In emerging markets, this can be a particularly challenging setback, as migrating to or building a new system can come with serious costs and resource demands.
But what if your core system didn’t need to bring undue burden onto your business and customers?
SaaS providers, like Oradian, have led the charge toward a cloud-native future for banking systems. With a cloud core, you can scale your financial operations as needed, even in dynamic markets with more complex customer needs and evolving regulatory requirements.
The challenge of downtime when modernising legacy banking systems
Upgrading a core banking system is an essential process for any financial institution facing scalability issues. Reliable banking services are a must for retaining customers and building brand trust. At the same time, banking services that experience frequent outages or unreliable connections can quickly turn consumers in these newer markets away, onto the apps of competitors.
Looking at the growing Nigerian market as an example, the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) expressed concerns in 2024 over the impact of ongoing disruptions to banking services across the country. The FCCPC committed to improving banking service quality, stating that a failure to improve would result in further actions to confirm compliance.
What the situation in Nigeria reveals to us is that reducing downtime and ensuring service continuity are key factors not just for winning customer loyalty in emerging markets but also for maintaining operational resilience in the face of mounting regulatory pressures.
FairMoney, one of Africa’s leading digital banks, improved its uptime to a rate of 99.9% with the help of Oradian. Read the case study here.
Addressing the build or buy dilemma
Choosing whether to build or buy a core banking system is of great debate among banking executives.
Both offer advantages and drawbacks for financial institutions in terms of scalability and customisation. Deciding whether to buy an out-of-the-box core or build a highly specialised system in-house can cause tension between decision makers. A CTO, for example, may believe in the capabilities of their technological teams to deliver a new core while a CFO may be more concerned with the costs of upfront investment and long-term maintenance.
When you crunch the numbers, a cloud core comes out on top in terms of both its ability to scale and its cost-effectiveness over time. The key is finding a cloud-native core banking system that can offer both out-of-the-box functionality for businesses with an immediate need for increased scalability support and customisability for institutions with existing technology and development teams.
“With technology, you’re able to scale faster without having to roll-out additional branches, so I think the investment in technology isn’t a cost-saving strategy, but a scale-maximisation strategy. When we’re thinking about the investment in technology, we’re not thinking about the cheaper solution but about which solution will help us to grow the fastest.”
– Rajan Uttamchandani, CEO of Esquire Financing
One cost advantage of choosing the cloud for your core is the more flexible pricing model. Building a new system entirely in-house requires substantial upfront investment in both the technologies to support a new infrastructure and the talent needed to maintain them, not to mention a significant amount of potential downtime as old systems and data are migrated to a new solution, without a tried and tested approach.
Comparatively, a cloud-native core comes ready to implement and use, often offering custom pricing to match your operational needs. One survey found that the cloud’s “pay for what you use” model can result in 30% to 40% saved in upfront investment costs. You also gain the peace of mind that the partner you are working with has experience successfully undertaking such migrations.
Ideally, you should opt for a solution like Oradian’s Instafin platform, which grants you a developer-friendly experience and multiple configuration options according to your developmental preferences. While Oradian’s platform works without additional coding, you can select and deploy a custom set of core modules, as well as build bespoke services with custom fields.
How Oradian’s Instafin Core Banking System tackles downtime
Reducing your downtime when modernising your banking system is critical for increasing revenue. The more uptime you can offer to customers, the greater your retention rates will be, something that is of utmost necessity when growing a business in emerging markets.
Instafin, Oradian’s core banking system for financial institutions, minimises downtime from the very beginning of implementation.
Our platform offers a scalable system hosted securely in the cloud and accessible from anywhere, increasing your geographic and demographic reach. Plus, we bring years of experience tailoring our banking core to the needs of dynamic markets like those seen in the Philippines, Nigeria, and Indonesia.
Take the Philippines as an example. Bank stability in the region is highly varied, with few banks breaching a 98% uptime rate. Despite this, RAFI Micro Finance Inc — a microfinance company in the Philippines — managed to achieve an uptime of 99.944% in the same period.
How? Through partnership with Oradian.
Oradian’s core banking platform gave RAFI the flexible scalability combined with the operational resilience it needed to implement a new system quickly without subjecting its existing customers to long wait periods, downtime, or limited access to services.
Part of what makes the Instafin core system powerful for institutions in emerging markets is Oradian’s experience with different types of migrations. We only use our in-house and highly experienced, on the ground implementation teams to complete a migration to Oradian to guarantee that the exact specifications and needs of each client are met to a tee.
Oradian can do more than just improve your uptime rate. With our platform, you can create and launch new financial products with tremendous speed, just like our fintech customer, Salmon.
“Oradian offers a vital combination of flexible, scalable, best-in-class technology and comprehensive in-market customer support and expertise that enables us to drive growth, scale rapidly, and boost our performance. This is an essential recipe for remaining competitive in an increasingly crowded fintech landscape.” – George Chesakov, CEO of Salmon
Benefit from the Cloud with Oradian
Oradian’s core banking platform keeps your system online and up-to-date at all times.
Accessible from anywhere, our cloud-native solution offers a mix of customisation options to match your development needs and resources. You can use our platform straight out of the box, or you can configure it to your heart’s desire to achieve a truly tailored core banking solution.
One of our guarantees to you is zero downtime thanks to our blue/green deployment method, allowing you to experiment with your system in a separate development environment without disrupting the current system and its user experience for customers.
