Eight years of Lendrise: over 2 million consumer accounts – and counting

Lendrise was the first private non-financial company to provide individuals with access to their credit score and credit report, their income statement issued by the Romanian National Agency for Fiscal Administration (ANAF), and their bank account information, for any Romanian citizen or resident holding a valid Romanian ID card or passport.

An article by Nic Balaceanu, Lendrise CEO

We launched just weeks after GDPR came into force in Europe because we believed that giving consumers greater control over their own data would fundamentally reshape financial services. While many saw GDPR as another compliance exercise, we saw the beginning of a new relationship between consumers, their financial information and the institutions they choose to trust.

Eight years later, more than 2 million consumer accounts have been created across our platforms. Every day, hundreds of new consumers join our ecosystem, with peak days reaching well into the thousands, while hundreds of thousands return on a recurring basis, creating millions of trusted interactions. Trust is not built overnight. It is earned one onboarding, one consent and one customer at a time.

Our journey has continuously evolved. We started with consumer financial data, expanded into Open Banking, built Sunt.IO, one of Romania’s pioneering Autoritatea pentru Digitalizarea României -authorised digital identity platforms, and invested in digital identity, KYC and fraud prevention. Looking back, these were never separate initiatives. They are all part of the same vision that I now describe as #FinancialIdentity: combining trusted identity, consumer consent, financial data and fraud intelligence to create better experiences for consumers and better decisions for institutions.

As a founding member of Romanian Fintech Association, we have also had the privilege of contributing to the development of Romania’s fintech ecosystem and working alongside many remarkable companies that believe innovation and collaboration can modernise financial services.

Europe is now entering another important chapter with PSD2/3, eIDAS 2.0 and CCD2. For Romania, this is an opportunity that should no longer be delayed by bureaucracy, fragmented implementation or infringement procedures. We have the talent, the technology and the entrepreneurial ecosystem to become a reference market for Financial Identity, not simply a country that eventually complies with European regulation.

For Lendrise, this anniversary is not only a moment to celebrate what we have built over the past eight years. It is also the beginning of a new chapter. The trust we have earned through millions of consumer interactions gives us the foundation to expand our services for both consumers and institutional partners and transform that trust into the next generation of Financial Identity solutions.

Thank you to our customers, partners, colleagues and friends who have been part of this journey. The first eight years were about earning trust. The next eight will be about creating even more value from it.