• Background & Context

In Colombia, many people don't trust banks, even though it's easy to open a savings account. It's hard for young to build a credit history, which they need for their first credit card. But young people love gaming, and there are 22 million gamers in Colombia. They use digital payments to buy gaming stuff and cool gadgets, so we wanted to approach gamers by offering financial services like no other bank does and making sure they feel welcome in a system that usually ignores them.

• Creative Challenge

How do we create new rules for a banking system that has always depended on them to ensure its business success?

Traditionally the credit score is calculated based on 5 pieces: the payment history, how much a person owns, the length of their credit history, their credit mix, and how suitable the new credit is. That process measures your creditworthiness, so we needed to find new ways to prove that a person with very little credit history or none, could be as trustworthy.

• Solution

We built a system around gaming. With the help of experts, we dug deep into all the data that video games could give us, and we discovered 28 soft skills that could help us create a new credit score system to understand better their credit risk profiling based on their cognitive flexibility, self-supervision, coordination with others, management of material resources, instead of their payments history.

By studying how people interacted with games we found we could see their personalities, priorities, and commitment in each decision. We used how they played to predict how they would behave in the real world. The bank’s risk team evaluated how we could use those predictions to define a new type of risk profile.

• Execution

People just had to sign in and then sync their Steam account to our system and play for 15 hours. This would give us the time to evaluate their skills, analyze, and score them to decide if the person was trustworthy enough to hold a credit card. The credit card's limit was aligned to their risk profile. The better the profile, the higher the amount

To increase our reach, we opened our Twitch channel and hosted a hybrid live event with national press coverage, influencers, and hundreds of thousands of gamers, who turned into credit card holders and active customers of our own and partners’ e-commerce to boost sales in technology and gaming categories during the two years ahead.