Over the last decade, fintech has obsessed over one thing: speed.
There’s faster transfers, instant settlements, real-time notifications and to be fair, speed was once revolutionary. It disrupted legacy banking, made cross-border transfers more accessible and it reshaped the expectations of users who previously had to wait 2–3 business days to confirm a transaction.
But we’ve reached a turning point; Today, speed is no longer a differentiator. It’s an assumption.
Just like mobile-first design or two-factor authentication, instant transfers have become expected. They no longer impress; they’re the bare minimum.
So the question we ask at Woven is simple: Now that we’ve reached fast, what’s next? Our answer: Certainty.
Speed Is Utility. Certainty Is Trust.
Speed answers the question: “Did it go through?”
Certainty answers: “Will it always work when I need it?”
The truth is: most people don’t remember when a transaction is fast, but they absolutely remember when it fails; and in markets like Nigeria, where trust in infrastructure is delicate and every failed payment chips away at user confidence, certainty isn’t a luxury, it’s a requirement.
Imagine a merchant selling on WhatsApp sends a payment link to a customer who’s ready to buy. The customer clicks, but the page won’t load. There’s a minor network delay or a broken link, or even an expired session… The merchant probably loses the sale, and the customer loses confidence in the technology.
Speed wasn’t the issue. Certainty was.
The Cost of Uncertainty in Payments
In a system where failure happens at the edge, on the customer’s screen, the cost isn’t always financial. It’s reputational, and according to a 2023 report from McKinsey on customer experience in digital banking, 76% of users who experienced a failed payment said they would hesitate to use that platform again. Even more said they would abandon the transaction entirely if it required multiple steps to retry.
This is more of a brand risk than it is a product bug, and if your payment system forces users to refresh multiple times, send follow-up screenshots or ask “has it dropped?” every time, then the system isn’t just inefficient; it’s fragile.
Certainty on the other hand looks like a payment link that works instantly, every time, a QR code that doesn’t fail under pressure, a virtual account that reflects the transaction before the customer follows up, and a dashboard that just shows clarity, not confusion. The absence of friction, questions, or anxiety.
If speed is about shaving off seconds, certainty is about building trust that lasts months, even years.
At Woven, we think about these details obsessively because they’re fundamental. What We’re Building at Woven
We’ve spent months not just engineering for speed, but architecting for trust.
We’ve built payment links that open fast, even on low bandwidth; our QR flows are designed for instant scan-to-settlement; our virtual accounts reflect inflows in real-time, and reconcile without stress; and our dashboard? We kept it clean and simple, so everything’s easy to find and use, no confusion.
We don’t chase hype. We build what matters; the kind of tech you can rely on without thinking twice… tech that makes life easier for real users.
Because our audience is not measuring us on hype. They’re measuring us on reliability, and in the coming years, the best fintech products won’t win by going faster. They’ll win by being the ones users never have to worry about.
That’s what we build for. Not speed. Certainty.