Analysts estimate that the number of end-clients with a digital bank account could grow by 70% across a pool of the 28 countries they surveyed. This represents a major opportunity for banks and lenders looking to scale into new regions or grow their user base across their existing market. But any scaling bank or lender needs one absolutely essential thing: a trustworthy core banking platform that can support their growth.
However, despite this opportunity, 90-95% of Southeast Asian banks are still operating on legacy, on-premise cores, despite modern cores reducing operational and transaction costs by 30-50%.
Whether you’ve tried to build your own platform or have shopped about from those available on the market, there’s a strong chance your platform implementation or core banking modernisation project has been considered an IT project, which has led to the business case focusing on cost reduction, technical debt, or regulatory compliance, with the conversation staying in the CTO’s office.
This is a missed opportunity.
Core banking modernisation projects should be a commercial decision led by revenue and growth objectives. When positioned correctly, this unlocks new markets, products, and customer segments that were previously unprofitable or impossible to serve.
This playbook shows how banks and lenders can turn core modernisation from a cost centre into a revenue driver. It is written for CIOs and CTOs who are tired of carrying a technology project that is really about business transformation as well as CEOs and founders who are looking for a clear path from investment to return and want to enable growth that doesn’t break operations.
Why revenue rarely features in core modernisation business cases
Three factors keep core modernisation framed as a technical problem:
Core platform vendor positioning
Traditional core providers sell replacement, not capability. The conversation defaults to system swap-outs, migration timelines, and risk mitigation.
IT ownership
When technology teams own the business case, they optimise for what they can measure: uptime, performance, maintenance costs. Revenue impact requires commercial input that often arrives too late.
Fear of failure
Boards and CFOs have seen core projects overrun, stall, or damage operations. The safest pitch emphasises stability and compliance, rather than what scaling banks and lenders need: stable, controlled, sustainable growth.
The result is that many banks and lenders invest millions in modernisation without a clear view of how it will generate returns.
The commercial case for core modernisation
A modern, cloud-native core banking platform built for scale and capable of activating AI enables three categories of revenue that other systems, whether built or bought, cannot support profitably:
New customer segments
Many cores were built for branch banking at scale. Product configuration is rigid, onboarding is manual, and pricing structures assume high-value, low-volume customers.
Banks and lenders serving microfinance, SME lending, or embedded banking customers often hit immediate constraints, finding they may struggle when minimum balance requirements cannot be lowered and customer acquisition costs stay high because operational costs per account remain fixed.
A core like Oradian changes this: when account setup, KYC workflows, and product configuration are automated and API-driven, you can profitably serve customers that would lose money on another system.
This can help banks and lenders expand downmarket or into adjacencies without degrading their margins.
New products and faster time to market
Product launches on many cores follow a predictable pattern: six to twelve months from concept to live, heavy reliance on vendor support, limited configurability, and high testing overhead. By the time a product reaches its market, customer needs have shifted or a competitor has moved faster, particularly in dynamic markets where fintech competitors are shipping at an increasingly fast pace.
That’s why many scaling banks and lenders choose to leverage cores like Oradian, which decouple product logic from core operations. Product managers configure lending terms, interest calculations, fees, and eligibility rules without engineering dependencies. APIs allow rapid integration with payment rails, credit bureaus, and third-party data sources.
This enables banks and lenders to ship more products, test faster, and capture market opportunities before they close.
Platform and embedded banking revenue
The fastest-growing banks and lenders operate as platforms, enabling fintechs, telcos, e-commerce players, and service providers to offer financial products under their own brands.
This requires infrastructure that most cores cannot deliver. Partner onboarding must be self-service, product configurations must be isolated per partner, and reconciliation, reporting, and compliance must scale across hundreds or thousands of white-label arrangements.
When this works, revenue shifts from linear, where banks can provide one product to one customer, to exponential, with banks providing one platform to many distributors. Each partner becomes a revenue channel without corresponding operational overhead.
This ensures banks and lenders are able to generate high-margin platform fees and expand distribution without direct customer acquisition costs.
