The conversations I’m having with credit and lending software founders in Europe have shifted. Until recently the question was almost always some version of “how do we grow faster?” Today it is more often “how do we grow in a way that lasts?”

That shift matters. The European credit and lending software market is maturing quickly, and the distance between companies that will scale sustainably and those that will stall — stuck in pilots, narrow customer wins, or bolt-on positioning — is widening. With DORA already in force and the EU AI Act raising the bar for systems used in credit decisioning, procurement standards are hardening and vendor lists are narrowing.

At Upliift, we invest for the long term in specialised European software businesses. We work closely with founders building credit and lending platforms in highly regulated environments, such as our investment in Galileo Network in Italy. We see both the day-to-day pressures and the structural shifts that create long-term opportunity.

Here are the five forces I believe matter most right now — and what each one means if you are building or leading a B2B software business selling into lenders, banks, or financial institutions across Europe.

1. AI-native decisioning is becoming the baseline — and governance is now part of the product

As a founder or leader, the question is no longer whether AI belongs in your product. The question is whether you can help customers run it safely, transparently, and at scale in real lending workflows.

By 2026, buyers have moved past asking whether your product uses AI. They are asking how well it works in production — in underwriting support, credit scoring, risk monitoring — and whether it comes with the controls needed to run it responsibly. The European Banking Authority has been clear that using AI to evaluate creditworthiness is classified as high risk under the EU AI Act. Documentation, audit trails, and explainability are not optional features. They are part of what the product needs to do.

Andrea Gelfi, CEO of Galileo Network, one of Italy’s leading credit and lending software businesses, works at the centre of this challenge every day:

“Artificial intelligence has now become an essential element and is increasingly difficult to do without. As we operate in the Financial Services sector, which is a regulated sector, we believe AI must be used carefully and responsibly, in full compliance with regulations.”

For software providers, this means governance is no longer legal fine print. It is part of the product. The credit and lending businesses gaining ground right now are those that have made AI governance, decision traceability, and resilience controls visible features of what they sell — not afterthoughts bolted on under pressure from a risk officer.

2. Embedded credit is becoming the default distribution model

Credit is increasingly being offered inside other workflows: accounting platforms, procurement tools, vertical software platforms, marketplaces, and payment flows. McKinsey describes Europe’s embedded finance market as growing at double-digit rates, with revenues projected to surpass €100 billion by 2030, and points to the convergence of banks, merchants, and customer platforms around embedded distribution. Oliver Wyman similarly identifies embedded lending as one of the forces reshaping European SME lending.

For software founders, this is not just a trend to track. It is a structural shift in how your product needs to be built and supported. Three things follow directly from it:

• Partnerships and integrations become a core go-to-market engine, not a secondary channel
• Implementation quality and time-to-value become genuine competitive differentiators
• Your operating model — support, onboarding, compliance readiness — becomes part of what you are selling

The winners in embedded credit will not simply have strong lending logic. They will be the easiest to integrate, the easiest to trust, and the easiest to operate reliably at scale. That combination is harder to build than it looks and harder to replicate once it is working well.

3. Regulatory-first design is now a growth strategy, not a compliance burden

In Europe, regulation does not sit on the sidelines of product development. It shapes requirements, procurement decisions, and vendor selection and that dynamic is intensifying, not easing.

Two developments are particularly relevant right now. DORA entered into application on 17 January 2025 and applies to financial entities and their ICT third-party providers. Separately, the EU is advancing its open finance framework, which will reshape how credit data is obtained, shared, and governed.

The lesson for founders is not simply to be more compliant. It is to build products that make compliance easier for your customers — audit trails built into core workflows, resilience that holds up under third-party risk scrutiny, and AI governance that satisfies what regulators and internal risk teams will increasingly demand. Buyers are actively cautious of black-box systems, not only for ethical reasons, but because those systems are harder to justify internally when something goes wrong. Software that reduces regulatory anxiety and moves confidently through due diligence has a structural advantage over competitors still catching up. In Europe, compliance is increasingly a commercial moat.

