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 we needed to change this, especially when part of that usage gap was motivated by the processes our 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 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.

People had to sign in, choose their preferred game, and play for 15 hours total. This would give us the time we needed to evaluate the 28 soft skills defined, analyze them, grade them and finally decide if the profile was safe enough to approve a new credit card.

The analysis and studies happened behind the scenes, users did not see what was being studied or when. This kept the gaming experience as natural as possible, giving us insight into their unfiltered gaming behavior. This was the most important factor, because only natural behavior would lead to accurate predictions of real-life behaviors.

The credit card's limit adapted to the user's risk profile. The better the profile, the higher the amount. Giving people an opportunity they had never had before by using gaming as a platform and their own behavior as our guide to bridge the banking usage gap.

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 baking 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.

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.