Bondora

Data-driven growth, powered by open banking 

Since 2008, nearly 200,000 customers have trusted Bondora for their financial needs, borrowing over €1 billion across five markets: Estonia, Finland, Spain, the Netherlands, and Latvia.

“We offer simple access to funds, often to cover large purchases or unexpected expenses,” said Juris Rieksts-Riekstins, Chief Credit Officer, Bondora. “And we also offer consumers the opportunity to earn interest on their extra cash by investing in small loans.”

Bondora analyses loan applicants’ financial health using custom-built data models, which allow it to quickly weigh the risk of individual loans and make near-instant credit decisions. Those models are its secret sauce, but one of the key ingredients is Bank Account Data from GoCardless, which provides the raw transaction data from customers’ bank accounts via open banking APIs.

Rafael Gonzalez-Iglesias, Bondora’s Head of Data Science, believes the company would look very different without Bank Account Data. “The ease at which we can retrieve transaction data made it possible for a company with less than 200 employees to expand from two markets to five without really needing to increase headcount,” he said.

(Bank) coverage is king

To make this kind of success happen, bank coverage is the first thing Bondora needs from its transaction data. The math is simple: the more banks it can reliably source data from, the more customers it can serve. 

“We’ve found that GoCardless offers the widest bank coverage of any provider,” said Rafael. “That means we can verify the identities and analyse the transactions of a wider market of consumers, not just customers of the biggest banks. And all for a better cost than the competition.”

“As an open banking pioneer, GoCardless has worked extensively to enable maximum access to banks across Europe,” added Juris. “It has also refined its APIs to the point that all we had to do was plug the data feeds into our services.”

Data quality is queen

With bank coverage taken care of, the next thing Bondora needs is for its data to be high quality. The better the data, the more accurate its decisions.

“We built our data categorisation models in-house, because even with third party providers we would still be doing a lot of quality assurance processes ourselves,” said Juris. “This gives us better control, and allows us to be more informed about the decisions we’re making.”

“The quality of GoCardless data allows these models to do all the categorisation we need to translate the semi-structured data into actionable insights. It means we can confidently create a 360-degree view of how people get money in and how they spend it, and turn that information into affordability decisions. That all happens in 10-15 seconds, compared to the several hours it would take someone to manually review a single bank statement.”

Killer conversion rate

The result is a streamlined customer experience that delivers a consistently high conversion rate.

“Without Bank Account Data customers would need to download statements from their internet banking and then send them to us,” said Juris.

Repeatable, all across Europe

Long term, Bondora aims to become a pan-European credit provider offering more products to more customers. This journey will be made simpler and faster because of Bank Account Data’s European-wide reach.

“Bank Account Data covers the whole of Europe, which will allow us to standardise our core processes across different markets as we expand,” said Juris. “We don't want to build an empire of people sitting in an office; we want to build an empire that runs on its own. The high level of automation enabled by Bank Account Data will be vital as we scale.”

“The data will also help us better understand customers and their needs in order to extend our product offerings. This reliability and scalability reflects one of GoCardless’s core strengths. Open banking is still an emerging technology, but their headstart means they’ve ironed out most issues and can deliver a dependable source of data of the highest quality.”