(MENAFN- Khaleej Times)

A few days ago, TapTap Send suddenly halted money transfers from the UAE for several days while they worked on system upgrades. Naturally, this resulted in frustration among their users who were suddenly left without a way to carry out what, in many cases, were time-sensitive money transfers to their loved ones abroad.

This got me thinking about our responsibility as a fintech ecosystem, specifically with regards to the availability of our services. How do we move towards a world where financial systems are there when users need them? Where apps approach 100% availability?

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Traditionally, availability was treated as something you protected by slowing down. If a system was critical, the thinking was that the safest way to maintain reliability was to minimize change. Change was framed as danger. Organizations built bureaucratic structures to stop change from happening quickly. This was the era of Change Management, Maintenance Windows, and Change Advisory Boards.

If you worked in tech anytime before 2010, you'll remember this rhythm:

. New features were batched together for weeks or months.

. Releases were planned far in advance, often scheduled late at night or on weekends.

. Engineers would gather in“war rooms” to deploy a big release. If anything went wrong, rollback was manual and painful.

. Post-mortems usually resulted in more process and more sign-offs.

Ironically, this approach was intended to protect reliability, but it also made downtime expected and accepted.“Friday night maintenance” was considered A New Reliability Standard for the Region 1 normal. Service Level Agreements even explicitly excluded scheduled downtime. Reliability was never defined as always on - it was defined as“working most of the time, except when we choose to take it down.”

The implicit message to users was:“This service will work... most of the time. Except when we decide to take it offline. Please plan around us.”

But in this day and age where the internet feels as natural a resource as oxygen, that mindset no longer works. The timing of a transaction can be as critical as the transaction itself. The best companies in the world have adopted a new philosophy: reliability isn't about avoiding change, it's about designing for constant change.

I once asked an early Stripe employee how they managed to move so fast as a platform providing such a critical service. His answer stuck with me: moving fast doesn't necessarily mean breaking things if you build for reliability from the start. With the right systems for monitoring and testing, you can move fast and be highly reliable. Delivering things quickly in small increments means you can collect feedback from your system early and often before users ever notice.

This approach isn't just good engineering, it's good business. Investing in resilient infrastructure pays for itself many times over when compared to the cost of a major outage, lost reputation, and broken trust.

Fintech is built on the promise of access, speed, and dependability. Behind every transaction is a person depending on that promise - whether it's a worker sending money home, a parent paying for school, or a small business managing cash flow. In our region, the shift in mindset around availability is still nascent. Many institutions here continue to treat downtime as an unavoidable part of operating critical financial systems. But I believe the new generation of startups in the Middle East has an opportunity, and a responsibility, to build differently: to treat reliability not as a luxury, but as a baseline expectation.

The writer is Co-Founder & CEO of Ziina.

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