In Colombia 72% of people, according to Forbes Colombia, don't use any financial products in any given month. This shows a clear disconnect between the banking industry and the people.

As the biggest player in the industry the bank needed to change this, especially when part of that usage gap was motivated by the processes they had.

Getting a savings account is easy but building credit history, in a country where every process depended on it, was not. Very few banks gave younger audiences, migrants, or simply farmers without previous credit history a second look. Leaving them out of the banking system by default.

If they didn't have a credit history they could not get a credit card, and credit cards are the most basic product. So... How do you get credit history when you can’t even get access to the basics?

That was our challenge, we needed to bend our own rules.

We knew that the gap between the banking industry and real colombians is huge, and on the other hand we also knew that 64% of the country's internet connected population is into gaming. That is why gamming became the tool we used.

With the help of experts, we dug deep into all the data games could give us and amongst those we discovered 24 soft skills that could help us create a new type of credit risk profiling.

People just had to sign in, choose their game, and play for 15 hours. This would give us the time to evaluate the skills defined, analyze, grade and decide if the profile was safe enough to approve a new credit card.

The credit card's limit adapted to the user's risk profile. The better the profile, the higher the amount. Those who couldn't create a credit history, had a chance now.

Our investigation led to two findings: First, 50% of Colombia’s population has serious issues getting access to the banking industry. Second, there are 22 million gamers in the country, that translates to the 64% we talked about before.

Gamming had the reach to give us insights into Colombian’s lives and behavior. The audience was clear: gamers that had a hard time entering the banking system. Most were 18 – 34 in age, from all socio-economic backgrounds, with no previous credit history.

By studying how people interacted with games we found we could see their personalities, priorities and fears reflected in each decision. We could even use how they played to predict how they would behave in the real world. More importantly, when we looked at what our risk team evaluated when creating credit risk profiles we realized we could use those predictions to define a new type of risk profile.

The project began by analyzing the pros and cons of launching this idea, after several months (6 to be exact) of debate amongst the risk team, the project was approved.

The campaign was launched through direct communication with a database of 440.000 bank clients (in Colombia only) with no approved or pre-approved credit cards from us or other banks. We used sms, mailing and social media targeting to get the message across.

The experimental nature of the initiative (2 month on air) was filled with constant UX and data base optimization. The journey constantly improved, and the weekly results enhanced.

This is not a temporary idea, this is a platform that is being built for the long term and we expect to have handed out 4500 credit cards by December 2022.

We had never explored the gaming territory and there had never been a campaign quite like this one in the bank, so setting business objectives from the beginning was not an option. This was a risk, a beta initiative we jumped into with the only objective of finding new ways of communicating with people.

In only one month we managed to get 1200 people to sign into the platform to play, and we gave out 464 credit cards to people who wouldn't have gotten one any other way.