Pepper, Playbuzz Get Together to Make a Fun Mobile Banking Experience

While mobile payments have been a bit of a lagging market, particularly in the United States, that’s absolutely not the case with mobile banking, which has proven a lot more welcome for those looking to take care of bank-related chores in the middle of a normal day. Pepper—produced by Israel’s Leumi bank—has decided to step up its own capabilities with help from Playbuzz.

The Pepper app recently found that millennials aren’t adopting traditional banking apps quite so much, and so is turning to help from the Playbuzz service to add specific, interactive, and highly personalized content to Pepper. That includes most everything from polls to quizzes, a combination that Pepper hopes will keep more users on the app longer, having a better time while they’re there.

Millennials actually care quite a bit about their finances; a recent report noted that over 80 percent of millennials know what’s happening with their accounts at any given moment, and 70 percent are actually thinking ahead. That’s more than a lot of people expect from millennials, so the notion of throwing some fun into a mobile banking app may have more merit than some might project. In fact, around 75 percent are active savers, trying to preserve about 20 percent of their monthly earnings, so it’s obvious that millennials are engaged bank customers.

It’s easy to wonder if Pepper may be solving the wrong problem. Since Pepper is an app connected to an Israeli bank, the demographics and conditions may be different there than in the United States. Given that reports suggest that mobile banking is more popular than mobile payments in the United States, this may be a problem that is limited to Israel. Still, the idea of tossing a little fun into the mobile banking process isn’t such a terrible idea; oftentimes I’ve wished that someone could put up a little video at my bank’s drive-thru showing Looney Tunes shorts or the like.

Solving the wrong problem? Maybe not in Israel. At any rate, it’s a small change that might shake up the whole system, and that’s a pattern worth considering.