Re-Lender Review - A Voluntary Shutdown, Not a Regulator Sanction

Italian lending crowdfunding platform for “reconversion” projects: turning existing industrial, urban and real estate assets into new uses. Re-Lender obtained its European ECSP authorisation from Consob in July 2024 and, nineteen months later, its shareholders resolved to wind the company up. The platform stopped launching campaigns in February 2026 and now exists only to see its remaining loans through to maturity.

This is a cautionary card. Re-Lender is not open to new investment and there is no sign-up link on this page.

What Re-Lender was in 60 seconds

Re-Lender lent retail money to Italian companies carrying out reconversion work: old factories turned into housing, urban regeneration, ecological and technological upgrades. You put in from EUR 50, the borrower paid a fixed rate agreed in advance (typically quoted in the 8% to 10% range), and repayments came back on a set amortisation schedule. Borrowers were scored by the external rating agency modeFinance and by an internal RE-Lender Score. Projects were sorted into six families the platform called RE-CONVERT, RE-GREEN, RE-URBAN, RE-BUILD, RE-DIGITAL and RE-START, which described the type of work being financed rather than the risk level.

In February 2026 the shareholders decided to close the company. That decision, not a regulator, is why the platform is gone.

The sanction question, answered plainly

Re-Lender appears on lists of Italian platforms that “had problems”, alongside Recrowd and Rendimento Etico. The three cases are not the same thing, and the difference matters when you are judging a platform’s conduct.

• Recrowd was suspended by Banca d’Italia with effect from 31 July 2025 and later fined. That is a supervisory measure imposed on an unwilling firm.
• Rendimento Etico was suspended by Consob for 120 days in December 2025 and then had its authorisation revoked in March 2026, after the company itself asked for revocation in October 2025.
• Re-Lender was neither suspended nor revoked. We searched Consob’s public bulletin and resolutions and found no measure against Re-Lender S.p.A. after the authorisation itself. The only thing that happened was a shareholder resolution of 17 February 2026 to wind the company up, filed with the Chamber of Commerce on 26 February 2026.

So the honest label is: an authorised platform that chose to close, not a platform the regulator stopped. That is a materially better outcome for an investor than a suspension, because the firm was still compliant and able to organise its own exit. It is still a loss event in the sense that matters practically: your money stayed locked in projects that now run to maturity under someone else’s administration.

One caveat we cannot close: we could not confirm from the ESMA register whether the ECSP authorisation has been formally surrendered, marked withdrawn, or is simply dormant while the company is liquidated. See the verification list at the top of this file.

What happened, in order

• July 2019. The platform goes live, presenting itself as the first Italian crowdfunding platform dedicated to reconversion.
• 10 November 2023. The deadline for operating under the old Italian rules. By that date the platform reports EUR 41M raised since launch, split roughly EUR 26.5M to Italian SMEs and EUR 14.5M to real estate projects, across 163 projects, with close to 37,000 registered users.
• 10 July 2024. Consob authorises Re-Lender S.p.A. as a crowdfunding service provider under Regulation (EU) 2020/1503, resolution no. 23190, for the service of facilitating the granting of loans. Banca d’Italia was consulted. Consob states it will notify ESMA for entry in the Article 14 register.
• 17 February 2026. The shareholders resolve on voluntary liquidation.
• 26 February 2026. The resolution is registered with the Chamber of Commerce. New intermediation stops. No new offers are published. The company operates a business continuity plan for existing positions.
• 30 March 2026. Users with open projects receive instructions from EvenFi, an ECSP-authorised platform, to register there and view their positions. Loan contracts, rates and amortisation schedules are stated to be unchanged; what changes is who runs the plumbing.

Reasons given by the company, as reported in its own communications and in Italian specialist coverage: the operating cost of the new European regime, which is heavier than the old national rules on capital and controls, and an increase in defaults on reconversion projects.

Things to Watch

• The company named rising defaults as a cause of its own closure, and there is no public loss figure to put next to that statement. This is the single most important gap on this card. Article 20 of Regulation (EU) 2020/1503 requires an ECSP provider to publish default rates over at least the preceding 36 months, and Re-Lender stated it did so annually. We could not retrieve those figures, and we found no disclosure of final losses, that is, capital written off after recovery attempts ended. Across the eight Italian and French platforms CrowdIndex has examined, the recurring pattern is a headline of zero losses sitting next to a portfolio in difficulty. Re-Lender does not make a zero-loss claim, which is to its credit, but the absence of any published loss line means an investor cannot check how bad the reconversion book actually got.

• Roughly EUR 19M of investor money was still in the ground when the platform closed. Our arithmetic, not the platform’s. The platform reported EUR 46,101,400 raised in total and EUR 27,000,500 across 103 concluded projects. Subtracting one from the other leaves about EUR 19.1M nominally outstanding, and 103 of 190+ projects concluded means only about 54% of the deal count had reached the end of its life. Treat both numbers as indicative: they come from a January 2026 snapshot of the platform’s own statistics page, the “concluded” figure counts capital returned on closed deals rather than a clean split of the current book, and we could not re-read the page directly to confirm the snapshot date.

