The Gamification of Investing : How Fintech Brokerage-App Features Shape Young Retail Investors’ Decision-Making

Sammanfattning

Background: Fintech brokerage applications have made investing more accessible, immediate, and self-directed. At the same time, these platforms increasingly include gamified features such as rankings, push notifications, referral rewards, free-share rewards, and simplified portfolio displays. This is especially relevant for young retail investors, who frequently use mobile-first investment platforms. Existing research has primarily examined such features through quantitative outcomes such as trading volume, risk-taking, and attention-induced buying. However, limited knowledge exists on how young retail investors themselves perceive these features and how they shape investment decision-making. Purpose: This study explores how young retail investors perceive gamified features in fintech brokerage applications and how these features shape their investment decision-making. More specifically, it examines how top movers lists, push notifications and price alerts, refer-a-friend and freeshare rewards, and portfolio displays shape what young investors notice, interpret, and do before making investment decisions. These findings add to the emerging literature on gamified brokerage-app design while also supporting platform providers, regulators, and financial educators in making more informed decisions about responsible app-based investing. Method: To fulfill the purpose of this study and answer the research question, an abductive qualitative study was conducted using semi-structured interviews with 17 young retail investors aged between 20 and 27. The interviews were supported by feature-based visual stimulus materials to encourage detailed reflections on specific brokerage-app features. In total, the interviews generated 18 hours and 50 minutes of interview data. The data was analyzed through thematic analysis, allowing recurring patterns in participants’ perceptions, interpretations, emotional responses, and investment-related behavior to be identified. Conclusion: The findings show that young retail investors perceive gamified brokerage-app features ambivalently. Participants valued these features as accessible, informative, convenient, rewarding, and engaging, while also interpreting them as attention-directing, emotionally activating, commercially motivated, or potentially misleading. The features did not directly determine investment behavior. Instead, they mainly shaped the pre-transaction stage of decision-making by influencing what investors noticed, how they interpreted investment-related information, how emotions entered the decision process, and how attention moved toward checking, research, resistance, or action. Top movers shaped investors’ consideration sets, notifications created app re-entry, rewards changed how gifted value and risk were perceived, and portfolio displays encouraged emotional monitoring and low-friction action. Overall, the thesis shows that fintech brokerage applications should not only be understood as access-enabling tools, but also as pre-transaction choice environments that shape investment decision-making before a trade occurs. However, this influence is not uniform, as the same feature can support, redirect, or pressure investors depending on their routines, experience, and situation.