Going through a fuss just to pay can be enough to turn anyone away from a purchase, and it does, with global checkout abandonment rates at around 70%.  

This 70% is a huge gap in captured revenue for merchants and a prime opportunity for financial institutions ready to step in. 

That is where BNPL comes in. 

Whether a customer is standing in a shop or staring at an online cart, the pitch is simple: you can pay for your purchase in instalments and you can set that plan up today, right now.  

Sounds great, right? The only problem here is that merchants and the financial institutions that back them must make a borrowing decision in seconds, while the customer waits, or they lose the sale.  

And most legacy cores simply aren’t set up for that sort of product launch.  

That’s okay, though. Because if you want to access this BNPL revenue growth, you can use a product engine. Here are some of the commercial numbers around BNPL as well as how your financial institution can tap into the market without completely overhauling your current core by leveraging a product engine.  

Buy-now-pay-later: SE Asia’s market leading opportunity  

Southeast Asia’s BNPL market is forecast to reach $53.2 billion by 2027, with the Philippines the fastest-growing market in the region at a projected 235% between 2024 and 2027. The Philippines and Indonesia together account for two-thirds of the region’s BNPL users, and in the Philippines more than 75% of BNPL users are millennials and Gen Z; exactly the customers every institution says it wants next. 

Indonesia, an $8.59 billion BNPL market led by Akulaku and Kredivo, has fintechs embedding credit straight into checkout journeys. And it’s no longer only B2C consumers. B2B BNPL in Indonesia is growing at 30.4% a year, on its way to $5.89 billion by 2030, serving a base of more than 60 million small businesses buying stock and paying in instalments. If your institution works with SME lending, that’s another layer to this market that you can grow with.  

Merchants want this as much as customers do, because credit at checkout produces measurable conversion uplifts, with marketplaces consistently reporting gains in the mid teens.  

Everyone involved has a reason to say yes to BNPL.  

But is your institution going to be the one providing the credit?  

What BNPL requires to function 

Behind the simple customer promise sits a demanding product: 

• Fast credit answers: Figuring out if someone can borrow money in less than a second while they wait at the checkout counter. 

• Lots of small loans: Making thousands of little payment plans every single day without breaking the system. 

• Paying the store: Giving the shop its money while taking out the right fee for each different seller. 

• Quick reminders: Checking in the very next day if a payment gets missed, because these loans are super short. 

• Custom setup per shop: Setting different rules, limits, and prices for a big store buying tech versus a small shop buying food. 

Each merchant needs a different setup. If you can’t change the rules quickly for each partner, your team spends all day fixing things by hand. 

Why legacy cores can’t scale in BNPL with you  

Old systems move slowly. They were built for a world where you’d fill out a piece of paper, a person checks it, and you get money days later. BNPL does not work like that. If your system takes minutes to say yes, the shopper will leave. Old systems are built to handle a few big loans a day, not thousands of tiny ones every hour. On top of that, every new store wants different rules. If your tech team has to rebuild the relevant engine for every single store, you simply can’t access this market quickly enough. 

The sales team signs up new stores, but the technology can’t keep up. So the whole business sits there waiting. 

Use Oradian’s product engine  

There is an answer: keep your current core as the system of record, and run the BNPL products on Oradian’s product engine alongside it, one built for exactly this type of lending. 

The division of labour works as follows: your product team configures each merchant’s variation, tenors, limits, pricing, fees, as configuration under approval controls, in hours. Your engineers connect checkouts, payment gateways, marketplaces and decisioning tools through stable, versioned APIs, across 750+ native endpoints, so the tenth merchant is faster than the first. And where a partnership needs logic nothing else has, a subsidy waterfall, a stock-finance repayment tied to daily takings, your team writes it in Custom Code, which enables low-code, no-code and your code production, giving your product team and internal engineers total control over your products, in a governed and auditable environment, with Oradian’s product engine’s AI agent helping author it. 

You must be able to make lending decisions in seconds 

And with a product engine, you can. Sub-100ms API response times are what let the credit decision live inside the checkout instead of after it. If standard credit checks give you nothing, you have to look somewhere else. A product engine pulls live customer behaviour straight from Database Access, mixes it with the merchant’s own data, and feeds your risk model. In under a second, an approval and spending limit drop back into the checkout flow. That enables you to approve buyers a traditional credit check could reject. 

Fast, but still governed  

BNPL is under more regulatory attention everywhere, and that’s working in favour of serious operators. In Indonesia, OJK’s licensing and capital requirements have removed most of the competition while increasing confidence in licensed platforms. Regulated institutions that can run BNPL under real governance are exactly who the market is being cleared for. Every product change is approved, versioned and reversible, every agreement posts to your general ledger in real time, and the audit trail remains maintained, even at large volumes. With this, you could experience results like the 99.98% uptime Oradian’s product engine customers enjoy, or results similar to one of our customer’s who processes 8,000+ loan applications a day while remaining stable. 

Book a call to launch BNPL this year with Oradian  

BNPL is how people and shops pay today. The shoppers want it, the stores want it, and the market is growing fast. Whether your bank scales with a piece of that revenue comes down to one thing: can your tech team launch this now, or are you sitting around waiting on your old system? Ready to launch buy-now-pay-later? Book a call by emailing vanda.jirasek@oradian.com to set up your product engine today.