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, and 7 out of 10 credit card applications are rejected. A good part of these rejections is to young users who do not have score credit.

As the biggest player in the banking industry, we 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.

During an investigative deep dive into the depths of our audiences we found a fact that could help us reach those two thirds of the population that don’t use financial products each month, and it was that 64% of the country's internet connected population is into gaming.

Gamming had the reach we needed, so what could gaming do for us? A hypothesis began to take shape. Would it be possible to use gamming to predict or get to know our audiences better? Could it give us the knowledge we had to have to give them the products they needed?

With the help of industry experts, we started evaluating the information games could give us and how that information might be relevant for credit risk profiles. Profiles that before then had always been defined by previous baking behavior and history. We defined 28 soft skills that our risk teams deemed strong enough to predict baking behavior and define a new type of credit risk profile.

This is how the gamming profile was born.

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.

Those who couldn't create a credit history before had a chance to do so now. This changed everything. In the long term it could give them access to home credits, car credits, and any other loan they might need to better their future.

The Gaming Profile is a case of innovation which challenged the mechanisms for traditional credit score credit analysis. Bancolombia in alliance with Soft skills a data analysis company and Steam one of the most popular game providers largest in the world, created the first risk measurement model based on the gambling behaviors of young people and not on their financial behaviors.

This new way of understanding an audience allowed the bank to provide credit options to young users. In the first stage of implementation, more than the 60% of applications were approved. Reach 21,666 hours to deliver credit applications. In total, 43,078 hours were played on Steam to be able to request the credit card.