Sales velocity

Stay with me on this one — it’s the part that makes the rest of Guild worth doing for traders. When you take payments through Guild, every inflow is a row. Stack the rows by day and you get a line chart. The slope of that line — your sales velocity — is the single most powerful signal a lender will read when they decide whether to advance you inventory. A bank can’t read your cash drawer. They can read your velocity chart.

What “velocity” actually means

Two numbers we track and surface on your dashboard:

Metric	Definition
Daily inflow average (30d)	Mean naira amount that landed in your wallet per active business day, over the trailing 30 days.
Monthly inflow (90d)	Sum of all wallet inflows in the trailing 30/60/90-day windows. The 90-day reading is what the standing model and lender snapshots use.

A few derived signals layer on top:

Customer count — how many distinct senders paid you in the last 30 days.
Repeat-customer rate — share of inflows from senders you’ve received from before.
Velocity trend — is your daily average rising or falling versus the prior 30 days?
Working-day discipline — what share of your declared working days had at least one inflow.

The standing model weights all of these. It doesn’t reward “high revenue” — it rewards consistent, repeatable, customer-diverse activity. A trader doing ₦80,000 every day across 40 different customers ranks higher than one doing ₦200,000 on Mondays and zero the rest of the week, even though the latter has higher total revenue.

The four tiers, trader edition

Same tier framework as Job Seekers, with trader-specific signals.

Tier	Velocity benchmark (30-day)	What it unlocks
Building	Just opened the virtual account, under 30 days of activity	Receive payments, withdraw, basic dashboard
Emerging	≥₦30k daily avg, ≥10 distinct customers, ≥30d tenure	Higher transaction limits, lender consent eligibility
Trusted	≥₦80k daily avg, ≥30 distinct customers, ≥60d tenure	Inventory-advance offer eligibility, premium customer support
Established	≥₦150k daily avg, ≥80 distinct customers, ≥90d tenure	Top-tier inventory advance, best terms from partner lenders

Numbers shift as we calibrate against real Nigerian informal-economy patterns. Your dashboard shows your current standing relative to the threshold for the next tier, not a fixed gate.

Inventory advance — what it actually is

Hold on, this is the punchline 👀 Once you’re at Trusted tier, a quadrant on your dashboard lights up:

Inventory advance offer. Based on your 30-day velocity (₦95k daily, 47 customers), you’re eligible for up to ₦200,000 in inventory advance. Repay over 14 weekly installments via direct debit from your wallet. Total cost ₦212,000. Tap to apply.

What’s happening underneath: a partner financier (a microfinance institution, a credit fintech, increasingly a commercial bank) has integrated with our Partner API. They’ve defined a product profile — “advance up to ₦200k to Trusted-tier traders with ≥₦80k daily velocity, repay over 14 weeks at 6% all-in, eligibility refreshed monthly.” When your dashboard reads your standing, it checks every active product profile and surfaces the one(s) you qualify for. You tap Apply. We surface a consent prompt: “Share your Guild snapshot with X Financier?” You tap yes. The financier hits GET /partner/v1/users/usr.../snapshot, reads your tier, your velocity, your customer count, your repayment streak (if any), and approves or declines in milliseconds. If approved, the funds disburse straight to your Guild wallet via OPay payout. The repayment schedule writes to our savings/mandates table. Every Tuesday at 9 AM, we direct-debit your wallet for the weekly amount. The lender sees each repayment land in their own dashboard the moment our webhook fires. You never touched cash. The financier never had to manually underwrite. Your velocity chart did the work.

What makes velocity go up

Take more payments through Guild. Every customer transfer is a row.
Diversify your customers. A new sender adds to your customer count.
Stay consistent. Daily activity on declared working days beats sporadic bursts.
Use multiple channels. Static VA, dynamic VAs, wallet-to-wallet — all count.

What pulls it down

Refunds. A refund subtracts from net inflow.
Quiet stretches. A two-week vacation where you don’t take any payments will show up as a velocity dip — recoverable, but visible.
Mismatched transactions. If you accept a lot of MISMATCH inflows (wrong amount transferred), the noise hurts the signal quality.
Failed debits. If a partner lender’s repayment debit fails because your wallet was empty, that’s a negative signal in your standing.

Why we don’t show you the score directly

You see your tier (Building, Emerging, Trusted, Established) and the signals behind it. We don’t surface the raw numerical score in the trader dashboard. Two reasons:

The numerical score moves daily as the model recomputes. Showing it would invite obsession over noise.
The score is for the model and the lender to read. You should be reading the signals — am I serving more customers, am I consistent, am I responsive — because those are the levers you can actually pull.

When you grant a lender consent, the snapshot we send them includes the numerical score. They use it. You don’t need to.

The fastest way from Emerging to Trusted: encourage a few of your regular cash customers to transfer instead. You don’t need to convert all of them. Five regulars switching to transfers adds five distinct senders to your customer count and stabilises your daily-average inflow. Most traders cross the Trusted threshold in 6-8 weeks of intentional effort.

What lenders see vs what you see

Your dashboard surfaces tier, signals, and offers in plain language. The lender sees a signed JSON snapshot:

{
  "userId": "usr_01HMFB...",
  "actorRole": "TRADER",
  "standingTier": "Trusted",
  "standingScore": 612,
  "signals": {
    "monthlyVelocityKobo": "9500000000",
    "dailyAvgInflowKobo": "316000000",
    "distinctSendersLast30d": 47,
    "repeatCustomerRate": 0.71,
    "workingDayDisciplineRate": 0.93,
    "lifetimeEarnedKobo": "1842000000",
    "repaymentStreak": 0
  },
  "ledgerWindowDays": 90,
  "signedAt": "2026-08-14T11:02:33Z",
  "signature": "ed25519:..."
}

The signature lets them prove the snapshot came from Guild and hasn’t been tampered with. Their underwriting model takes the rest.

Bills

Spend from your wallet — airtime, data, electricity.

The Partner Portal

The other side — how a financier integrates and reads your snapshot.

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Sales velocity

What “velocity” actually means

The four tiers, trader edition

Inventory advance — what it actually is

What makes velocity go up

What pulls it down

Why we don’t show you the score directly

What lenders see vs what you see

Next

Bills

The Partner Portal

​What “velocity” actually means

​The four tiers, trader edition

​Inventory advance — what it actually is

​What makes velocity go up

​What pulls it down

​Why we don’t show you the score directly

​What lenders see vs what you see

​Next

Bills

The Partner Portal

What “velocity” actually means

The four tiers, trader edition

Inventory advance — what it actually is

What makes velocity go up

What pulls it down

Why we don’t show you the score directly

What lenders see vs what you see

Next