Want to launch faster without needing to rebuild your entire core?
To some, this may sound like an obvious dream, after all, who doesn’t want to be first-to-market? But despite the obvious desirability of moving quickly, many banks and financial institutions are bottlenecked by legacy systems, rigid, outdated processes, and the belief that you need to overhaul your entire core just to launch a single product.
But what if you didn’t?
What if instead of overhauling your entire core system in one go, you could leverage a smarter, lower-risk approach borrowed from a strategy popularised by McKinsey: launch something new on a separate stack, move fast, and prove value without disrupting what already works.
We explore what this strategy and how you can leverage it to launch new products in this article.
Why launching new products on legacy systems slows you down
Most banks still rely on legacy core systems built for stability, not agility. These systems are monolithic, heavily customised, and notoriously difficult to change, which can, in theory, be fine when you’re maintaining existing products. But when it’s time to launch something new the cracks really begin to show.
New product ideas often get trapped in a maze of vendor dependencies and rigid processes. Even the smallest configuration change can set off a chain reaction, where you end up spending weeks waiting for vendor approval, expensive change requests, manual testing windows, and system-wide downtime just to push one update.
With many traditional core providers, you’re not in control of your own roadmap, you’re stuck in theirs. Your timelines get dictated by their release schedule, their backlog, and their priorities, not yours. That means the difference between launching in weeks and launching in a year often comes down to whether your vendor “has capacity” to make the change.
According to research by Oracle, banks using traditional architectures experience product launch cycles that are 6 to 18 months longer than their cloud-native peers. Meanwhile, fintech challengers, often operating on leaner, more flexible platforms, can ship updates in 3 to 6 months, if not faster.
The result is that traditional businesses are missing revenue, frustrating their product teams, and watching the gap widen between what customers want and what their infrastructure can deliver. Fintech challengers, on the other hand, are pushing products to market faster, capturing attention, and winning over customers who value speed and responsiveness.
This presents a major strategic problem: when your system architecture can’t keep pace with your growth goals, you’re handing market share to your competitors. And once that market share is gone, the revenue that comes with it is gone too, often for good.
The speedboat strategy: moving fast without rebuilding an entire tanker
There’s a great strategy for release popularised by McKinsey. It goes a little like the following.
If your core system is the tanker (solid, slow, and hard to turn) then the modern solution isn’t to rebuild the entire ship, it’s to launch a speedboat alongside it.
With this concept, banks and financial institutions run a new product line, customer segment, or service layer on a separate, more agile core platform without needing to overhaul their entire infrastructure.
Think of it like this: rather than attempting a high-risk, multi-year rebuild in one move, you start by running a high-impact product—like your first digital-only loan, SME line, or embedded finance service—on a modern, cloud-native platform like Oradian. This is your fast track way to proving value, validating the new architecture, and creating the foundation to migrate the rest of your business with far less risk and disruption.
That means you retain full control, avoid disrupting existing systems, and you get to test the agility of a modern infrastructure in real market conditions without betting the entire bank on a single move.
It’s a strategic decision, not a technical one. And it’s how financial institutions across Southeast Asia and Africa are launching faster, testing smarter, and building a competitive edge into their operations without taking unnecessary risks.
The benefits of launching new products in this way
By running new products or services on a cloud-native platform like Oradian, institutions are gaining a strategic lever to compete more effectively.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
Faster time to market
Launching a new loan product or entering a new segment doesn’t have to take 12–18 months. With pre-built functionality, API-ready integrations, and flexible configuration, Oradian enables teams to move from idea to market in a fraction of the time, often in just weeks.
Reduced complexity and risk
Building new functionality directly into your existing legacy core increases complexity and often requires invasive changes. On the other hand, spinning up a product on a platform like Oradian isolates that risk, so your team can experiment faster without putting your entire business at risk.
Built-in compliance and auditing
When your new product is running on infrastructure already designed for multi-market regulatory compliance, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel for every change, which reduces both your cost to launch and your compliance risk.
Easier iteration and scale
Launching on Oradian gives you access to real-time reporting, cloud-native scalability, and modular architecture from day one. That means you can tweak, update, and scale your offering as customer behaviour evolves without massive technical debt dragging you down.
This approach turns your institution into a portfolio of experiments, each one de-risked, faster to launch, and easier to scale if successful.
Build faster, smarter, and without the baggage
You don’t need to overhaul your entire infrastructure to innovate.
By launching new products with a cloud-native system built for speed, scale, and adaptability, you can break out of legacy constraints without compromising your day-to-day operations.
At Oradian, we’ve helped leading financial institutions across Southeast Asia and Africa launch standalone products, test new business lines, and enter new markets, all without needing to rebuild their core from scratch or depend on a legacy system that is dragging them down.
Whether you’re a fintech looking to achieve astronomical growth, or a traditional institution wanting to explore new segments, you need a way to innovate without risking your stability, and we can help you get that.
Your next product doesn’t have to wait, and you don’t have to build another tanker…you just need the right speedboat.
📎 Learn how Oradian helps institutions launch faster by booking a call with us today.
