Why your 2026 user growth target is really a core banking decision

I’ve been in enough boardrooms across Nigeria, the Philippines, and Indonesia to recognise the pattern: leadership sets ambitious user growth targets, such as requesting double the active customers, triple lending volume, or capturing market share from fintech competitors. To achieve those targets, the marketing team gets a bigger budget, the product team gets put under pressure to ship faster, and digital transformation becomes the rallying cry.

And then, six months later, the same leadership team is asking why growth has stalled.

In these circumstances, the uncomfortable truth is this: your 2026 user growth target isn’t a marketing problem, it’s a core banking system problem.

I’m not saying marketing doesn’t matter—it absolutely does. But I’ve watched too many institutions burn through acquisition budgets while their legacy cores quietly strangle every growth lever they’re trying to pull. Because you can’t acquire users faster than your systems can onboard them, you can’t retain users when your platform breaks under peak load, and you can’t iterate on products when every change requires a six-month vendor implementation cycle.

The institutions that hit their 2026 growth targets will be the ones that treated their core banking decision as a strategic growth enabler, not just an IT procurement exercise.

**The growth bottleneck nobody wants to talk about **

Here’s a scenario I hear constantly: a digital bank in Manila wants to launch a new small business loan product. The product team has validated demand, marketing is ready to launch campaigns, and the business case is solid. But the timeline is somewhere between nine months and a year.

Why?

Because every parameter, from interest rates to repayment schedules to fee structures, requires custom development from their core banking vendor.

So by the time the product launches, the market opportunity has already shifted. A competitor has already launched something similar and the moment is gone.

Or consider this: a Nigerian fintech scales their marketing spend to acquire gig workers during a high-intent period. Thousands of users download the app, start onboarding… and the system buckles. Customers experience low response times, failed verifications, and eventually, users abandon the flow and leave one-star reviews. The cost-per-funded-user spikes because half the acquired users never complete signup.

This is what happens when institutions try to drive growth on infrastructure that was never designed for it.

The hard reality is that most mid-size financial institutions in dynamic markets are trying to compete in 2026 on core banking systems built 15 to 20 years ago. These systems were designed for branch banking, batch processing, and quarterly product releases. They were never built for real-time payments, instant loan decisions, continuous product experimentation, or the kind of data visibility that modern banking growth strategies require.

And no amount of marketing spend or digital channel investment can compensate for that fundamental constraint that sits at the base of their company infrastructure.

**What actual user growth requires from your core **

Let me break down what’s actually needed to hit aggressive user growth targets in 2026, and why each requirement traces back to your core banking platform.

**Speed to market on new products **

When instant payment systems are capable of processing over 100 million transactions monthly in the Philippines and users expect instant everything, no bank or lender can afford quarterly product release cycles. Competitors—especially digital-native fintechs—are launching product variations in weeks, testing with real users, and iterating based on actual behaviour.

This requires a core that’s configurable without vendor dependency. Product managers must be able to adjust interest rates, fee structures, and eligibility rules through admin interfaces. Engineering teams need to be able to inject custom logic through APIs or extensibility frameworks when configuration isn’t enough. If launching a simple product variation requires a vendor scoping call, a development queue, and a deployment window months out, that firm is already losing out.

**Real-time processing and reliability **

Your platform must work when salaries land, when bills are due, when business opportunities arise. A user who cannot access their salary on payday because your app is down will switch providers that same week and an SME owner who cannot process a payment because your platform failed will find an alternative before the day is over.

It is essential to be able to deliver real-time transaction processing, instant balance updates, and immediate loan disbursement. Batch-oriented cores that process transactions overnight cannot support the instant experiences users now expect as standard. And in markets where trust in digital banking is still being built, reliability is a fundamental growth driver.

**Data visibility for intelligent decision-making **

Here’s a question I ask every prospective client: can your marketing team see, right now, which acquisition channels are producing users who fund accounts and transact? Can your product team identify which features drive engagement versus which are ignored? Can your risk team spot early warning signals of portfolio deterioration before it becomes a crisis?

