How Fintech Apps Drive Stickiness with Non-Transactional Engagement   

The global banking industry is thriving, with a record $1.3 trillion in net income reached in recent years. This growth is supported by the rapid expansion of digital banking, with more than 750 digital-only banks serving an estimated 1.8 billion users worldwide.

However, many of these users do not engage with banking apps regularly. It’s a challenge to re-engage them and turn dormancy into lasting, active relationships. 
This article examines this challenge and explores how adjoe’s engagement technology turns non-transactional moments into habit-forming engagement.   

Fintech Apps Have a Stickiness Deficit

Finance apps don’t have a long-term retention problem. They typically have a strong D30 retention rate compared to other app categories. However, the DAU/MAU ratio (stickiness) for these apps is much lower compared to other app categories.

Messaging and social apps typically exceed 50% DAU/MAU stickiness, while gaming ranges from 20–50%. By comparison, fintech app stickiness is around 10-25%, with B2B SaaS in a similar range.  

Loyal customers keep a finance app for years but engage only when checking balances or making payments. This inactivity results in customers seeing finance apps as a utility they use only when needed. Eventually, it leads to lower growth and profitability for fintechs.

How App Stickiness Impacts Fintech Growth

For fintech apps, sustainable growth depends on how much value a customer generates over time (LTV), relative to the cost of acquiring them (CAC). This is often viewed as a ratio (LTV:CAC), a widely recognized industry benchmark. 
A 3:1 ratio is commonly cited as healthy, while lower ratios signal inefficient acquisition or weak retention and engagement for users.  

Fintech apps face a structural challenge on the CAC side of the ratio. Regulatory and compliance requirements increase the cost of acquiring and onboarding customers, while intense competition puts further pressure on acquisition costs. 

These factors put greater emphasis on increasing lifetime value to maximise the revenue generated from acquired customers. 

Extending customer lifetime value and boosting app stickiness can improve the LTV:CAC ratio. That’s why the industry is exploring new ways to make financial apps ‘stickier’.  

Stickiness Drives Primary Financial Institution Status

Engagement is more than a measure of user activity for finance apps. It can also measure how much of a customer’s financial relationship the brand captures.  

When a financial institution becomes a customer’s primary financial relationship, they are more likely to adopt additional products and services from that brand. Increased engagement and deeper product activation build share of wallet.

Every customer who drifts away from consistent engagement affects their lifetime value (LTV), making it harder to justify high CAC. So low app stickiness has a real cost. Fewer sessions mean fewer chances to cross-sell and monetize, which weakens the LTV:CAC ratio. 

When users only engage sporadically, fintech apps miss out on the full revenue and monetization potential those users could generate. Low stickiness doesn’t only mean disengaged users; it leads to a shrinking window for fintech apps to convert engagement into revenue.

Fintech Apps’ Response to the Stickiness Gap 

1. Cashbacks and Rewards 

One industry response to drive engagement is through cashbacks and reward mechanics. These include instant cashback on everyday spending, personalized rewards, and limited-time offers at partner brands.

However, these programs incur higher costs by increasing promotional budgets; fintechs typically fund payouts directly from their margins, making them hard to scale. Customers also wait a long time to receive value in their wallet, which limits stickiness.  

2. AI Hyper-Personalization and Push Notifications 

Fintech apps also adopt AI to surface personalized offers based on each user’s behavior. We see this with PayPal providing hyper-personalized shopping recommendations to users. Another key part of this strategy is push notifications, which pull users back into the app instead of waiting for them to check in on their own.

But there are limitations here as well. This approach requires large amounts of high-quality data. Over-reliance on push notifications can backfire, as sending even one push notification per week can cause 10% of users to disable notifications and 6% to abandon the app altogether. 

3. Super Apps: Non-Banking Features to Increase Sessions 

Another industry response has been the emergence of ‘super apps’, building a suite of banking products and services to become a financial hub for customers.   

A McKinsey report noted Revolut’s evolution from three niche services to 50+ products, including lifestyle and entertainment services. Similar trends are seen in the APAC market. Grab, which started as a ride-hailing service, has expanded into payments, food and grocery delivery, and other services.  

