Banking on GamBLs™

Early November, in 2006, the eLearning team from ICICI Bank requested TATA Interactive Systems to recommend a training intervention program that would help make their people, involved in the Inward Clearing process, more efficient. One of their tasks involved spotting up to 18 potential discrepancies on each bearer cheque in less than 7 seconds to overcome the high volumes of transactions everyday. For the bank, an incorrect decision of passing or holding a cheque has severe regulatory, financial and legal implications. The need, as we saw it, was to entice their employees to demonstrate exceptional skills in the task.

Our solution, ‘Cheque-Mate’, was a skill-enhancer game designed around our Game Based Learning (GamBLs™) model. It put the player in an imaginary world where he/she was challenged to tag a series of correct and incorrect cheques according to an identified discrepancy in a limited time. The player would customize the game to match his/her ability using time and complexity controls at the start of the game. The player was scored on speed and accuracy of their decisions and recognition for good performance corresponded to the degree of challenge. The game used a dynamic data model that generated different data sets for every session to ensure replay-ability, another key attribute of GamBLs™.

The game was received with great enthusiasm by both the eLearning group and the employees of ICICI Bank. It also won the APEX Award this year.

In focus group testing, one of the players said,  “When I started, I could hardly find errors in a cheque, but after practice, I could track errors quite easily. So definitely playing over again I would look forward to improving my scores and reducing the errors.”

Another said, “It made me sit back and concentrate to ensure good scores.”
Since November, 2006, TATA Interactive Systems have created four highly engaging GamBLs™ for ICICI Bank and are in the process of developing four more around the roles of cashiers, back-end operations, Branch managers, customer sales representatives and sales representatives.

Mr. K. Ramkumar, Group Head – HR, ICICI Bank expressed his excitement about the role of gaming in his department vision for the future in an article that appeared in The Mint recently.

(Chandra Shekhar Ghildiyal is Deputy Head – Game-Based Learning at TATA Interactive Systems)