4. Real-time and continuous lending will replace point-in-time credit checks

The traditional lending model relies heavily on point-in-time assessment: a snapshot of risk at origination, with limited monitoring unless something visibly goes wrong. That model is changing as data infrastructure improves and lender expectations around portfolio management continue to rise.

Oliver Wyman highlights real-time transaction data combined with AI as a key enabler for faster and more accurate credit decisions in European SME lending. EY’s view of next-generation credit decisioning similarly emphasises analytics and digital tools supporting not just origination, but ongoing customer management and proactive risk monitoring throughout the life of a loan.

For product teams, this tends to drive a consistent set of roadmap priorities:

• Monitoring and early warning systems move from optional add-ons to core platform modules
• Data quality and coverage become strategic assets, not infrastructure decisions
• Pricing, limits, and risk policies become dynamic — adjustable as conditions change rather than fixed at drawdown

Put simply: more lenders want platforms that help them manage risk continuously, not just platforms that approve applications.

5. Consolidation is pushing buyers towards end-to-end platforms

Many lenders do not want six separate tools across origination, decisioning, servicing, monitoring, and reporting. They want fewer vendors, tighter integration, clearer accountability, and a single partner they can hold to a high standard of operational resilience. Oliver Wyman’s analysis of European SME lending points directly to this dynamic — identifying embedded lending models and technology-enhanced efficiency as forces transforming the SME lending lifecycle end to end, from deal sourcing and origination through to funding and repayment.

For founders, this creates a genuine strategic choice. Expand across the lending lifecycle and position yourself as a broader platform — or stay highly specialised and integrate so deeply that you become genuinely difficult to replace. Both strategies can work. What is getting harder is the middle ground: not broad enough to be a platform and not specialised enough to be essential.

Turning trends into growth: a founder self-check

These five forces are easy to describe and hard to act on. What tends to separate companies that scale from those that stall is not awareness of the themes, but discipline in executing against them.

Andrea Gelfi frames the practical focus that drives long-term value creation in this market:

“Our focus must be on increasing the speed of services that enable our customers. This means reducing processing time, limiting the use of paper and improving efficiency in the connections between the distribution network, the central back office and decision-making bodies. Better service leads to greater efficiency for our customers.”

A few questions worth starting with:

• Which two or three customer outcomes do we improve most reliably and consistently today?
• What stops roll-outs in practice: data quality, integration complexity, governance gaps, or change management inside the customer?
• Can we explain our AI approach — and its controls — to a risk officer in plain English?
• Are we genuinely ready for DORA-era resilience scrutiny and third-party risk assessment?
• Are we building towards end-to-end workflows and continuous risk management, or are we still primarily solving point problems?

Those questions often reveal whether a business is genuinely ready for the next phase of growth, or whether there is structural work to do first.

A different kind of partner for a different kind of moment

At Upliift, we work with founders of specialised credit and lending software businesses who are thinking about the long term. Not the next fundraise. Not the next twelve months. The next chapter.

We invest with permanent equity, which means no fixed exit timetable and no structural pressure to force a one-size-fits-all playbook onto the businesses we work alongside. We help founders strengthen the fundamentals that compound over time — culture, teams, customer relationships, and margins — while also helping them evolve the parts of their product and operating model that no longer fit today’s market. The goal is straightforward: modernise and scale sustainably, while protecting trust, identity, and continuity.

If you are leading a specialised credit or lending software business in Europe and these themes feel familiar, we would welcome a conversation. No hard sell. Just an honest discussion about what you are seeing in your market, what 2026 is likely to demand, and what the right next chapter could look like for your business.

This blog is written with input from Andrea Gelfi, CEO of Galileo Network. It’s a part of the series exploring the forces shaping European Credit & Lending software. Read the other posts: The Long-Term Partner for Credit & Lending Founders.