User Retention Dropped 15%? First Check How Many Milliseconds Your Market Data Is Delayed

As a fintech product manager, we agonize over user experience every day: Is the UI design smooth enough? Can the trading process be simplified further? How’s the community vibe? We run countless A/B tests and optimize the color of every button, yet often overlook the invisible but deadliest "killer" — data latency.

Have you ever wondered:

Why do users complain our K-line charts are "laggy," always a step behind competitors?Why does our App crash instantly or fail to process orders during market booms?Why do users still drift to "faster" rivals despite our more comprehensive features?

The answer may lie in hundreds of milliseconds of delay. In finance, "time is money" is not a metaphor, but a fact. If a trader misses the best entry point or fails to stop loss in time due to your platform’s data latency, will they trust you again?

Users won’t say: "Your average WebSocket push latency is 170ms higher than competitors." They’ll vote with their feet — leaving a review like "This App sucks" before uninstalling.

Thus, the foundation of user experience for a fintech product doesn’t lie in flashy UI, but in the stability, reliability, and speed of underlying data services. It’s like a restaurant: no matter how luxurious the decor, it will eventually fail if the ingredients are stale or service is slow.

When choosing a data service provider, price shouldn’t be the sole consideration. Several more critical metrics include:

• Service Level Agreement (SLA): The gap between 99.9% and 99.95% availability is huge. The latter means hours less downtime per year — a matter of life and death on key market days.
• Data Transmission Protocol: Still using Polling to refresh data? That’s outdated. Real-time push via WebSocket is now standard, minimizing latency to the fullest.
• Data Source Quality: Is the data from primary exchanges or "second-hand" sources through layers of sublicensing? The quality of the source determines your platform’s ceiling.

Selecting data infrastructure for a product is a business decision, not just a technical one. It directly impacts user retention, brand reputation, and ultimate commercial success. Instead of spending heavily to recover lost users later, invest in a rock-solid foundation from the start.

Some top-performing trading platforms I know are extremely strict when choosing data solutions — they even include SLA and latency metrics in core KPIs. They understand that paying for high-quality data is essentially paying for user trust. That’s why services like Alltick highlight 99.95% SLA and millisecond-level latency as core selling points: they know these are the lifelines of fintech products.

So, at the next product meeting, before discussing UI and features, ask: "Is our data fast and stable enough?"

#ProductManager #UserExperience #UserRetention #FintechApp #Exchange #SLA #WebSocket