Embedded consumer financing in a marketplace with more than 1M products
About Home Credit Philippines
Home Credit Philippines is the leading consumer finance company in the Philippines. Since 2013, it has helped more than 8 million customers buy what they need through fast, affordable loans — many of them first-time borrowers. In 2019, it became the first non-bank in the country licensed to issue credit cards.
The Home Credit App has over 8 million users. Most customers use it to manage their loans and make payments. Home Credit wanted to make it much more than that.
The Challenge
Home Credit wanted to turn its app into something customers open because they want to shop - not just manage a loan. But they knew their customers well. Filipinos, especially when buying high value electronics also want to see and touch a product before they commit. They want to talk to a salesperson.
An online-only marketplace wasn’t going to work. Home Credit needed a platform where customers could browse, research and get excited with shopping - then find a nearby store to go to buy in-person with a point-of-sale loan OR go home and finish the loan application.
To do that, they needed a marketplace that could:
Handle millions of users browsing a catalogue of more than one million products
Show which retail partners stocked each product along with their in-store price and location
Give the Home Credit team easy tools to run seasonal promotions, sales events and featured collections
Connect Home Credit’s own lending platform for both in-app and in-store loan applications
Building all of this from scratch would take years. Home Credit needed a solid platform they could start with and shape to their needs.
Unmatched Out-Of-The-Box Functionality
The Home Credit team did a thorough analysis of Arcadier’s marketplace platform -
Frantisek Hasara, Home Credit Philippines Technical Team Lead,
“With Arcadier’s capability to provide the best out-of-the-box functionality and solutions, we are confident that we can work collaboratively to design, customise, and integrate their solutions to match the vision of our product.
We at Home Credit Philippines are excited to partner with Arcadier for this project to further develop and organise our web marketplace and provide our Filipino consumers with a seamless experience when using our mobile application.”
A Unified Catalogue of Over One Million Products
At the heart of the marketplace is a single product catalogue covering more than one million consumer electronics, white goods, and appliances. Every product has a consistent listing — specs, images, and a reference price — regardless of which retailer stocks it.
This makes browsing feel clean and reliable. A customer searching for a refrigerator sees a well-organised set of options — not a mess of different listings with inconsistent details. The catalogue is what everything else is built on.
Because the catalogue is so large, Home Credit upgraded to Arcadier's ElasticSearch integration. This gives customers fast, accurate keyword and lexical search across over a million products — so they can find what they're looking for quickly, even with a broad or partial search term.
Collections Module - Promotions without a Dev Team
Electronics retail runs on campaigns. Back-to-school, holiday sales, brand launches — Home Credit needed to move quickly when these moments came around. They used Arcadier's Collections Module heavily, building promotional pages and carousels entirely through the Admin interface — no developer needed for each campaign.
Home Credit’s marketing and merchandising team could create a featured collection, add products, set sale pricing, and push it to a homepage carousel or a dedicated landing page — all without raising a tech ticket. That kind of speed matters when a promotion has a short window.
In a lending context, this is especially powerful. When a customer sees a product featured with messaging like 'as low as ₱999 for 12 months', the purchase feels more reachable. That shift in perception drives clicks, and clicks drive loan applications.
Consolidated Front End Management System
Home Credit has a large marketing team producing promotions, content and designs across their different departments. Arcadier’s headless architecture gave their marketing technology team the opportunity to consolidate the front end of all their digital assets into one enterprise Content Management System, bringing about more efficient workflows, sharing of assets and greater brand and design consistencies. The transition was swift and smooth. Arcadier continued to power the marketplace engine behind the scenes.
What This Means for Financial Institutions
Home Credit's marketplace isn't a standard online shop. It's about a bridge between browsing on a phone and buying in a store OR online — built around how the customer wants to shop. That's a real customer focus that changed the trajectory of their app usage and overall success in terms of financing applications and loan size.
For any financial institution thinking about a marketplace, this is a useful model. A marketplace is a great place to create the discovery and purchase intent - finishing with an embedded financing option to satisfy the customer’s desire to own.
For more information about the full implementation and deployment - get in touch. We’d be happy to talk through how your requirements might be similar.
