Asia-Pacific is the fastest-growing embedded finance market in the world, forecast to grow at nearly 26% a year to 2031, and embedded finance drew more than $4.3 billion of disclosed fintech funding in Southeast Asia in a single year. 

One 2026 deployment of embedded finance across five markets produced a 21.5% improvement in conversion and a 25.3% increase in revenue per visitor, and marketplaces that build credit into checkout consistently report conversion uplifts in the mid teens. Gojek already offers credit to drivers and small businesses through GoPay, and Grab does the same through GrabFin, reaching gig workers and small traders who rarely appear in a traditional credit file. Fintechs including Akulaku, Kredivo and Atome are embedding credit directly into retail and online checkout journeys across the region. 

The truth is clear: distributing credit through merchant platforms and e-commerce marketplaces is an excellent way for SEA’s financial institutions to tap into new growth opportunities, with loan channelling enabling businesses to grow their lending solutions faster by connecting into a broader financial ecosystem.  

With loan channelling, you can:  

• Expand lending through partners 

• Access new customers 

• Bring new propositions to market  

All without building every capability yourself.  

Banks in SEA are clearly moving quickly on this. But the real deciding factor for you is... 

Can your infrastructure move fast enough to capture this opportunity?  

The good news is that research on the region points to collaboration as the deciding factor, ahead of standalone scale. 

Currently, the market is arranging itself into three groups:  

• Platforms that own the checkout are lending through it 

• Credit fintechs that are scaling on bank funding partnerships 

• Banks and digital banks are using their balance sheets and licences to hold on to the customer 

Sounds great, right? But how quickly can you tap into this market opportunity by orchestrating a lending ecosystem?  

The answer likely depends on your infrastructure. After all, leveraging loan channelling means you need to loop in decisioning tools, AI agents, funding sources, and distribution partners, with each of these partners and technologies demanding different products, pricing and fee structures, eligibility, limits, workflows, reporting capabilities, and customer experiences.  

Can your product engine manage that kind of project today? If the thought of launching a new loan channelling product excites you when you think of the revenue opportunities but fills you with dread when you consider the infrastructure implications, this article is for you. In it, we outline why loan channelling could be your next big growth product and how to launch it in under three months by using a product engine, also known as a mini-core.  

Benefits and use cases of loan channelling  

You don’t need to build every lending capability from scratch. Here are some of the ways you can use loan channelling to connect into high-growth ecosystems.  

Embedded lending through distribution partners 

Offer lending through marketplaces, merchant platforms, super apps and fintech partners, allowing institutions to reach customers through new channels. 

Bank–fintech loan channelling partnerships 

Fintechs originate customers while banks provide funding and/or book the loans, allowing both sides to expand their addressable market. 

Alternative-data and AI-powered credit decisioning 

Connect operational and external data with AI/ML models, credit decisioning and fraud tools to improve underwriting, pricing and portfolio management. 

Quickly launch partner-specific lending products 

Configure different products, pricing, eligibility rules and journeys for different partners and adapt them as market opportunities change. 

How to roll out loan channelling without your core getting in the way  

Launching partner-specific credit doesn’t require replacing your legacy core system. Instead, augmenting your core with a product engine, or mini-core, means you can keep your existing core in place as your system of record to handle foundational accounting tasks. Then, alongside it, you deploy a product engine; a lightweight, standalone software layer that acts as your system of innovation. 

The product engine handles all partner-specific credit rules, customer lifecycles and transaction ledgers, giving your team a governed, three-level framework to launch and iterate products at speed.  

No Code 

Product, risk, and compliance teams configure rates, fees, eligibility rules, and repayment schedules in minutes without writing software or opening vendor tickets. 

Low Code 

Engineering teams connect distribution partners, eKYC tools, alternative data feeds, and local payment rails using sub-100ms API response times. Integrations take days instead of months. 

Your Code  

Developers build proprietary, highly differentiated product logic through a governed extension framework, assisted by integrated AI tooling to accelerate authoring. 

Benefits of a product engine:  

• Faster time-to-market: Go from initial agreement to live partner rollout in under 90 days. 

• Lower customer acquisition cost: Acquire pre-qualified users directly through partner channels instead of spending heavily on direct acquisition. 

• Higher loan volumes: Scale throughput quickly across multiple distribution channels simultaneously. 

• Zero downtime risk: Innovate on the product engine without risking the stability of your primary core system. 

• Greater control: Shift ownership of product releases back to your internal teams with no vendor roadmaps, no ticket backlogs. 

Oradian: the product engine you need to launch and iterate quickly  

Ready to tap into the growth potential of loan channelling? Oradian’s product engine provides the open, API-driven, and AI-ready banking infrastructure you need to capture ecosystem growth without infrastructure friction in Southeast Asia. 

• Quickly access ecosystems: Over 750+ native API endpoints enable your engineering team to plug into distribution partners, payment rails, and third-party data providers in days. 

• Adapt quickly: Position your lending infrastructure around growth and adaptability rather than passive administrative record-keeping. 

• Build on ai-ready infrastructure: True AI lending requires structured operational data. Oradian brings together direct database access, custom code, and real-time APIs so external AI models can feed risk decisions straight into your credit engine. 

Built on infrastructure supporting 99.98% uptime, Oradian powers high-volume lending operations across our markets. For example, with Oradian, Salmon achieved a 200x increase in monthly lending throughput and drove +648% loan portfolio growth in 12 months while FairMoney processes over 8,000 loan applications daily on a single deployment. 

Stop letting legacy core constraints cap your commercial strategy. You don’t need a multi-year core transformation to launch your next distribution partnership. You just need Oradian.  

Questions to ask yourself as a head of product 

If you’re a head of product, here are six practical questions to ask yourself and your product engine vendor to help you make the right choice here. 

Question: Who owns product changes?  

Best answer: Your product team. Rates, fees, eligibility and schedules are configuration, done in-house, under approval controls. There should be no vendor tickets and no release cycles required. 

Question: How much engineering does each new partner take?  

Best answer: Days of API work, and it falls with every partner because the patterns repeat. The first integration should be the longest one you’ll ever do. 

Question: Will the integrations stay stable?  

Best answer: Yes. The APIs are versioned and backwards compatible, so what you built for partner one still works when partner five goes live. 

Question: Can we differentiate partner products?  

Best answer: Product teams configure standard differences, engineering connects partners through APIs, and Custom Code handles differentiated logic.  

Question: Can we launch without destabilising the existing core?  

Best answer: Yes, because your current core isn’t involved. The product engine runs alongside it. Your existing products, your ledger and your daily operations aren’t impacted. 

Launch lending products quickly with Oradian  

A product engine can enable you to launch lending products quickly into the market. Contact vanda.jiraesk@oradian.com to start launching partner-specific lending products without your existing core serving as a bottleneck.