But such services route users to a third-party provider or external app. This pulls users out of the fintech app’s ecosystem, with little incentive to return. The engagement moment doesn’t lead to sustained app usage or more transactions on the fintech platform.

Rewarded Gaming Proven to Boost App Stickiness   

Rewarded gaming in fintech apps is a growing trend to increase app engagement and encourage growth in share of wallet. It’s a different approach that goes beyond traditional gamification mechanisms like progression bars, challenges, or badges.        

Customers using the fintech app get introduced to premium mobile games and add relevant rewards directly to their digital wallets. They redeem the earned balance for actions such as fee coverage, premium features, or card customization.

This brings the existing behavior directly into the fintech app. As a result, customers also discover more native app features, increasing the LTV, and the earned balance is spent within the fintech’s ecosystem.  

From a wider market perspective, the behaviors and audiences overlap. Seven in ten U.S. mobile gamers have a finance or payment app, and digital wallets are already being used to pay for mobile gaming. 

Capturing this overlapping audience lets fintechs direct everyday engagement into their own ecosystems. adjoe’s rewarded engagement technologies are an ideal bridge to turn high monthly active users into daily active users for fintechs. 

How adjoe’s Engagement Tech Solves Fintech App Stickiness

adjoe’s engagement technology offers a white-label gaming rewards solution to embed a catalog of popular mobile games seamlessly into the app’s user interface. Users play games and earn the app’s own rewards currency, which they can redeem within the fintech app.     

adjoe’s technology is specifically designed to address the stickiness and LTV:CAC challenge of finance apps. Across global fintech apps, adjoe partners are already seeing users engage more frequently and adopt downstream products.

1. Turn Gameplay into Real Rewards and Transactions

adjoe’s engagement tech gives users an enjoyable way to earn cashback credited directly to their digital wallet, BNPL account, or loyalty points in the app. 

Many third-party experiences pull users away from the fintech ecosystem. With adjoe’s approach, rewards stay within the app and are redeemed for products and services such as a customized debit card, premium account features, cashback, or fee coverage.

2. Funded by Top Game Studio Partners

There is a difference in how rewarded engagement tech fits into fintech app economics. Fintech apps need to move away from continually funding rewards from their own margins. adjoe’s technology turns everyday engagement into real, spendable rewards at no cost to the brand. 

adjoe partners with top game studios looking to acquire and engage valuable players. Fintech apps can achieve high CPIs above typical market rates and access a premium advertiser base. Not only does this mean fintech app user’s have a more rewarding experience, but it also opens a new revenue stream for the fintech brand.

3. Building Top-of-Wallet Habits 

Frequent app openings lift the DAU/MAU ratio for stickiness and create more opportunities for transactions. Over time, fintech apps become more present in users’ everyday financial lives and can achieve primary status. 

adjoe’s engagement tech helps you do that and also expands ecosystem discovery. Users return to the app more often to play and earn rewards. Every new app open means increased exposure to new offers, partner activations, and new product activations beyond their usual transactions.

In Nectar’s case, 33% of adjoe’s gamers were new to the Nectar loyalty coalition, showing how rewarded gaming can introduce users to a broader ecosystem. 

adjoe’s Engagement Tech: User flow on Fintech Apps

Here’s the look and feel of adjoe’s engagement technology inside a fintech app.
It complements the existing fintech app journey and sits as a natural engagement layer between financial interactions. The user flow below illustrates how:      

Supported by adjoe’s ML-powered technology, customers are matched with relevant games, while dynamic reward mechanisms respond to gameplay and progression.     

Users return regularly for these rewards and stay for the entertainment experience. This creates more frequent app openings and interactions throughout the month. 

Habit Formation: The New Fintech Engagement Loop

As finance markets mature, staying competitive means shifting utility-driven usage into frequent, habitual engagement. Rewarded gaming turns existing users into active daily users by adding non-transactional engagement that drives downstream value within the app. 

adjoe’s engagement tech builds that habit so fintech customers return regularly and transact often for the long-term. Contact adjoe and learn how we can boost engagement for your fintech app.