Written by Mirko Budimir — August 2023
In 2015, through the Alva group — the Icelandic investment company of serial founder Skorri Rafn Rafnsson — Moberg became the engineering arm behind a whole family of Icelandic fintechs: Netgíró, Aktiva, Mynta and Skilum. This is the chapter where one product company learned to build many.
One group, many bets — and one engineering team
By 2015 the Icelandic entrepreneurs behind Netgíró had assembled a portfolio of fintech ventures under one roof — the group that would become Alva Capital. A detail we have always enjoyed: before the rename, the Icelandic holding company was itself called Móberg. The two shared a name before they shared a decade of work.
Every venture in that portfolio needed serious software — payments, lending, billing, collections — and the group's engineering arm was us. In an era when Alva's fintechs were doubling turnover year after year, the Zagreb team was shipping the systems underneath.
Four fintechs, built by Moberg
Netgíró — pay with your phone
Payments · BNPL
The flagship: Iceland's homegrown buy-now-pay-later payment method. A phone number at checkout instead of a card, a barcode at the till, purchases collected on one monthly invoice, instalments split however suits — and loans applied for in the app itself.
Aktiva — Iceland's first online loan market
Lending marketplace
When Aktiva opened in June 2016 it was a national first: an online lánatorg, a loan marketplace connecting borrowers and investors directly, cutting out the overhead of traditional banking to lower the cost to consumers.
Mynta — billing and claims management
Billing & claims
The unglamorous plumbing every economy runs on: invoicing and claims handling, engineered to stay reliable at scale. In 2017 Mynta merged into Inkasso, the fintech that set out to make Icelandic debt collection more human.
Skilum — collections, done decently
Collections
Skilum's stated role says it all: serve both payers and creditors while respecting the relationship between them, and handle what are often difficult situations with a solution in mind. Even the name is a gentle pun — it is good to be í skilum, in good standing.
The fintechs had commerce siblings in the same portfolio, also built by us: Hópkaup, Iceland's first and largest group-buying site — more than 80,000 customers, close to 30% of the country's population — and Heimkaup, the online retail pioneer. Small market, national scale: that combination shaped how we build to this day.
Build once, reuse across a portfolio
Building four fintechs for one group forces a discipline that building one product never does. The payments core, the credit logic, the billing engines and the operational tooling had to be patterns rather than one-offs — shipped for one company, reused by the next. That habit became Moberg's defining idea, and was formalised years later as the Industry Accelerators.
The chapter closed the way Icelandic ventures do. Mynta merged into Inkasso and Aktiva into Netgíró, and in January 2021 Kvika Bank acquired Netgíró, taking a 40% stake in Moberg with it. Alva turned its focus to real estate. We kept the fintech muscle it helped us build.
