Founded in 1930, AS Financiering is the second oldest financing company in Norway. Headquartered in Oslo, AS Financiering offers loans against mortgage for new and used cars, motorcycles, boats, and caravans. The firm is a wholly owned subsidiary of Sparebanken Øst , one of the country’s largest non-aligned savings banks, which purchased AS Financiering in 1991.

Established in 1990, Knowit Reaktor is a Nordic consultancy firm offering services in design and communication, management consulting, IT, and system development. The company has around 2,600 employees in operations in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Germany. Knowit AB (publ) is listed on the Nordic Exchange in Stockholm.

Project Details

In January 2019, in light of new regulations, AS Financering was required to upgrade its core and customer-facing banking systems before the end of 2019 in order to continue operating. The lender also found that it needed to improve its operating efficiency to offer competitive products in the market. AS Financiering also had to improve its agility and time-to-market performance of existing customer-facing and internal solutions and the largely manual internal processes to compete with smaller specialised companies. These requirements culminated in a strategy to establish an entirely new standalone solution requiring minimal infrastructure changes. The solution also had to provide a complete self-service frontend and a highly automated backend, all to be delivered within an aggressive timeline.

The solution had to offer automated loan approval processing to finance cars, motorcycles, caravans, and other vehicles with sales collateral, boat loans with and without ship mortgages, and leasing of cars and other vehicles such as trucks, tractors, and construction machinery.

Knowit used the V3 master build of its Dploy dealer portal with Stacc core for this project. The project start was in April 2019, followed by a six-sprint schedule with a final acceptance test in January 2020 and go-live achieved in February 2020. AS Financiering and Knowit both deployed resources for this project.

Solution

The project called for a self-service solution for which Knowit Reaktor used Dploy, its flexible platform for automation of complete credit processes from application to disbursement of loans and leasing. Dploy is built on modern web technology that provides opportunities for customisation for an optimal user experience. Stacc was also leveraged as a core system for transactions and accounting.

As part of the project, a self-service portal was created for direct loan customers and a customer portal, closely integrated with Dploy Front and Core processes and workflows. Additionally, there was an eSigning portal for the electronic signing of agreements with components delivered from Signicat.

The solution had a new integration layer to mediate services towards core systems and surrounding banking systems. Multiple adapters such as Bilpriser (car valuations), BankID authentication (OIDC), Bisnode (credit valuation, debt servicing ability, debt registry), and Altinn (registry services) were deployed. The solution was fully compliant with anti-laundering, screening, sanction list, political exposure, and other relevant legal requirements.

Project Complexity and Best Practices

The project called for complex coordination among all stakeholders, such as managing the controlling bank Sparebanken Øst, the customer AS Financinering, the supplier Knowit, and numerous external third-party suppliers. Another coordination challenge was with the Brønnøysund national registry, which resulted in changes to the timeline and specification several times as new services were developed.

The ambitious target for the automation of internal processes required extensive business process development and training activities. In contrast, customer self-service required extensive efforts to create intuitive UX and customer process flows. The project goal of having all viable external applications automatically approved and paid out required detailed testing and development of scoring rules.  The supplier used ‘wysiwyg’ forms and GUIs for product and scoring rules engines to vastly reduce time to market for new products.

Programme Governance

The project was organised using a single project manager to assume the main responsibility for implementation, coordination, and communication between the parties. The project also had a steering committee appointed by the customer, serving as the ultimate decision forum and escalation point for any challenges in the project above the PM level. Regular status reports and status meetings were arranged at agreed intervals and distributed to the PMs and the steering group.

Apart from the formal routines, the project was run collaboratively, emphasising close collaboration via video, agile boards, and task sharing and ran six sprint sequences for a total of five modular deliveries and an acceptance test phase.

Potential Benefits

The lender witnessed a 22% increase in the number of applications, and the sales/total payout amount doubled from June through September 2020. The operating efficiency also improved, with operating costs falling from 35.3% to 32.9% in 2019. Automation increased from 0% to beyond 90% within 14 days of go-live. The system now allows a typical e-signed application to move through to payout within 2-3 minutes.

IBSI View

This was a successful implementation as AS Financiering went from a completely manual operation to a nearly completely automated application handling lender within one calendar year. Knowit helped implement and migrate all banking activities to a new solution with no downtime – an impressive feat while operating at full capacity.