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Startups Change how Moldovans pay their bills
26 Aug 2025
Most people only think about it when it doesn’t work. But everything depends on how money moves. Fintech startups in Moldova are changing the pipes behind instant payment systems.
Click to approve. Swipe to pay. Confirm with a fingerprint. That’s what most fintech looks like on the surface. But some Moldovan startups build a future where software talks to software. For example, Finergy was founded by two engineers who knew Moldova’s banking system inside out. They are one of several helping banks and merchants move to a world of programmable, instant payments.
Making things faster
Before founding Finergy, an economist by training, Ghenadie Cernei spent years trying to modernize banking systems from within. As director of digital transformation at MAIB, he helped introduce contactless payments and led key upgrades in backend infrastructure.
After 30 years in the system, moving from developer to security lead and then to director, Cernei left working at banks. “The conditions were great,” he says. “But I started to lose perspective.” He stopped seeing things with fresh eyes, he says, and accepting them as they are.
The desire to do more drove Ghenadie to look outside. When he and his friend, software engineer Maxim Burdiean, teamed up in 2023, they weren’t trying to compete with banks. “We realized we were solving the same problems over and over,” Ghenadie says. “Just on opposite sides of the wall. We realized: banks need tools they can’t build from scratch. We weren’t betting on product-market fit. We knew the market. The real question was: can we deliver what it needs?”
Several big Moldovan banks use Finergy’s tech . Photo credit: Iurie Gandrabura
At the Startup Moldova Summit in spring 2025, Maxim stepped on stage not to pitch another wallet or superapp, but to present a vision for the infrastructure behind instant payments. The company, he explained, is designed to help banks and fintechs process real-time transactions. He spoke without flash or slogans. In this field, clarity and depth often matter more than pitch decks. Maxim had never worked in a bank. But through his company, he maintained MAIB’s entire mobile app stack on both iOS and Android, solving bugs and rewriting middleware.“I saw everything up close," he says.
Then, timing matters. In 2024, Moldova launched MIA, its first national instant payment system, supported by the National Bank of Moldova (NBM) and USAID. Over 700 companies activated the new payment options just three months after the launch. By 2025, Moldova had joined SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area), making instant payments cross-border and programmable.
Faster than cards, friendlier than cash
At the 2013 Freediving World Championship in Belgrade, a freediver himself and the founder of Simpals, Dmitri Voloshin, saw elite athletes wearing makeshift collars looking like bike tires. “It looked ridiculous,” he later wrote in his blog. “Why does no one fix this?”
Why was he bothered? Shortly, freediving is a sport where athletes dive underwater on a single breath, without using oxygen tanks. It requires endurance, technique, and mental control. The most important thing is that even minor equipment flaws can put performance or safety at risk.
Photo credit: Iurie Gandrabura
Both Maxim Burdiean and Ghenadie Cernei use Finergy’s tools in their own lives. Ghenadie recalls one of his first real-world tests: “I was in Romania and needed to pay for insurance. The agent sent me a payment link on Viber. I clicked, paid, and realized. It went through our system. That’s when it clicked. We’re not just building backend tools. This works for people!”
“A big bank can still afford to fix things manually,” Maxim explains. “But for smaller players, it has to just work. The system must be self-sufficient, predictable, and secure, because no one has time to babysit infrastructure.”
Built on the globally accepted ISO 20022 standard and already integrated with SEPA, miaPOS fits directly into national and European payment rails. “Each country has its rails,” Ghenadie says. “MIA in Moldova. IRIS in Greece. Blik in Poland. Europe is moving toward unifying them. We’re already part of that logic.”
The company also built a remote identity verification system integrated with Moldova’s national ID database. That is something foreign providers couldn’t access at the time. “We didn’t reinvent the wheel,” Cernei says. “We just connected what was needed.” The system now works via website or mobile, aligning with the latest NBM regulation for remote onboarding.
Built for Moldova, Wired for Europe
Still, Finergy hasn’t lost sight of the basics. “Terminals are too expensive for some rural vendors,” Ghenadie says. “We want to make digital payments accessible even where card hardware can’t reach.” That’s why they’re adapting their system for Moldova’s basic cash registers, turning even a paper receipt into a QR-enabled checkout.
“The goal,” he says, “is to cover the last mile. People often ask what exactly we build. We don’t build a visible product. We build the rails underneath like electricity. You don’t think about it when it works. But everything depends on it.”
The next step? Romania. “We don’t need to localize much,” Maxim says. “Just plug in.”
Finergy is part of a larger trend: Moldovan tech companies building for export. Salt Edge helps European banks comply with PSD2. Fagura turned regular Romanians into lenders, passing €2 million in peer-to-peer loans.
Then, Planable and Brizy reached international users through collaboration tools and no-code web platforms. For example, Planable, featured in Forbes, was acquired by SE Ranking in 2025, a global tech firm with $35M+ in annual revenue.
Planable co-founders Xenia Muntean (from left), Vlad Caluș, and Nicu Gudumac, together with Chief Marketing Officer Miruna Dragomir. Photo credit: Planable
Ghenadie Cernei’s vision stretches further. He believes payment systems will soon not only serve humans, but also AI-gents, software bots acting on people’s behalf. “It’s already happening in small ways,” he says. “Your phone adjusts photos. Why not have an agent that knows your bills and pays them automatically when it makes sense for you?” That’s the world Finergy is preparing for.
“Imagine a personal AI-assistant that tracks your bills and spending habits, and pays automatically when conditions match your preferences: not too early, not too late, and never above your limits. We already have basic automation for that,” he says. “And once the buyer and the seller connect through programmable payment rails, agents will simply interact with each other.”
The pace of change, Ghenadie notes, often outstrips our ability to adapt. He gives an example he’s fond of. At first, a person thinks they’re dealing with a horse, with something manageable. But by the time they’re ready to ride, it’s already a motorcycle. Then, a helicopter. Then, a plane or even a rocket. “And you’re left wondering what to do,” Ghenadie says. “But then you look around and see people who haven’t even noticed anything changed. And you think that at least you noticed the change.”
Photo credit: Iurie Gandrabura
Finergy is registered within the Moldova Innovation Technology Park and is also a part of the Startup Moldova ecosystem that helps to stay connected with the local companies and demands.
The co-founders admit they can't predict what fintech will look like in a decade. Maybe money will disappear, maybe AI will evolve on its own. For Ghenadie and Maxim, the real challenge is staying agile. Each day brings a new wave, and mastering the last one isn’t enough.
It all reflects where Finergy’s mission began. Not in theory, but in hands-on experience with real systems, bugs, and bottlenecks. Now they’re building the infrastructure to move beyond it.
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