Helgi Bj\u00f6rn Kristinsson recently became the managing director of Alva, the parent company of Netg\u00edr\u00f3 and Aktiva. Alva employs around 40 people, including 20 programmers, in Iceland and Croatia. Aktiva offers its customers consumer loans, while Netg\u00edr\u00f3 allows people to pay for products, distribute payments as needed, and provide loans to its customers.
“Alva was founded in 2012 and launched in 2013 and has almost doubled steadily over the years,” says Helgi Bj\u00f6rn. Alva had a turnover of seven billion last year, and Helgi Bj\u00f6rn says that given how the year is starting, the company’s turnover can be expected to double this year. “Of course, I am optimistic at the beginning of the year. We will hopefully be something north of fourteen billion this year. We have an excellent “platform” and outstanding business model scalability to add customers. In addition, we have fewer employees in January this year than in January last year, but with much more turnover. So we look forward to the future. The river travel is good, the country’s employment level is high, and all statistics are outstanding. Like everyone else, one hopes this stability will remain,” says Helgi Bj\u00f6rn. However, year after year, growth like this is neither natural nor easy.
“Of course, this has come with some growing pains.” We were perhaps to some extent ahead of our time,” says Helgi Bj\u00f6rn. The company was, therefore, with previous financial technology companies in Iceland. “When that word, financial technology, was little used here in Iceland, this company was doing exciting things,” but the company’s customers are around 55,000. Initially, Aktiva was conceived as a company to manage peer-to-peer loans, where people could offer credit for others to apply, but Helgi Bj\u00f6rn was previously Aktiva’s managing director. However, it turned out that such activities depended on the permission of the Financial Supervisory Authority for payment collection. “That’s how the foundations of peer-to-peer lending were pulled from our feet. We then just changed the form and financed the loans ourselves, which has been very successful.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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