• Recovery now depends on a third party you did not choose. EvenFi took over technical management of flows and residual repayments. Loan contracts remain valid and terms are unchanged, but the party chasing a late borrower on your behalf is no longer the party you signed up with, and it has no equity at stake in these deals. The commercial terms of the run-off mandate are not public.

• Documentation lives on a domain that is being retired. The company told users to download contracts and amortisation schedules from the old private area before relender.eu is shut down. If you held positions and did not do this, you may find the paper trail harder to reconstruct later. This is a practical warning, not a theoretical one.

• Short life under the regime that was supposed to protect investors. Re-Lender operated for about nineteen months as a fully authorised ECSP provider before deciding the model did not pay. The stricter European regime raised standards and also raised fixed costs, and smaller platforms are the ones that cannot carry them. A platform holding a fresh ECSP authorisation is therefore not, on its own, evidence that it will still be operating in three years.

What this means if you held positions

Your loan contracts are unaffected by the liquidation. Interest rates, schedules and maturities stay as signed, and repayments continue to flow from borrower accounts to investor accounts, now through EvenFi’s dashboard. Available cash sitting uninvested in the account can normally be withdrawn, and the practical steps are: complete the EvenFi registration, download every contract and amortisation schedule from the old Re-Lender area while it is still reachable, and then monitor repayments there.

What does not change is the underlying risk. The platform closing does not cancel a single loan, and it does not improve the odds on a borrower that was already struggling. Given that the company cited rising defaults among its reasons for closing, the residual book is likelier to be the harder half than the easier half: the good projects are disproportionately the ones that already repaid.

Compared to alternatives

Re-Lender against Recrowd. Recrowd was stopped by Banca d’Italia in July 2025 and fined in June 2026. Re-Lender stopped itself. From an investor’s point of view, an orderly voluntary wind-down with a named run-off manager is a meaningfully better failure mode than a supervisory suspension, because the firm arranged continuity before it lost the ability to act. Neither outcome returns your capital any faster than the borrowers do.

Re-Lender against Rendimento Etico. Rendimento Etico was suspended, then had its authorisation revoked, and was also the first client of EvenFi’s run-off service. The two platforms ended in the same operational place under the same administrator, by very different routes. If you are trying to read regulatory records, this is the case that shows why “appears on a list of troubled platforms” is not a finding: you have to check whether the regulator acted, or the shareholders did.

Re-Lender against a platform still open for business. There is no comparison to draw on yields or features, because Re-Lender no longer offers either. The transferable lesson is about concentration. Re-Lender specialised in one thematic niche, reconversion projects, which carries a specific execution risk: the works have to be completed and the converted asset has to find its market. When that niche turned, the platform had nothing else in the book to carry it. Sector diversification is a separate discipline from platform diversification, and this case is a clean illustration of why.

Frequently Asked Questions

Was Re-Lender sanctioned by a regulator? No. We found no suspension, revocation, fine or public warning against Re-Lender S.p.A. from Consob, Banca d’Italia or any other authority. The platform closed because its own shareholders resolved on voluntary liquidation on 17 February 2026. It is sometimes listed next to Recrowd and Rendimento Etico, both of which were subject to actual regulatory measures, and that grouping is misleading.

Was Re-Lender properly authorised? Yes. Consob authorised Re-Lender S.p.A. as a crowdfunding service provider under Regulation (EU) 2020/1503 by resolution no. 23190 of 10 July 2024, after consulting Banca d’Italia, for the service of facilitating the granting of loans. Whether the authorisation has since been formally surrendered or withdrawn is something we could not verify.

Can I still invest on Re-Lender? No. The platform stopped publishing new offers and launching new campaigns when the liquidation was filed in February 2026.

What happens to money I already invested? The loan contracts remain valid on their original terms. Technical management of repayments moved to EvenFi, an ECSP-authorised platform, and users with open positions were sent registration instructions on 30 March 2026. Repayment still depends on the borrowers paying, and capital is not guaranteed.

How much did Re-Lender lose for investors? Unknown, and that is the honest answer. The company named an increase in defaults on reconversion projects as one reason for closing, but we could not retrieve its Article 20 default-rate disclosure or any final-loss figure. Do not read the absence of a loss number as an absence of losses.

Which website was the real platform? relender.eu. Every source we checked, including the company’s own blog and the Consob resolution chain, points there.

Bottom Line

Re-Lender is the most benign of the recent Italian platform failures, and it is still a failure. The company was properly authorised, was never sanctioned, and organised a documented handover of its residual loan book to a licensed third party before shutting down. That is close to the best a closing platform can do. But the reasons it gave for closing include rising defaults in its own niche, and no published loss figure exists to size that admission, so investors holding the roughly EUR 19M that was still outstanding on our arithmetic are relying on recoveries they cannot independently measure. The case belongs on CrowdIndex not as an investment option but as evidence for two things: that an ECSP authorisation is a floor and not a guarantee of durability, and that a platform built around a single thematic niche has nowhere to hide when that niche turns.

Disclosure. CrowdIndex has no affiliate relationship with Re-Lender and earns nothing from this page. There is no sign-up link because the platform does not accept new investors. This card is published as a cautionary reference under the editorial criteria on our Methodology page.