As an individual person in a fragile situation, facing big, organized companies (like debt collectors) has you stuck with a losing position.
Luckily, Norwegian citizens have NAV (Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration), which offers financial advice & debt counselling. They contact debt collectors, negotiate terms of payment, and supervise the process. However, it’s easier said than done. While all secured loans like mortgages and unsecured, like credit cards are registered, it’s much more difficult to track who bought your debt from non-banking institutions. There are hundreds of debt-collecting companies, and NAV needs to contact all of them to check if there’s any debt registered for a particular individual. That process is very error-prone and time-consuming.
Our clients Lene Drange and Hallgeir Kvadsheim knew this and decided to act. They are stars of the Luksusfellen TV show, which helps regular Norwegians get out of debt and put their personal finances in check. They decided to create an automated debt register, to help people get out of debt, and to provide a tool for NAV’s employees to assist people struggling to cover their expenses.
As an individual person in a fragile situation, facing big, organized companies (like debt collectors) has you stuck with a losing position.
Luckily, Norwegian citizens have NAV (Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration), which offers financial advice & debt counselling. They contact debt collectors, negotiate terms of payment, and supervise the process. However, it’s easier said than done. While all secured loans like mortgages and unsecured, like credit cards are registered, it’s much more difficult to track who bought your debt from non-banking institutions. There are hundreds of debt-collecting companies, and NAV needs to contact all of them to check if there’s any debt registered for a particular individual. That process is very error-prone and time-consuming.
While all secured loans like mortgages and unsecured, like credit cards are registered, it’s much more difficult to track who bought your debt from non-banking institutions. There are hundreds of debt-collecting companies, and NAV needs to contact all of them to check if there’s any debt registered for a particular individual. That process is very error-prone and time-consuming.
Our clients Lene Drange and Hallgeir Kvadsheim knew this and decided to act. They are stars of the Luksusfellen TV show, which helps regular Norwegians get out of debt and put their personal finances in check. They decided to create an automated debt register, to help people get out of debt, and to provide a tool for NAV’s employees to assist people struggling to cover their expenses.
The whole process starts with getting a proxy from the user. Later, we can contact all debt collectors on their behalf – some using API calls, while others require sending an e-mail. And reminding.
KOIA loves challenges
And reminding again. And processing scanned PDFs with handwritten notes. We’re sending so many emails that even avoiding spam filters is a challenge, but KOIA loves challenges.
We started out working on the app as it just left the early MVP stage. Our goal was to improve user experience and adjust technical parts to meet our high standards and allow us to maintain stable code without much effort.
We also added many new features that brought improvements and required functionalities to all parties that are using the app.
Split the app into several pieces
— commercial page, end user page, management panels for different coworking parties. We strongly believe that each kind of user needs to work with the product in the most suitable way to accomplish tasks with maximum effectiveness.Redesigned the interface.
As an obvious result of splitting the application into several parts, we were able to prepare the best User Experience for each target audience. This helps our users work with the application with minimum effort.Beyond the desktop.
Part of the UX redesign was introducing the application to the mobile world, as we discovered that a lot of users don’t even own a computer.Stable environments.
We changed the whole process of building and deploying apps to save time, money and gain the possibility to maintain it easily and fast. We also increased SLA.High standard codebase.
We have performed a set of updates to the codebase to introduce a more concise structure. We also improved overall code quality. Now adding new features is a pleasure.The results were overwhelmingly positive. We speeded up the NAV advisors’ work ten-fold, with over 10 times more documents passing through the system.
This enables them to help more people manage debt. The number of users also increased 10 times and with over 100 new features (added in just 6 months) they can now have a complete overview of their debt. It is unusual for fintech companies to literally save people’s lives, but that’s what Lene and Hallgeir are doing.
The whole process starts with getting a proxy from the user. Later, we can contact all debt collectors on their behalf – some using API calls, while others require sending an e-mail. And reminding. And reminding again. And processing scanned PDFs with handwritten notes. We’re sending so many emails that even avoiding spam filters is a challenge, but KOIA loves challenges.
KOIA loves challenges
We started out working on the app as it just left the early MVP stage. Our goal was to improve user experience and adjust technical parts to meet our high standards and allow us to maintain stable code without much effort. We also added many new features that brought improvements and required functionalities to all parties that are using the app.