Most can’t answer yes to any of those questions because their core banking system doesn’t expose data in a usable form. Different teams pull user counts from different systems and get different numbers. By the time reports surface insights, users have already churned.

Growth in 2026 requires real-time access to transaction data, user behaviour, and product performance. You need clean, queryable data that analysts can work with directly, you need event streams that capture actions across channels, and you need the ability to operationalise those insights by being able to do things like trigger campaigns, adjust credit limits, and personalise experiences, all based on what the data tells you.

If your core treats data as something locked inside vendor-controlled schemas that require weeks of professional services to extract, you cannot compete with institutions that have real-time data pipelines powering every decision.

**Scalability without manual intervention **

When you run an acquisition campaign that works better than expected, or when you go viral on social media, or when a partnership suddenly drives thousands of new signups…what happens to your systems?

If the answer involves emergency calls to your infrastructure team, manual scaling procedures, or degraded performance, then you have a problem. Cloud-native cores scale elastically. That means that the platform can effectively handle things like transaction volume spiking 10x on salary day or a marketing campaign driving unexpected user acquisition.

Legacy cores hosted in someone else’s data centre—what I call cloud-washed systems—cannot do this. They carry all the limitations of old architecture with none of the advantages of genuine cloud-native design.

**The digital-native advantage compounds over time **

What frustrates me most about this situation is that the gap between legacy-constrained institutions and digital-native competitors isn’t static, it compounds.

Digital-native platforms built on modern cores can launch products in weeks; that means they can run more experiments, learn faster, and double down on what works. They can see user behaviour in real time and optimise accordingly and they can handle growth without infrastructure becoming a constraint.

During that same period, institutions on legacy cores are still waiting for their vendor to scope the last product change, reconciling user data across disconnected systems, and explaining to the board why an important app went down during peak usage.

The institutions winning in dynamic markets today are truly the ones with the infrastructure to move at market speed.

**Why this matters more in 2026 than ever before **

The competitive dynamics in markets like Nigeria, the Philippines, and Indonesia have fundamentally shifted. Digital wallets and app-based banks are now the default choice for millions of people. Mobile internet penetration has reached 80-90% in Indonesia. Instant payment rails are processing billions in value monthly across these markets.

If your app is slow, if onboarding is painful, and if you can’t offer the products users want when they want them, then there are dozens of alternatives just a tap away. Research shows that 84% of banking users would switch providers for better insights, while 33% would switch over an outage.

In this environment, “build it and they will come” is dead. Growth belongs to institutions that are closest to the user and being close to the user requires infrastructure that doesn’t get in the way.

**What to do about all this **

If you’re setting user growth targets for 2026, here are the honest questions you need to ask about your core banking platform:

• Can we launch new products in weeks, not quarters?

• Can we handle 10x volume spikes without degradation?

• Do our teams have real-time access to user and transaction data?

• Can we integrate with partners, payment rails, and third-party services without months of custom development?

• Are we genuinely cloud-native, or just cloud-washed?

These may feel like IT questions, but they are actually business questions that determine whether your growth targets are realistic or aspirational fiction.

**The institutions that will win in 2026 **

The financial institutions that will hit their 2026 user growth targets and sustain that growth beyond are those that recognise a fundamental truth: infrastructure is strategy.

They’re treating core banking modernisation as the foundation that enables everything else: faster product launches, better user experiences, data-driven decision-making, and the ability to scale without breaking. They are:

• Demanding genuine cloud-native architecture, not cloud-washed legacy systems.

• Insisting on API-first platforms that give their teams autonomy.

• Requiring direct data access so analytics and product teams can move quickly.

• Choosing vendors who understand that the core banking platform exists to enable growth, not constrain it.

Your 2026 user growth target is sitting in a boardroom presentation right now, the real question is whether your core banking platform can actually deliver it.

If you’re planning to double active users, triple lending volume, or capture market share from digital-native competitors and you’re doing it on infrastructure built for a different era, I’d encourage you to revisit that plan. Because growth without the right foundation is just a more expensive way to discover your limitations.