I’m a Bachelor student at SUPSI DEASS (Ticino) finishing my thesis on a topic I think this community will find genuinely interesting: how Swiss investment apps use gamification to influence our financial decisions.
Concretely: do push notifications make you trade more than you’d otherwise want to? Does Yuh’s Swissqoin system incentivize overtrading? Do Top Movers lists steer you toward volatile stocks? The academic evidence from international markets (Barber et al., 2022 in Journal of Finance; Chapkovski et al., 2024 in Management Science; FCA 2024 experiment with 9,000 consumers) says yes — but there’s almost no data specifically on the Swiss market.
That’s what I’m trying to fix.
I’ve built an anonymous 5-minute survey covering:
Which gamification features you actually see in your app (Yuh, Neon, Swissquote, PostFinance, IBKR, etc.)
Whether notifications have ever triggered a trade
Three validated financial literacy questions (Lusardi & Mitchell, 2008)
Whether you think the app design is neutral — or not
No right or wrong answers. Fully anonymous. LPD/GDPR compliant.
I’ll share the aggregated results back here once the thesis is done — curious to see how the Mustachian community compares to the general Swiss retail investor population on financial literacy and gamification exposure.
Happy to discuss the topic or the methodology in the comments — I’ve been following this forum for research and the quality of discussion here is genuinely useful for the thesis.
Thank you for taking the time to respond even if the language was a barrier — that alone is genuinely appreciated!
On the language: the survey is in Italian because unfourtunately since I’m based in Ticino my main basin is here, i’m trying to extend it to have even more useful and complete datas. Since all responses need to be aggregated for statistical analysis, keeping a single survey ensures consistency across the dataset. That said, Google Forms has a built-in translation feature: open the survey link in Chrome, right-click anywhere on the page and select “Translate to English” — it works well for a structured questionnaire like this one.
For anyone who’d prefer to read the full questions and options in English before filling it in:
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SECTION A — Profile
Age range
○ 18–24 ○ 25–34 ○ 35–44 ○ 45–54 ○ 55+
Gender
○ Woman ○ Man ○ Non-binary / other ○ Prefer not to say
Highest level of education completed
○ High school / Matura ○ Vocational qualification (CFC) ○ Bachelor (HES / HEU / Uni) ○ Master or higher
Years of experience in financial investing
○ None ○ Less than 1 year ○ 1–3 years ○ 3–7 years ○ More than 7 years
Which platform do you mainly use for savings or investments?
○ Yuh ○ Neon ○ Swissquote ○ PostFinance ○ UBS / Credit Suisse ○ Cantonal bank ○ International platform (Trade Republic, eToro, IBKR, other) ○ None
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SECTION B — Financial literacy (Lusardi & Mitchell, 2008)
You have CHF 100 in a savings account at 2% annual interest. After 5 years with no withdrawals, how much is in the account?
○ More than CHF 110 ○ Exactly CHF 110 ○ Less than CHF 110 ○ Don’t know
Your savings account pays 1% interest and inflation is 2%. After one year, with the money in the account you can buy…
○ More than today ○ Exactly the same as today ○ Less than today ○ Don’t know
Is it generally safer to invest in a single stock or in a diversified fund?
○ A single stock ○ A diversified fund ○ Makes no difference ○ Don’t know
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SECTION C — Gamification exposure
How often do you open your main financial app?
○ Less than once a week ○ About once a week ○ Several times a week ○ Once a day ○ Multiple times a day
Which of these features are present in your main financial app? [multiple choice]
☐ Push notifications on price movements
☐ Badges / medals for milestones
☐ Leaderboards / user rankings
☐ Random prizes / lotteries (e.g. free stocks)
☐ Celebration animations (e.g. confetti)
☐ Streaks / daily series to maintain
☐ Points or virtual currency (e.g. Swissqoin)
☐ Top movers / most traded stocks list
☐ Copy trading / social trading
☐ Savings goal progress bars
☐ None of these
How many financial apps do you actively use?
○ One only ○ Two ○ Three or four ○ Five or more
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SECTION D — Behaviour
How many buy/sell trades (stocks, ETFs, crypto) do you make per month on average?
○ I don’t trade — I only save in accounts or passive funds
○ 1–2 trades per month
○ 3–9 trades per month
○ 10–20 trades per month
○ More than 20 trades per month
In the past year, have you ever placed a trade immediately after receiving a push notification from your financial app?
○ Never ○ Once or twice ○ A few times (3–10) ○ Often — notifications regularly influence my decisions
Do you track your investment performance (e.g. annualised return, comparison with a benchmark)?
