Points, Badges, and Leaderboards Are Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Fabian Tatomirescu spent nearly two decades deliberately not working in insurance before he came back to run digital innovation at his family’s brokerage. His grandmother never went to school, had twelve siblings, and grew up sharing two pairs of shoes among all the children — his father built Campion Broker, now Romania’s sixth-largest insurance broker with roughly 5% market share, essentially from nothing, starting around 1997-98 as Romania’s post-communist free market was still finding its footing.

Fabian felt he couldn’t thrive in that shadow without first proving something on his own. He became a fashion photographer, then a brand manager for a Romanian brand that went international, then a failed fashion designer importing textiles from Bangladesh (undone by 2020), then — the detour that actually mattered — a competitive gamer chasing a top-3%-of-the-world Predator rank in Apex Legends and, as a 12-year-old, qualifying for a European StarCraft championship in Germany.

That gaming background is what he eventually brought home. Not as a gimmick, but as the actual design discipline behind how he’s rebuilding Campion’s sales force incentive systems.

In Episode 119 of InsurTechTalk, Fabian and I covered why gamification is user-centered design and not badges, how he’s translating competitive gaming psychology into quarterly sales KPIs, and why he thinks insurers should gamify customer education rather than customer discounts.

About Fabian Tatomirescu

Fabian Tatomirescu is Deputy General Manager at Campion Broker, Romania’s sixth-largest insurance brokerage, where he unofficially leads digital integration and digital innovation. He is second-generation at the family business his father built starting in the late 1990s. Before returning to insurance, Fabian spent roughly 17 years across fashion photography, brand management, fashion design, and competitive gaming, and cites Yu-kai Chou’s Actionable Gamification as the formative text that shaped his current approach to sales force incentive design.

Gamification Is Not Points, Badges, and Leaderboards

Fabian’s opening correction is the most important framing in the conversation: points, badges, and leaderboards are the shallow, clickbait-friendly surface of gamification, not the substance.

The actual discipline, in his words, is user-centered design — building systems around the actions a user takes, engineered around psychological levers the user often isn’t consciously aware of:

• Meaning and a sense of ownership
• Social influence
• Feelings of accomplishment and empowerment
• Scarcity
• Avoidance behavior and unpredictability as deliberate design elements

His personal reference point is his own path through competitive gaming — endless experimentation with build orders in StarCraft, then discovering he could accelerate his own improvement in Apex Legends by watching other players, absorbing technique, and returning to practice. The insight he wanted to translate to a sales environment: that entire self-driven improvement loop — watch, learn, practice, improve, repeat — is almost impossible to replicate in a business context built on spreadsheets and static PDFs.

Building It for the Sales Force, Not the Policyholder

This is the genuinely distinctive part of Campion’s approach. Most industry conversations about gamification default immediately to the policyholder — discounts for healthy behavior, point systems for safe driving. Fabian built his system for the internal sales force first.

The mechanics, as he described them:

• Sales is inherently a competitive environment — everyone can see roughly where they stand relative to everyone else
• Campion translates quarterly business priorities (e.g., a push to sell more health or travel coverage in a given quarter, based on internal data on what’s performing well) directly into a sales rep’s app as visible, specific quarterly KPIs
• Hitting a KPI earns both a monetary bonus and XP that moves the rep up a ladder; each subsequent tier raises the bar
• At quarter’s end, KPIs reset, but standing carries forward partially based on prior performance — reps don’t restart from zero
• Critically, participation is entirely optional. A rep who doesn’t engage with the gamified layer still earns their commission and any bonus tied to KPIs they hit — even unknowingly — because Fabian considers it unfair to withhold earned compensation from someone who simply didn’t opt into the game layer

The Merger Incentive Problem

I pushed Fabian on a live, practical problem I was working on as an advisor at the time: designing financial incentives to retain leadership and staff through a business merger, where cultural integration inevitably lags behind the deal itself.

His honest answer: full automation is the only way this scales. His illustrative example was disarmingly personal — even he, a highly competitive person with a household chores app tracking points against his wife, sometimes forgets to log his own chores. In a fast-moving business environment, expecting employees to manually log their own KPI achievements is unrealistic.

His proposed ideal: every meaningful action within the company hierarchy gets logged automatically, triggering an immediate, visible reward — XP, a notification, recognition visible to the team — the same dynamic that made a “ding” in World of Warcraft a publicly celebrated event within a guild. His prediction for the cultural byproduct: bad-faith actors get pushed out not by management action but by peer pressure from a team operating in a transparent, positive-reinforcement environment where underperformance and misaligned values become visibly obvious.

Gamifying the Policyholder: Education Over Discounts

Where most insurers who attempt customer-facing gamification default to fitness-tracking discount programs (reward the marathon runners), Fabian’s proposal points somewhere more universal and, he’d argue, more honest about the actual customer relationship.

His starting observation is bleak but accurate: personal lines insurance offers almost no positive touchpoints. Buy the policy (a single event, often reluctant), pay the premium (negative, recurring), file a claim (negative, stressful), get made whole again (neutral at best — you’re back to where you started, not ahead). Every interaction in that loop is either transactional or negative.

His proposed fix borrows the same “fuel economy vs. fuel consumption” reframing trick Volkswagen used on its dashboards roughly a decade ago — the same underlying number, presented as something you’re gaining rather than something you’re spending:

• Take the existing bonus-malus mechanism already common in European auto insurance and make it fully transparent through a real, dedicated app — not a generic reward layer bolted onto an existing product, and ideally not tied to a single carrier
• Actively teach the customer what specifically improves their score, the way a US credit score system (in principle) explains what improves creditworthiness
• Borrow directly from how Uber turned an anxiety-inducing wait (“where is my ride?”) into an empowering, transparent one, simply by showing the map and the real-time ETA — insurers should apply the same transparency to claims: show average resolution time, show exactly what affected a bonus-malus score negatively, and show the path back to a better rate

His broader idea, which we developed together in the conversation: reframe the entire category from “how much you pay” to “how much you save” and “how much you learn” — using the same self-directed education instinct that drives people to YouTube to verify their accountant is doing their taxes correctly. Insurers could actively feed and reward that instinct with content teaching risk management and financial literacy, rather than only ever talking about premiums.

Advice: The Journey Never Actually Stops

Asked for closing advice, Fabian’s answer resisted the confident startup-advice register entirely: have patience with yourself, have fun, don’t give up, and be kind to yourself even at your lowest points — because the journey itself never really ends, and being kind to yourself now is what makes you capable of getting better later.

Key Takeaways

• Gamification is user-centered design built around psychological drivers — meaning, ownership, social proof, accomplishment — not points, badges, and leaderboards, which are only the visible surface
• Applying gamification to a sales force rather than the policyholder is a genuinely underexplored angle, and works best when participation is fully optional and never withholds compensation from non-participants
• Full automation of achievement tracking and reward is the only realistic way to sustain gamified incentives at organizational scale — manual self-logging fails even for highly motivated individuals
• Peer-driven cultural pressure, not management intervention, is the natural byproduct of a transparent, positively-reinforced incentive system
• Personal lines insurance has almost no positive customer touchpoints by default — buy, pay, claim, get made whole — which makes transparency and education, not discounts alone, the more durable gamification lever
• Reframing the same underlying number (fuel consumption to fuel economy; premium cost to savings) changes how reluctant customers receive it, without changing the underlying product at all
• The tip-of-the-iceberg marketing reframe only works if the rest of the business genuinely operates on the same underlying ethos — it can’t be cosmetic