Tinkoff Investments started as a traditional brokerage platform — powerful but complex. Our team had a bigger ambition: we wanted to make investing exciting and accessible to a much broader audience, including people who had never bought a stock before.

The idea behind the project was simple: investing doesn’t have to be boring. We believed that game mechanics like tournaments, leagues, and achievements could spark curiosity, encourage learning, and motivate users to invest more regularly. That’s how “Tournaments” were born.

As we were developing a completely new feature from scratch, we aimed to minimize uncertainties and achieve outcomes aligned with our goals. We sought a better understanding of the market, competitors, and investor experiences.
What we discovered:

Designing for motivation and fairness

We explored multiple gamification formats — global leaderboards, personal challenges, even achievement-based badges — and landed on tournament-based competitions split into leagues. This structure allowed us to match users with similar levels of experience and portfolio size, giving everyone a fair chance to win.

As users performed well, they moved up from Bronze to Silver, Gold, and even Platinum leagues. To keep things exciting, we introduced boosters — temporary power-ups that multiplied your points or increased your ranking speed. The visual language of the tournament UI included trophy icons, league color schemes, and dynamic score indicators that responded to user performance in real time.

I worked on everything from concept and flow to the UI kit and final production specs. Each design decision was made with real users in mind, including accessibility improvements — like replacing red for losses with purple in some cases for color-blind users.

Collaboration & constraints

The project was developed in tight collaboration with product managers, designers, and developers. We worked iteratively, holding regular design critiques, test tournaments, and internal play sessions. Our main constraints were technical performance (real-time calculations and ranking logic) and legal compliance with Central Bank regulations — we had to ensure that none of the features resembled gambling.

We prioritized features for launch in phases: daily and weekly tournaments with clear prizes first, followed by seasonal championships like the Russian Investment Cup (RICh), which attracted hundreds of thousands of participants.

During the tournament registration, the user will be placed in a group with up to 45 investors from their league – an in-game level. At the end of the week or month, participants who secure the top 3 positions in the group receive rewards and advance to the next league with even more valuable prizes.

A league is the investor level within the tournament. In one group of players, participants can only belong to one league. This means that newcomers in the tournaments will compete only with other newcomers, while experienced investors will face similarly worthy opponents.

The transition between leagues occurs at the conclusion of each daily, weekly, and monthly tournament in which users participated. Progress within leagues for tournaments of different durations is tracked separately.

A booster is a bonus that provides the opportunity to earn more game points during tournaments in Tinkoff Investments. Boosters can be got for completing tasks — for example, for publishing three posts in Pulse or opening an IIS. One random booster is given for each new achievement.

* Boosters only affect game points in the tournament. They don’t change the value of assets or the amount of money in users portfolio.

The outcome

In the first year, over 250,000 investors joined the tournaments. The key metrics — daily active users, retention, and number of trades — grew steadily. More than 100 tournaments were held, and over 30,000 users received prizes, from cash rewards to rare in-app achievements.

Tournaments became a new daily habit for many users. The redesigned investor card became a destination — a space to track your performance, earnings, and next league goal. We saw organic community activity rise in Pulse, the in-app social feed, where users discussed strategies, cheered on winners, and shared tips on how to climb the ranks.

What I took away