Bancassurance and Gamification (Part 2)

Risk, prevision and protection are the essential elements for the insurance industry. Even though they form a fine binding line between banking and insurance, a coordinated operation in educational bonding processes through technology in order to transfer knowledge to sales forces and seek solutions in the handling of massive bank clients as an opportunity to distribute insurance is relatively novelty.

As in other functional scopes, bancassurance operations can reveal many contradictions such as promoting consumption and investment. Banks and insurance companies can perceive insurance products in different ways, thus creating communication noises to clients. Despite being in financial services, the insurance industry has a different origin and character with a slower and exceptionally smaller client-underwriting base. Therefore, it is common to find cases in which both organizational cultures face serious integration problems and struggle generating profitability.

In the insurance and bancassurance distribution channels, the organization is often faced with the dilemma of expanding its distribution channel or professionalizing it. Meanwhile, unbanked – and, therefore, uninsured – consumers are kept waiting.

In 2012, a bancassurance entity in Latin America, determined to better reach a traditionally uninsured universe began to integrate gamification into the training and development solutions for one of its distribution channels. This innovation allowed the company to communicate at thirty-five thousand distribution points complex insurance concepts in a simple, didactic and playful way and, also, to coach sales skills to people without previous experience in insurance sales. Using design thinking and gaming, the company designed tools and processes that provided context and comprehension for ordinary people to understand insurance concepts and how those related to their own lives, ultimately bringing an insurance awareness they never had and thus changing their likelihood to buy insurance products.

What took to this rapid change in perception and assessment? The simple exploration of the concept of with versus without risk in a simulated environment using a short set of images easy to memorize and contextualized in people’s real lives – not images of the classical insurance marketing of upper class white people smiling because they just bought a life insurance. Interviewees of different ages and socioeconomic levels were given a simple set of images explaining what insurance is, means, insurance types, the protection it implies, the role of the bank / insurance company in taking and managing risk, and the way to buy products, especially life insurance.

In other words, by teaching people about the concept of “risk”, incorporating a game strategy into the learning and communication strategy, the content assimilation process will become much more agile and faster … but also much more relevant and habitual.

To take into account

Using game strategies in part or all of the teaching activities clearly affects the forgetting curve in a positive way, given its relationship with mechanisms rooted in the concepts of relevance and habit:

• Relevance: We only pay attention to what helps us in survival, success and need. Our brain capacity is limited, and we are very selective when deciding whether or not we want to permanently store a particular memory or information. The relevance of information is deeply intertwined with our needs.
• Habit: Repetition is what really helps the information to become permanent. People used to remember their own phone number as well because they were used to repeating it to others on various social occasions. Lack of habit is a phenomenon that exacerbates the forgetting curve.

Gaming is an excellent method of achieving relevance and habit. Amid the noisy universe of information around us, massive injections of new knowledge are disconnected from memory more rapidly.

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Article Author

Hernan Poblete Research Director MORE

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