pioneered the "Round-Up," automatically investing your spare change from everyday purchases. It uses game mechanics like progress tracking, badges, milestones to make saving feel automatic and rewarding.
Robinhood created an user experience that felt more like a mobile game than a brokerage. It became famous (and later, infamous) for its celebratory confetti animations, push notifications for market movements, and scratch-off lotteries for free stocks.
These first generation of gamified consumer finance apps delivered dopamine hits through exciting user experience.
The next generation of gamified fintech apps started gamifying the actual rewards.
Gamifying Savings
One approach was to introduce novel rewards for saving, effectively swapping traditional interest for entertainment and upside.
Yotta is the most well-known example. It is a prize-linked savings app where every dollar saved earns lottery tickets. At its peak, Yotta reached over a million users and held more than $100M in deposits, proving there was real demand for gamified savings. However, in May 2024, its third-party payment processor, Synapse, filed for bankruptcy. As a result, 85,000 Yotta customers were locked out of their funds.
Another company exploring a similar idea is Layup, which targets sports fans. Instead of earning interest, users make daily sports picks to win prizes from a shared pool. Layup has raised over $2M and acquired more than 10,000 users.
The challenge with this savings-based model is structural. In the US, most people do not keep much money in savings accounts. Roughly one in four Americans has less than $1,000 in savings. Many rely on credit cards for daily spending, or put excess cash into stocks, bonds, or high-yield savings accounts.
For many users, the novelty wears off quickly. Winning a few dollars a week is rarely enough to motivate larger deposits or long-term engagement.
Gamifying Credit
The other angle is to gamify the credit card experience.
Arro is a good example. The company helps underserved users build credit by removing traditional barriers. There is no credit check and no deposit required. The core innovation is that gamification directly drives credit improvement. Users complete gamified financial literacy lessons to increase their credit line. Arro has raised $10M and has over 300,000 downloads.
Another one I like is Coverd. I met their team recently and had a chance to learn more about their vision to gamify consumer credit.
Coverd was born when two Wall Street traders—Albert Wang, an oil derivatives trader from Morgan Stanley, and Eric Xu, a quant portfolio manager from Hudson River Trading—were pitched the opposite of their idea.
"Someone pitched us a punitive budgeting tool and we hated it."
They realized the real opportunity wasn't in restricting spending, but in making it exciting. They raised over $7M from investors like Yolo Group and a16z's speedrun to build a credit card that gamifies spending.
Their first product, which launched in September 2025, has attracted 2,000+ users and delivered $2M+ in bill write-offs in its first two months. The idea is that every time you make a purchase, you get to play a mini-game for a chance to win the purchase back.
Instead of burning cash on ads, Coverd acquired most of its early users through in-person activations. They ran prize wheels on the street. If you signed up, you could spin the wheel and win money. This approach is labor-intensive and hard to scale, but in a high-trust category like finance, face-to-face activation can work quite well. In just six weeks, the team spoke with over 1,000 potential users, rapidly validating onboarding, messaging, and the core appeal of the product.
The full vision, the Coverd Card, is slated for Q1 2026. It will offer up to 100% randomized cashback on every purchase. Instead of a guaranteed 2%, you might get up to 100% cash back right away. The Coverd team designed the product to make rewards more accessible and more instantly gratifying for users, versus legacy models that make users jump through hoops for any redemption.
The business is powered by interchange fees, typically 2 to 4%, most of which are pooled and redistributed to users. The odds depend on the total spend across the network. Interestingly, Coverd does not charge a "house edge” from these pools, and instead relies on their proprietary predictive model on mass spending behavior to randomize rewards across the platform.
One of the biggest challenges here is regulation. Coverd has spent over six months working with regulators across states to navigate gambling laws and avoid being classified as a casino. If resolved cleanly, this regulatory complexity could become a real moat.
Why This Matters
What’s interesting about this wave is that it’s less about dopamine-driven UX and more about aligning real financial outcomes with play. The winner here will help consumers change financial behavior in a way that feels voluntary and rewarding.
The big open question is durability. Novelty alone does not build lasting habits. The winners in this space will be the ones that combine fun with trust and REAL economic value.
I think we are still early here.
Leo
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