○ No, I don’t monitor performance systematically
○ I occasionally check the total portfolio value
○ I calculate my return but don’t compare it to a benchmark
○ I calculate my return and regularly compare it to a benchmark (e.g. SMI, MSCI World)
Do you have an explicit savings goal (e.g. “I want CHF X by year Y”)?
○ No ○ I have a vague idea but no formal goal ○ Yes, with a specific amount and deadline
In the past year, has your financial behaviour changed as a result of any app feature?
○ No — the app design does not influence my decisions
○ Yes, I saved more thanks to goal-setting or progress visualisation features
○ Yes, I traded more than intended because of notifications or leaderboards
○ Both, to different degrees
Game-like features (points, badges, leaderboards) make managing money more engaging
When I use a financial app with game elements, I feel more competent with money
Push notifications make me check or trade more often than I would spontaneously
I prefer a financial app with game features over one with only basic functions
When a streak I’m maintaining is at risk of breaking, I feel anxious and rush to act
I believe my app’s design is neutral — it doesn’t steer me toward any particular behaviour
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SECTION F — Financial wellbeing
How satisfied are you with your current financial situation? (1 = not at all / 5 = very)
How prepared are you to handle an unexpected expense of CHF 3,000?
○ Not at all — I would have to borrow
○ Poorly — it would cause significant difficulties
○ Fairly — I could manage but with sacrifices
○ Well — I have an adequate emergency fund
In the past 12 months, has gamification had an effect on your overall financial behaviour?
○ Mostly positive — it helped me save more or manage money better
○ Mostly negative — it led me to trade too much or make impulsive decisions
○ Mixed — both positive and negative effects
○ No noticeable effect
○ I don’t use financial apps with game features
Comments (optional)
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As for streaks on financial apps — yes, very much a thing, and your bedazzlement is well-placed! One of the cases I analyse in the thesis is FinanzApp, an Italian financial education startup. Their app tracks whether you’ve completed at least one financial micro-lesson each day and displays your current streak with a visual progress indicator. If you break it, the app activates what behavioural economists call Loss & Avoidance — the psychological reluctance to interrupt a series already in progress — which pushes you to open the app even on days when you had no intention of doing so. In a financial education context this is relatively benign. The same mechanic on a trading platform, where “engaging” means executing a trade rather than reading a lesson, is a very different proposition — which is exactly the distinction I’m trying to map across Swiss platforms.
Thanks for sharing the whole questionnaire! I like the financial literacy part One question:
I have different platforms for investments (IBKR) and savings (Eki, CEA). What would I answer?
I think there’s a difference between financial education and financial products. I don’t know about a financial product’s app that uses many game-like features. But I can well imagine that a financial education app uses lots of gamifications.
Great question on Q5 — if you use different platforms for different purposes, please select International platform (Trade Republic, eToro, IBKR, other) since that’s where the trading behaviour the survey is most interested in actually happens. Savings accounts with Eki or CEA are useful to mention in the comments field (Q26) if you want to add context.
And your observation about financial education vs financial products is spot on — it’s actually one of the central distinctions in my thesis. The academic term I use is White Hat gamification (features that build competence and autonomous motivation — quizzes, progress bars, educational missions) versus Black Hat gamification (features that drive frequency and create dependency — push notifications on price movements, points per transaction, random prize mechanics). Financial education apps tend to sit firmly in the first category, which is why their effects on behaviour are generally positive.
Where it gets interesting is financial product apps. They’re more subtle, but they’re there. Yuh’s Swissqoin system awards tokens for every trade you execute — capped at 10 transactions per day. Robinhood (US) had confetti animations on first trades, a lottery-style free stock at signup where you “scratched” a virtual card, and a tap game to climb a waitlist. The Massachusetts regulator fined them USD 7.5 million in January 2024 specifically for these features. Even something as simple as a “Top Movers” tab — which IBKR also has, incidentally — has been shown in peer-reviewed research (Barber, Huang, Odean & Schwarz, Journal of Finance, 2022) to systematically steer retail investors toward the most volatile stocks and generate negative abnormal returns of 4.7% over 20 days.
So the features exist on product apps too — they’re just less visible than badges and streaks, which makes them harder to spot and arguably more effective.
But there’s less consistency if people have different understanding of the questions. Wouldn’t it make sense to offer yourself several translations depending on the population you target?
Auto translate using a specific browser and a right click is a bit too specific a feature to put the burden of going through it on the person answering the survey in my opinion, the burden should be on the person providing the form.
Thanks for your answer regarding the streaks. I also think they’re ok for a financial learning app but wouldn’t be for a trading one.
