Written by Saša Kajfeš — July 2023
In 2013 three engineers took on one client with one idea: let Icelanders pay using nothing but their phone number. The product that came out of it, Netgíró, became Iceland's national payment method, and Moberg has built and maintained it without a break ever since.
A better way to pay — with just a phone number
The proposition was radical simplicity: buy online or in a shop without handing over card details. At an online checkout you gave a phone number; in a shop you showed a barcode from the app. Purchases were billed monthly, with instalment options and loan products available inside the app itself.
- For consumers
- — Convenience with security — no card details spread across every retailer you buy from.
- For merchants
- — Better conversion, and a direct channel to the customer.
- For the engineering team
- — Building financial-grade payment infrastructure from an empty repository.
A payment platform, built to be owned
Behind a friendly app sat infrastructure built entirely in-house: a .NET backend handling real-time authorisation at tills and online checkouts, invoicing and settlement, merchant integrations across thousands of sales locations, and a consumer app in the hands of much of the country.
The core
Real-time payments & billing
Authorisation at the moment of purchase, then monthly consolidation, instalment distribution and settlement — banking's accounting rigour with an application's user experience.
The intelligence
The credit decision engine
Since 2017, machine-learning scorecards have set credit limits and terms in seconds. Five model generations have run on one layer, each defended in board presentations rather than in isolated notebooks.
The longevity
Modern after a decade
The platform has been modernised continuously — it runs on .NET 9 today — without a rebuild. The original team has steered that evolution release by release.
A product a country actually uses
Social value
Safer, fairer everyday payments
Taking card numbers out of the checkout reduces what a customer is exposed to. Flexible payment plans give households room to breathe. And machine-learning credit decisions have halved loan defaults, which is better for the borrower as well as the lender.
Business value
Merchants sell more
Thousands of Icelandic retailers carry Netgíró because it converts — a fast checkout, and the option for a customer to spread the cost. In 2022 the platform passed 10 billion krónur successfully lent.
1 in 5
Icelandic adults use it
2,000+
Merchants on the platform
50%
Fewer loan defaults after ML scorecards
2013
Built and run by Moberg ever since
“Netgíró achieved an important milestone in 2022 when it successfully lent 10 billion kr. Moberg deserves a lot of credit for this accomplishment, and for all that we have been through together.”
We build it, and we stay
There is a detail in this story that says more than the product did: the client CEO whose platform we built eventually came to work at the company that built it. That is the principle in a sentence — we build it, and we stay. A small senior team can put together the infrastructure a whole country's payments run on, and then keep answering the phone about it. Thirteen years later, we still do.