Building the commercial business case
To position core platform modernisation as a revenue decision, scaling banks and lenders need to shift from vendor-led specifications to outcome-led planning.
Step 1: Map revenue to capability gaps
Start with the revenue plan. Identify which growth targets are constrained by the current core.
Ask:
- Which customer segments are we turning away because unit economics don’t work?
- Which products have we delayed or cancelled because the core can’t support them?
- Which partnerships have stalled because onboarding or integration is too complex?
Each answer represents a revenue opportunity that modernisation can unlock.
Step 2: Quantify the opportunity cost
Many cores have hidden costs that never appear in the business case. These include:
- Lost deals: Sales teams avoid certain verticals or use cases because delivery cannot support them.
- Product delays: Time to market stretches from months to quarters, missing revenue windows.
- Manual workarounds: Operations teams build fragile processes outside the core to compensate for missing functionality.
Calculating opportunity cost makes the revenue case visible. If a modern core reduces product launch time from nine months to six weeks, the value turns up in revenue from products that can now ship before competitors respond.
Step 3: Build a phased revenue model
Core modernisation does not need to be all-or-nothing. The most successful projects are staged to deliver revenue early and reinvest returns into later phases.
A phased approach might look like:
Phase 1 (Months 1–6): Deploy new accounts and deposits module. Launch two new savings products targeting underserved segments. Target revenue: $X from 50,000 new accounts.
Phase 2 (Months 7–12): Migrate lending and payments and launch API-based partner onboarding. Target revenue: $Y from embedded lending partnerships.
Phase 3 (Months 13–18): Full platform functionality. Enable white-label banking for enterprise clients. Target revenue: $Z from platform fees.
Step 4: Assign ownership to revenue and operations leaders
If the CTO owns the business case alone, modernisation remains a technical project. Instead, if possible, commercial leaders must share accountability.
For instance, your CFO could validate revenue assumptions and model cash flow impact, while the Chief Commercial Officer could own partner and product pipeline commitments, and the COO would then confirm operational readiness and cost-to-serve improvements.
When these roles are accountable for outcomes, the project attracts the right level of board and executive attention.
Common objections and how to handle them
Even with a strong commercial case, core modernisation projects face predictable pushback from internal sources who may believe that you could build all this functionality that Oradian offers onto your existing core.
While this is technically possible, it’s also economically flawed. Custom integrations, middleware layers, and workarounds create technical debt that scales linearly with revenue and as time passes, the more customers you serve, the more fragile the system becomes. Not to mention, the countless hours required from your engineering team, who could be focusing on launching new products, or the huge sums of money paid to core platforms whose commercial models are often misaligned with fast-growing, transaction-heavy businesses. Oradian is designed, beginning to end, for the operating model banks and lenders truly need: high transaction volumes, low margins, rapid iteration, and API-first distribution.
Oradian is designed, beginning to end, for the operating model banks and lenders truly need: high transaction volumes, low margins, rapid iteration, and API-first distribution.
What successful commercial cases look like
Banks and lenders that position core modernisation as a revenue project follow a consistent pattern:
- They start with a clear growth constraint tied to revenue
- They quantify opportunity cost
- They stage delivery to generate early returns
- They assign commercial accountability to business leaders, not just IT
- They select vendors and partners whose business model aligns with theirs
The outcome is not just a better core; it is a platform that supports scaling revenue models.
Practical next steps
If you are building the business case for core modernisation, begin with three questions:
- Which parts of our revenue plan cannot be delivered on the current core?
- What is the opportunity cost of delaying modernisation by 12 months?
- Who in the business should own commercial accountability for the outcomes?
The answers will clarify whether modernisation belongs in the IT budget or the growth budget.
Ready to experience scaling with ease?
Oradian provides core banking and digital lending infrastructure for institutions operating in dynamic and emerging markets. Our platform is built to support banks, lenders, and embedded banking providers who need to move fast, scale efficiently, and manage risk across multiple markets.
If you are evaluating core modernisation and want to explore how it can drive commercial outcomes, drop vanda.jirasek@oradian.com an email and we’ll schedule in some time to show you how you can grow with ease in 2026 and beyond.
