Is getting your banking system up on the cloud on your to do list for 2025 or 2026? For many financial institutions across Southeast Asia and Africa, it’s already ticked.
In Indonesia alone, digital banking transactions reached IDR 5,570 trillion in 2024, up 10.8% year-on-year, driven by mobile-first customer behaviour, with Gen Z playing a pivotal role in this shift. Meanwhile, banks in the Philippines are going beyond experimentation: UnionBank migrated over 1,000 workloads to a fully cloud-native core, and Cantilan Bank became one of the first rural banks to receive BSP approval for a fully cloud-based system. In Nigeria, economists forecast ₦30.2 trillion in economic value could be unlocked by speeding up the adoption of cloud computing over the next decade.
But what many of the most successful adopters of cloud know is that not all “cloud” solutions are created equal and for institutions making long-term decisions about their core banking infrastructure, the difference between cloud-enabled and cloud-native could mean the difference between evolving with the market of falling behind it.
So, what’s the difference between cloud-enabled and cloud-native and how can you protect your business from cloudwashing?
What is the difference between cloud-enabled and cloud-native?
A cloud-enabled platform is one that was originally built to run on-premise, but has since been retrofitted to run in a cloud environment; this is usually done through a lift-and-shift approach. Think of it as hosting legacy infrastructure on someone else’s servers. It might look like a cloud but it’s still monolithic under the hood, often slow to update, and typically reliant on vendor-managed upgrades, workarounds for integrations, and limited scalability.
By contrast, a cloud-native platform is purpose-built for the cloud from day one. It’s architected using modern principles: microservices, containerization, horizontal scaling, and API-first design. That means better uptime, faster deployments, real-time data sync, and far more flexibility when it comes to launching products, building integrations, or responding to regulatory changes.
When it comes to your core banking system, that distinction can define how your institution grows, adapts to the changing market, and competes in future years.
What is cloud-washing?
Cloud-washing is what happens when legacy tech vendors rebrand their software as “cloud-based” without actually rebuilding it for the cloud. It’s a marketing shortcut and for financial institutions making high-stakes infrastructure decisions, it can be a dangerous one.
These platforms might technically “run in the cloud,” but they’re often just hosted legacy systems, meaning they’re still monolithic, still hard to update, and still requiring long maintenance windows. Underneath the new branding, they’re still stuck in the same old architecture.
The problem is, if you’re buying into the promise of cloud (faster rollouts, easier scaling, better performance, and real-time flexibility) a cloud-washed solution can’t deliver on that promise. So all you end up with is the complexity of on-prem systems and none of the benefits of true cloud-native design.
According to Capgemini, while 91% of banks and insurers have begun their cloud transformation, the majority haven’t moved beyond surface-level adoption, opting for lift-and-shift strategies that preserve outdated architecture under a “cloud” label. These institutions are cloud-washed in everything but performance. They’re still dealing with long deployment cycles, rigid integrations, and limited scalability, while believing they’ve already modernised.
Why should this difference matter to your financial institution?
A cloud-washed, retrofitted core might tick the cloud box on your digital transformation roadmap, but it won’t give you the speed, flexibility, or scalability your institution actually needs to compete. You’ll still be dealing with long release cycles, still depending on vendor timelines, and still patching instead of progressing.
And while you’re waiting on workarounds, the market is moving.
Cloud-native systems help deliver:
- Faster product rollout
- Real-time data sync
- Modular architecture for seamless integrations
- Built-in compliance tooling
- Horizontal scalability, out of the box
And many more benefits. Choosing a truly cloud-native core banking system defines how fast you move, how far you scale, and how well you adapt to what comes next.
The cost of getting it wrong
For a lot of financial institutions, the warning signs of a cloud-washed core don’t show up in the pitch deck, they show up months (or years) later as missed revenue targets and shrinking market share.
Choosing a cloud-enabled platform when you need a cloud-native one ties up your internal teams in vendor workarounds, version upgrades, brittle integrations, and support escalations that should’ve never existed in the first place. You end up spending valuable time maintaining infrastructure instead of moving product.
Here’s what it really costs:
- It taking months instead of weeks to launch a new product
- Requiring more developer time spent on patching and manual fixes
- Experiencing delays in compliance updates and feature enhancements
- Paying for legacy infrastructure you can’t actually use
- More customer churn as a result of less innovation and slower experiences
A cloud-enabled system might look cheaper on paper until you factor in the opportunity cost of slower go-to-market and the internal fatigue of working around an architecture that was never designed to flex.
This is what makes cloud-washing so risky: you think you’re modernising, when really, you’re locking yourself into the same legacy constraints…just hosted elsewhere.
How to spot “fake” clouds in the wild
Not every platform that claims to be cloud is truly built for it. If you’re evaluating a core banking provider, spotting cloud-washing early can save you months of wasted effort and years of regret. Here’s what to look for:
- Monolithic architecture: If the platform doesn’t use microservices, expect slow releases and rigid dependencies.
- Version-based upgrades: If you need to schedule or pay for large system upgrade rollouts, it’s not truly SaaS.
- Limited or closed APIs: If integrations require vendor mediation or custom adapters, that’s a red flag.
- No usage-based pricing: If pricing doesn’t reflect scale or resource consumption, it’s probably lift-and-shift.
- Vendor-managed deployments: If you’re relying on their team every time something goes live, you’re not in control.
Ask providers to walk you through their release pipeline, ask what happens when a regulatory update hits, and ask how quickly you can roll out a new product line, as well as which parts of the process you’ll actually own.
How Oradian delivers true cloud-native core banking
Oradian is cloud-native, built from the ground up to give modern financial institutions the speed, control, and scalability they need to grow.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
- Launch new products, iterate fast, and scale without touching the core. Add, configure, or retire modules based on business needs, not vendor timelines.
- Cloud-native architecture provides the real-time data access, scalability, and modular integrations that are essential for deploying AI-powered tools, like credit scoring models, chatbots, and fraud detection, without disrupting your core operations.
- Build what you need, your way, with no-code, low-code, and custom-code flexibility.
- Open APIs and real-time push notifications make it easy to connect mobile apps, CRMs, chatbots, payments, scoring tools, so you have the tools you need to move fast and stay agile.
- With blue/green deployment options, real-time monitoring, and built-in support for regional regulatory requirements, Oradian helps you stay compliant without slowing down.
- From microfinance leaders in the Philippines to regional banks in Indonesia and high-growth lenders in Nigeria, Oradian is built for institutions operating in fast-moving environments with dynamic regulations.
As one Oradian customer put it, Oradian provides “the beauty of being a cloud-hosted, ready-made solution, but with our ability to develop it further using modern software development techniques. It makes it so much more future-proof in terms of how you build your IT organisation.”