I may have answered wrongly to Q10. Saxo includes tiered pricing based on transfered money and generated fees so I guess I should have ticked the “points or virtual currency” box, which I didn’t.
Glad the Yuh point landed! The language angle is exactly right — even the name “Yuhsers” instead of “clients” or “investors” is a deliberate framing choice. When Yuh responded to my research interview request, they actually stated that they don’t consider Swissqoin to be gamification at all, but rather a standard loyalty programme. That gap between how the industry defines its own features and how the academic literature classifies them is itself one of the findings of the thesis.
On the IBKR Top Movers tab — you’re right to be sceptical, I should have been more precise. The feature I was referring to is more directly documented in Robinhood’s interface, where it was called “Top Movers” and was central to the Massachusetts enforcement case. IBKR does have watchlists and “most active” sorting options depending on the interface and account type, but it’s a much more passive feature than Robinhood’s equivalent. The key difference is exactly what you imply: a tab that surfaces today’s most volatile stocks in a prominent position is a design choice, not a neutral tool — and the research shows that retail investors systematically overweight whatever is made most visible to them, regardless of whether it’s the best investment choice. On a platform like IBKR with a more professional user base, the effect is probably much smaller than on Robinhood. Which is actually consistent with your original intuition — the less financially literate the target user, the more the design matters.
You make a completely fair point on the language, and I appreciate the honest feedback. You’re right — the burden of translation should be on the researcher, not the respondent.
To be transparent about the process: the survey was originally designed with a Ticino-focused target audience in mind, where Italian is the natural language. When several local channels did not respond as expected, I made the decision to extend the outreach to the broader Swiss audience — French and German-speaking cantons included — while keeping the dataset in a single language to maintain statistical consistency. In hindsight, that decision came a bit late to also offer validated translations, which I acknowledge as a limitation. If I were designing the study from scratch with a pan-Swiss scope, offering the survey in all three national languages would have been the methodologically correct approach. I’ll note this explicitly in the limitations section of the thesis.
On Q10 and Saxo — that’s a genuinely interesting observation. Saxo’s tiered pricing model (Classic / Platinum / VIP based on volume and transferred assets) does share structural features with a loyalty programme: the more you trade or deposit, the better your conditions. Whether that constitutes a gamification mechanic in the academic sense depends on the definition — it doesn’t use points or virtual currency per se, but it does create a progression system with visible thresholds that can incentivise behaviour. For the purposes of the survey your original answer is fine either way — the question asks about explicit virtual currency or points, and a fee tier is a slightly different mechanism. But the fact that you noticed and questioned it is useful qualitative input, and I’ll reference this type of boundary case in the analysis.
Btw can you try using your own voice rather than using AI to reply? (It’s often imprecise, overly verbose and people hang out here to interact with humans )
If English is an issue, prefer a translate app to avoid having a model insert its own opinion and fluff things out.
I’m very aware this forum is populated by people who know finance well, and my primary goal here is data collection ,not to spark debate or come across as dismissive of any point of view. So I’ve probably overcorrected toward an overly accommodating tone trying to avoid stepping on anyone’s toes.
I’m also used to professional environments where newbies tend to get a pretty rough reception, so I may have been more careful than necessary. If anything I’ve written sounds excessively deferential or robotic, that’s why. Apologies for that.
I fully support that. Unfortunately your more recent posts are much lower quality compared to your first posts.
On the actual topic: I don‘t understand where you find the top movers in IB! Do you have your own IB account and can post a screenshot? Or did you get this information from literature?
I have responded to the italian survey with Chrome and try to use Google translate translation but it was partial (50-60% of the page) so I have to guess estimate the responses.
It definitely make sense to redo this survey in the main language of the community you will address (here it is English).
Also you have to translate each page, so equivalent of 10 times…
I didn’t know about the Top Movers features in IB. I am not sure I have seen it in SaxoBank either. I have bookmarked my portfolio as favorite so once I will connect I will land there.
This community is mainly prone to passive investment and ETF so less likely to be influence by these features compare to reddit forums.
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La Gamification negli Strumenti Finanziari in Svizzera
One of the cases I analyse in the thesis is FinanzApp, an Italian financial education startup. Their app tracks whether you’ve completed at least one financial micro-lesson each day and displays your current streak with a visual progress indicator. If you break it, the app activates what behavioural economists call Loss & Avoidance — the psychological reluctance to interrupt a series already in progress — which pushes you to open the app even on days when you had no intention of doing so. In a financial education context this is relatively benign. The same mechanic on a trading platform, where “engaging” means executing a trade rather than reading a lesson, is a very different proposition — which is exactly the distinction I’m trying to map across Swiss platforms.
One question:
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