A few years back, a good friend of mine decided to move to Germany for work. She was pretty excited—new city, new culture, and, of course, an excuse to eat more pretzels than anyone probably should. However, no one had prepared her for the “financial reset” she had to go through.
Moving from one EU country to another should feel like a seamless experience—especially in the age of free movement. And while it’s easy to move yourself or your Amazon orders across borders, your credit score? Not so much.
When she made the jump to Germany, her credit history didn’t follow. Suddenly, it didn’t matter that she had been a responsible adult with bills and credit cards back home.
Now, here I am thinking that—back then—despite all the progress the EU had made, cross-border lending was still stuck in the dark ages.
Today, things are different, thanks to big names in fintech that are actually making a difference. At this year’s edition of the UNCHAIN Festival, The Connector got to talk to Keiu Kalaus, the Chief Product Officer at Mifundo.
Mifundo has been addressing one of the biggest pain points for people moving across Europe: making sure your financial credibility doesn’t disappear just because you cross a border.
Thanks to them, European banks can see the whole picture, whether their customers are in Poland, Spain, or elsewhere in the EU. This isn’t just about convenience for people like my friend—it’s about real market expansion for banks and the financial sector at large.
The Challenges of Cross-Border Lending in the EU
Cross-border lending is not working in the European Union, where we are supposed to have free movement of people, goods, and services.
This is what Keiu Kalaus bluntly states during her interview at UNCHAIN. And she’s right. While moving from one country to another might be easy, your credit score doesn’t follow as smoothly.
Take Keiu’s own experience as an example. After living in Spain for 16 years, she returned to Estonia, excited to buy a house and settle back in her home country. The problem? When she went to the bank, her mortgage application was denied because the bank didn’t have access to her Spanish credit data.
My data was in Spain, and they didn’t have access to it.
It’s this very issue that Mifundo is solving.
But this isn’t just a customer problem—it’s also a challenge for banks.
The root cause is not the lack of data but how fragmented and poorly managed it is. With over 50 credit bureaus across 27 EU member states, no one’s sharing the data across borders.
This creates massive friction for banks trying to serve expats or multi-country citizens.
Mifundo’s Solution: Making Data Move with You
Keiu and her team at Mifundo are working to bring a simple but powerful solution to this: a unified, EU-wide credit score.
We create a common data pool, standardize the data, and calculate one EU credit score banks can trust.
Essentially, Mifundo is building the infrastructure that allows credit data to move with you, no matter where you are in Europe. This isn’t just a theoretical fix. The company has already onboarded 27 credit bureaus from across Europe, and they’re working with multiple banks.
We’ve signed contracts with four banks, and already have 10,000 early adopters pre-registered. The proof of concept is there.
The goal is to not only help banks reduce credit risk for foreign customers but also to grow their business volumes by up to 15%.
Using AI to Solve Fragmented Data
One of the key elements driving Mifundo’s platform is artificial intelligence.
AI helps us take all the scattered data, analyze it, and make sense of it.
It’s not just about crunching numbers—it’s about creating a credit score that banks across Europe can actually use.
Today, in Estonia, credit scores are percentages; in Poland, it’s a number; in Finland, it’s a letter grade. We standardize all of this into one consistent metric that works across the board.
Mifundo is also using AI to create a predictive match-making process between customers and banks.
Once we have a bank’s risk appetite and customer profile, the machine learning algorithm will predict which bank will offer the best deal for each customer.
It’s a win-win for both sides—banks find their ideal clients, and customers get the best loan offers.
A Roadmap for Borderless Credit
When looking ahead, the vision is clear.
First, we’re focused on building the pipelines with enough credit bureaus to offer real value to banks. Once we have that, we’ll scale up bank onboarding and start rolling out the service to customers.
The team is ambitious. By the end of the year, they aim to have complete coverage across Europe, with banks and credit bureaus working together. The future Mifundo envisions is a world where your credit history follows you no matter where you go. As Keiu puts it:
In the long run, fully cross-border lending will be a reality, where people can borrow from any EU bank, no matter where they live.
This is Keiu’s advice to banks:
Check your customer data. You probably have more foreigners than you think—between 10 to 15%, maybe more. If you’re not capitalizing on that, you’re missing a big opportunity.
In a world where we can get a pizza delivered from another country faster than we can transfer our credit data, Mifundo is working hard to bring Europe’s financial services into the 21st century.
We already know the fintech space is full of companies with big ideas, but Mifundo’s approach to cross-border credit is doing more than just filling a gap—it’s reshaping how we think about lending in an interconnected Europe.
So, the next time you find yourself switching countries, you can worry more about learning a few local phrases and less about convincing a new bank you’re not a risk.
