Every app built around engagement eventually reaches for the same toolkit. Duolingo has streaks, Strava has segments, and trading apps have notifications, badges and rewards. The mechanics differ, but the objective is usually similar: encourage a behavior, then reward the user for repeating it.
Long-term investing is one of the few categories where that logic can break. Some valuable investor behaviors are marked by the absence of activity: not reacting to every price movement, not trading on every headline, and continuing a sensible process through volatility. A customer who constantly opens an app may look highly engaged while becoming more exposed to noise and emotional decisions. Someone who contributes on schedule and rarely logs in may look inactive while behaving exactly as a long-term investor should.
The industry therefore has a measurement problem before it has a gamification problem. The harder question is whether digital investment products help sensible actions become routine, or whether they are designed mainly to get users to return and do something.
That question is becoming more relevant across Southeast Asia as digital financial services mature. The e-Conomy SEA 2025 report from Google, Temasek and Bain noted that digital financial services are expanding beyond payments and that several digital-wealth platforms across six Southeast Asian markets now exceed US$1 billion in assets under management. As access expands, the product challenge shifts from getting people through the door to shaping what happens after they arrive.
The product problem starts after the first investment
Digital investing has removed many barriers at the start of the journey. Account opening is simpler, minimum investment amounts have fallen, and transactions can happen in seconds. But investing is not one decision; it is a recurring one. Every time fresh cash arrives, the same question returns: what should I do with it?
For me, that shifts the design question from “How do we get someone to invest?” to “What helps the next sensible action happen?” Often the answer is subtraction rather than addition. Remove prompts that create unnecessary reactions, decisions that belong to a process rather than a person, and noise dressed up as information. Reducing friction is useful only if we are equally deliberate about which behavior becomes easier as a result.
Business models matter here. A platform that earns mainly from transactions has an incentive to keep creating reasons to act. A platform whose economics depend more on long-term client outcomes has reason to optimize for a different behavior. The same engagement mechanics can therefore point in very different directions.
Gamification only works if it rewards the right behavior
Gamification can reinforce repetition, but the mechanic matters less than the behavior underneath it. If the loop being rewarded is “open, click, transact, repeat,” a well-designed system may simply become very effective at producing more activity.
The evidence that these mechanics can change financial behavior is strong. In an experiment involving more than 9,000 consumers, the UK Financial Conduct Authority found that push notifications increased the number of trades by 11 percent, while a points-and-prize-draw mechanic increased trading by 12 percent. Both also increased the proportion of trades in riskier investments. A 2025 IOSCO report on digital engagement practices similarly noted that notifications, nudges and gamification can improve engagement but may also encourage more frequent or higher-risk trading when that is not in an investor’s best interest.
At Recompound, this thinking has shaped our own experiments. Alongside achievement features such as Trophy and Milestone, we introduced a Top-Up Indicator, a daily score from 0 to 100 that summarizes, under our methodology, how attractive the market looks for adding money. It is a reference rather than a rule, and it is not a prediction; historical patterns do not guarantee future outcomes.
The point is to give a patient investor a concrete way to think about contribution behavior without rewarding more time in the app. That is a very different objective from encouraging someone to trade more frequently.
The real test is whether investor behavior changes
A feature that gets used is not the same as a feature that works. Badges collected and screens opened prove that a mechanic generated activity; they do not show whether it created healthier investor behavior. The more meaningful test is what people do when markets give them a reason to panic.
Indonesia’s stock market fell sharply from its January 2026 highs. During that period, our client data showed more clients adding fresh money than during the preceding calmer months, with 38 percent more individual top-ups across the comparison periods. The deepest month of the decline was also the highest-participation month in our history.
We are careful about what this does and does not show. Our client base was also growing, and behavior during one market decline is not proof of a permanent habit. But this is the kind of evidence wealth platforms should examine: whether customers follow a process when conditions become uncomfortable rather than whether a feature simply generates clicks.
External research shows why investor behavior matters. Morningstar’s 2025 Mind the Gap research estimated that the average dollar invested in US mutual funds and ETFs earned 7.0 percent annually over the decade through 2024, compared with an 8.2 percent aggregate annual return for the funds themselves. The 1.2-percentage-point gap reflected the timing and magnitude of investors’ own cash flows. The study is US-based and says nothing about any particular wealthtech mechanic, but it illustrates how investor behavior can affect the returns people actually experience.
Engagement should serve the investor
There is ultimately an ethical question. What happens when the behavior that improves a platform’s engagement metrics is not the behavior that improves the customer’s financial life? Should every market movement trigger a notification, or should a platform sometimes go quiet when there is no useful action to take?
As Southeast Asia brings more people into digital financial products, platforms should be able to explain not only how a design feature changes behavior, but why the behavior it encourages is in the investor’s interest.
The first phase of wealthtech in the region was about access. The next should be about becoming an enabler. The goal of building wealth should not be to make people spend more of their lives thinking about their portfolios. If technology can help someone build a sound process, contribute consistently, recognize when information matters and ignore noise when it does not, successful engagement may eventually mean needing fewer nudges rather than more.
Toby Limanto is Co-Founder of Recompound, an Indonesian investment advisory platform focused on structured, long-term investing. Before Recompound, he co-founded StockPeek and worked in Goldman Sachs’ Engineering Division in Singapore and as a data science intern at Refinitiv. He holds a B.Sc. (Hons) in Mathematical, Computational and Statistical Sciences from Yale-NUS College.
Editor’s note: This contributed article has been lightly edited for clarity, length, style and factual precision. Where appropriate, TNGlobal has qualified or omitted claims that could not be independently corroborated. The views and arguments expressed remain those of the author and should not be read as investment advice.
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