Personal development

From moneylenders to mobile apps: How the institutions that lend us money without being banks have transformed themselves

An investigation into a century of credit, swindles, and financial hopes.

Introduction: When money doesn't come from the bank. Imagine you urgently need money to buy a computer for school, but your parents cannot get a bank loan because they lack the right paperwork, or their income isn't considered sufficient. You might turn to a quick-loan company, to a leasing firm that hands you the product today and lets you pay in instalments, or even to a mobile app that transfers money to your account within minutes. All of these are non-bank financial institutions — companies that deal in money without being banks in the traditional sense. They fill the gaps left by the conventional banking system, reaching places where banks will not or cannot go.

These non-bank financial institutions, known in Romanian as IFNs, have become an integral part of the country's economic life. From the large leasing companies that help businesses acquire machinery, to the rapid-loan apps that promise money in your account within ten minutes, the diversity of this sector is remarkable. They manage investment funds through which ordinary people set aside modest savings for retirement, offer insurance for cars and homes, and provide financing for small businesses that would otherwise have nowhere to turn for capital. In Romania in 2024, these institutions administer tens of billions of euros and serve millions of clients — from individuals on ordinary incomes to multinational corporations.

The road these institutions have travelled across the Romanian landscape has been a winding one, marked by moments of genuine hope and bitter disappointment, by brilliant innovations and shameful swindles. From the first loan houses of the Kingdom, through the communist wasteland when the state controlled everything, to the chaos of transition when people lost their life savings in pyramid schemes, and on to the present day when digital technology is rewriting all the rules — each phase has its own dramatic stories. This analysis reveals not merely the technical evolution of the sector, but the human dramas played out in its corridors: people stripped of everything they owned, families rescued by a loan granted at precisely the right moment, fraudsters who cheated thousands of trusting souls, and digital revolutionaries building the future of finance.

There is a persistent confusion — almost charming in its stubbornness — about what it actually means to have a positive attitude at work. Most people reduce it to a kind of social performance: the bright smile at the entrance on a grey Monday morning, the reflexive declaration that it's going to be a wonderful day, the performed enthusiasm in the team meeting that fools nobody, least of all yourself. And yet, if you look a little more carefully, you begin to see that this confusion — between authentic positivity and displayed positivity — is itself the source of a great deal of emotional exhaustion in the workplace.

A genuine positive attitude is not a mask you put on. It is something closer to an interior calibration — a way of regulating your relationship with uncertainty, with the minor failure on a Wednesday afternoon, with the colleague who manages to irritate you before 9 a.m., with the project that keeps refusing to behave. Contemporary psychology — and I mean here not the motivational literature that fills airport bookshops, but serious academic research — has arrived at several conclusions worth considering before constructing any list of practical advice.

Recent work within the PERMA+4 framework, developed from Seligman's (2011) foundational model and extended by Donaldson and Donaldson (2021), demonstrates that positive emotions are not merely the consequence of wellbeing but an active cause of it — they mediate the relationship between individual resources and professional satisfaction, functioning as an amplifier of everything else that is going well. In other words, you are not positive because things are going well; things go well also because you are positive. That distinction, quietly radical, changes rather a lot.

A substantial body of research has shown that a sustained positive outlook correlates with better psychological and physical wellbeing, and may even prolong life expectancy (Lyubomirsky, King & Diener, 2005). The person who has genuinely cultivated this orientation sees their life as a wide space full of possibility rather than a narrow corridor of closed doors. That vision, almost of its own accord, exposes them to new experiences, new competences, a different quality of daily presence.

When it comes to work specifically, your mental attitude shapes not only how others perceive you, but also your own professional satisfaction, your resilience in the face of obstruction, and the quality of what you actually produce. Given that many of us spend forty hours a week — sometimes considerably more — in the same physical or virtual space, alongside the same people, under the same pressures, cultivating a positive mental disposition is not a luxury or an affectation. It is a pragmatic necessity.

What follows are eighteen concrete ways of maintaining this attitude — not as surface technique, but as genuine interior practice, grounded in research and, in places, in the kind of honest reckoning that a list of this nature rarely allows itself.

There is an institution in Romania that almost every adult knows by name, yet few truly understand. It stands behind every receipt you receive in a shop, behind every salary your parents earn, behind every school and hospital that keeps the lights on in this country. We are talking about the National Agency for Fiscal Administration — ANAF.

When I was younger, my grandfather used to tell me about the days when taxes were paid at the counter, with banknotes counted out carefully, when tax officials would appear at your door clutching thick ledgers under their arms. Today, everything has changed beyond recognition. ANAF has evolved from a Soviet bureaucratic labyrinth into a modernised, computerised institution capable of tracking millions of transactions in real time. But this transformation did not happen overnight, and it certainly did not happen painlessly.

For a teenager, ANAF can seem like an abstract entity — something belonging to the adult world, tedious and remote. The reality, however, is that this institution determines how much money the state has to build new schools, to pay teachers, to maintain the roads you travel every day. It is a cog in a complex mechanism that, when it works well, allows all of us to live better lives. When it works badly, it can become a bureaucratic nightmare that stifles business and frustrates citizens.

This story deserves to be told, because sooner or later — when you get your first job, when you open your first business, or when you inherit something from your grandparents — you will have to deal with ANAF directly. Let us make sense of this institution together, its virtues and its failings alike.

I am sitting in the cinema and thinking that there are places which have no need of publicity. Places that breathe within their own silence, indifferent to the fact that no one comes to photograph them or transform them into weekend destinations. Tudor Giurgiu has just finished the film. The Spruce Forest — that simple, almost banal title, which conceals something you do not know how to name: a particular density, a humidity of the air that enters the lungs and stays there, like a thought you return to without meaning to. The director is now in dialogue with the audience. He answers with that apparent ease of people who have thought deeply before speaking — and I listen to him and think about the way some people seem already to have digested what others are only just beginning to feel.

…the identity of a village was built around a person or a family who had lived there and left something behind — not necessarily monuments, not necessarily documents, but a diffuse presence, a trace in the air.

The Holy Fathers would have said that there is a work of the heart that precedes the word. That before one can speak rightly about something, one must have passed through it with the heart, not merely with the mind. Saint Isaac the Syrian, in his Words on the Ascetic Life, writes that one who has not wept does not know what joy is — that these are not opposites, but steps, one after the other, one through the other. Giurgiu's film has brought me, without my knowing it, to one such step.

And so I say, without thinking too hard about it, that our county too has a spruce forest. At Oroftiana. I say this and immediately feel how something shifts in the auditorium — a silence that is not indifference, but rather a pause, a brief stillness in people who hear a word they are not sure whether they have heard before or only dreamt. Oroftiana. A name with a particular weight, with those long syllables that sound of another era, another world — a world in which places had owners with names, in which the nobility left their mark on toponymy, in which the identity of a village was built around a person or a family who had lived there and left something behind — not necessarily monuments, not necessarily documents, but a diffuse presence, a trace in the air.