Trust the Scuff Marks

What looks like damage might be doing the work.

In the mid-1800s, Scottish golfers noticed something that violated everything they thought they understood about performance. Their old, beaten-up golf balls flew farther and straighter than pristine new ones. The balls they had scuffed, nicked, and dented through rounds of play consistently outperformed smooth ones fresh from the mold.

So they stopped waiting for natural wear and started intentionally marking up new balls with hammers and chisels before they played with them. The "hand-hammered gutta ball" became standard practice. They trusted what worked before they understood why it worked. It took decades for the science to catch up, but golfers had been beating up their balls deliberately for nearly fifty years because empirical evidence told them something the theory had not yet explained.

Here is what the science eventually proved. A smooth ball creates laminar airflow that separates from the ball early, leaving a large low-pressure wake behind it, and that wake creates drag. Dimples force the boundary layer to become turbulent, which counterintuitively keeps the airflow attached to the ball longer, creating a smaller wake and less drag. Dimples reduce drag by nearly 50 percent, and a dimpled ball travels up to four times farther than a smooth one. The scuff marks were signal, not damage.

The Optimization Trap

Most fintech leaders are optimizing for smoothness when they should be asking which friction is doing work they cannot see.

You look at a clunky manual process and assume it needs automation. You see a workaround and assume it needs elimination. You notice something that feels rough and assume polish will improve performance. But sometimes that friction is load-bearing, and sometimes the thing that looks like inefficiency is actually what makes the system deliver outcomes. I watch fintech teams spend months building slick new interfaces to replace what they call legacy processes, only to discover conversion rates drop when they launch. The smooth version tested better in demos, but the rough version converted better in production because the friction was forcing a decision point that mattered.

The question is not how do we eliminate friction. The question is which friction is creating the outcome we want, and which friction is just slowing us down.

The Example Everyone Complains About

Know Your Customer requirements are the friction that shows up red in every funnel analysis. The verification steps feel burdensome, they hurt conversion, they slow down onboarding, and they create drop-off points that product teams obsess over removing. All of that is true, and KYC friction is real friction that costs you customers.

But that friction stops human trafficking. It catches elder abuse. It prevents money laundering and protects the financial system from being used to fund terrorism. These are not theoretical risks or compliance talking points. These are documented outcomes that happen when KYC processes work correctly. When you are standing in public rotating your phone to verify your face, you are participating in a system that has interrupted trafficking rings and stopped financial exploitation of vulnerable people.

The friction is identical whether you frame it as bureaucratic obstacle or protective barrier. What changes is whether customers trust it or resent it. Financial institutions that treat compliance as a necessary evil communicate that message to customers, and financial institutions that treat compliance as competitive advantage because it protects customers communicate that instead. The dimples are there either way, and you just decide whether to apologize for them or use them.

When Roughness Beats Polish

NuBank won Brazil not by smoothing out banking but by making the friction points visible and turning them into proof of a different promise.

Traditional Brazilian banks buried fees in complexity with dozens of line items, opaque pricing structures, and bureaucratic processes that made simple transactions difficult. The friction was there, but it was hidden, and customers absorbed the cost without understanding where it came from. NuBank launched with one product, a fee-free credit card that was mobile-only with no branches, and they made the absence of unproductive friction the entire point.

But they did not eliminate all friction. Opening a NuBank account required verification steps that took time, and their compliance processes were as rigorous as any traditional bank. The difference was they kept productive friction visible and removed unproductive friction entirely. They kept the dimples and removed the damage, which produced a Net Promoter Score around 86 in a market where traditional banks score in single digits. Nearly 90 percent of new customers came from referrals, and by 2025 they had 123 million customers across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. That growth did not come from being smoother but from being clearer about which friction mattered and why.

What This Means for Your Product

Fintech products are over-optimized for smoothness because smoothness tests well in demos. Investors love frictionless experiences, product teams love removing steps, and designers love clean interfaces. But customers sometimes need friction to make good decisions, and your system sometimes needs friction to deliver outcomes that matter more than conversion rates.

Think about where you are removing texture that creates traction. Think about where you are polishing away the scuff marks that make your system work better than the smooth alternative. Think about whether the thing you are calling legacy inefficiency might actually be a dimple you do not yet understand. The golf ball story is useful because it reminds us that observation preceded theory, and golfers knew scuffed balls worked better decades before anyone could explain why. Your job is similar, which means trusting what the evidence shows you about where friction creates better outcomes, even when the theory says smooth should be better.

Talk to you soon,
--Allison

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