Gold Coins

Paytm Gold had no real loyalty hook. Users invested, then left — there was nothing that made them feel rewarded for coming back, and nothing tying everyday Paytm activity to the gold habit. Gold Coins was a large, cross-team charter; I worked on it as one of the people shaping the experience, not a solo build.

The objective came first: give users something genuinely meaningful for their loyalty — a reward that grows, not a one-off cashback that's spent and forgotten. Cashback burns margin without building habit. The system to deliver that reward was designed around the objective, not the other way round.

• 01Shaped the core idea with the team: a coin currency users earn through everyday actions and redeem for real Digital Gold — a reward that grows over time instead of a discount spent once.
• 02Worked on the earn-to-redeem journey: how coins are earned, where users see their balance, and how they turn coins into actual gold.
• 03Contributed to the landing experience — a visual coin store that fills up as the balance grows, coin history, and a redemption flow that gives new users clear ways to start earning.
• 04Helped define the welcome moment: a coin bonus for new users on first open, rolled out in controlled stages for a safe launch.
• 05Collaborated across several cross-functional teams to bring the pieces together — earning rules, balance, redemption, and showing coins consistently across the app's key discovery points (home, offers, passbook).

Gold Coins did more than drive loyalty — it grew the core business. Daily gold transactions rose ~35%, driven both by users redeeming coins into real gold and by a ~17% lift in manual gold purchases alongside it. It became a new organic engine for gold awareness and acquisition across the wider Paytm ecosystem.

Building a loyalty currency means designing for the entire arc — not just the earning moment, but the moment a user realises their coins are actually worth something. Seeing the coin store fill up as the balance grew was a small detail that made that arc feel tangible.

The piece I'd push for next is a standardised streak system for earning coins — rewarding users for showing up, not just transacting. A streak blends a boost lever with an organic habit, turning scattered earning moments into a daily reason to come back.