Elmera says yes to more customers, without a rise in defaults
Elmera Group, the company behind Fjordkraft, Fjordkraft Mobil and Trøndelagkraft, chose Bislab as its new credit information provider and made the switch in January 2026. Today nine in ten new customers get a yes, and advisors get help from an AI agent to find the latest on the companies they assess.
It started with manual searches
A credit report shows what is in the public registers. It says little about what has happened to a company in recent months, such as whether it has won a big contract or posted a weak quarter. Elmera's advisors had to google that themselves, one application at a time.
Milun Majstorovic, Group Credit & Liquidity Manager at Elmera, raised this in a meeting with Bislab early in the collaboration. A first version of a news agent was ready quickly, and a little over a month after that meeting every advisor at Elmera was using it.
More on the news agent below. First, a look at what makes credit for electricity and mobile different.
Credit assessment for electricity and mobile is a different game
Elmera sells electricity and mobile subscriptions to consumers and businesses. Every new customer gets a credit assessment before the contract starts, often while they wait for an answer.
Signing up for electricity or a mobile subscription has little in common with applying for a loan. The bill comes every month, and for most consumers it is small. Power and phone bills are among the last bills people stop paying, and the ones that do reach debt collection tend to be settled quickly. In the business market, by contrast, a single invoice can run to several million kroner a month. A standard scorecard ignores all of this. It looks for financial risk in the broadest sense and turns away many people who would have paid. They tend to go straight to a competitor.
The scorecard Bislab runs for Elmera is built for energy and telecom. It draws on debt collection data and is calibrated together with Elmera's debt collection partner. It estimates how likely a customer is to end up with an unpaid electricity or telecom claim within the next year. That lets Elmera say yes to customers who look weak on paper but who, in practice, pay their bills.
“Their industry-specific approach to energy and telecom gives us great confidence in our credit management.”
One API for five companies
Bislab delivers credit assessments to all five companies through a single API. Many applicants are approved on a soft credit check alone, and the rest go through the scorecard. The decision itself stays with Elmera, in its own system and by its own rules.
Two weeks after Elmera got access, the first applications were going through. Advisors in credit and sales used the portal from day one, and Milun personally reviewed almost every customer who was credit checked after the switch. “Whenever we have found shortcomings or suggested improvements, Bislab has been quick and proactive,” he says.
The portal also gives advisors AI decision support. It summarises the credit picture and explains in plain language why a company has the rating it has, set against Elmera's own guidelines. The final call is still the advisor's.
More get a yes, fewer fall through the cracks
Over the summer, nine in ten applicants got a yes. More than half of all applicants were approved on a soft credit check.
The scorecard shows its worth among those who go on to a full credit check. Early in the summer, roughly three in four of them got a yes. By the end of the summer it was more than four in five, and the share turned away for lack of a rating had fallen by almost a third.
When the model gives no rating, there is usually a good reason. Almost nine in ten applicants without one have an active record showing they have no assets that can be seized, known in Norway as intet til utlegg. Among applicants with a rating, fewer than one in a hundred do.
A good scorecard has two jobs: finding the people who will not pay, and turning away as few as possible. The better it tells the two groups apart, the more people can get a yes at the same level of risk.
“Since we switched, we haven't seen any noticeable increase in payment defaults.”
What the credit report doesn't show
The news agent now does the searching that advisors used to do by hand.
When an advisor opens a company's credit report, the agent appears as Internet search, right next to the AI decision support. It reads the Norwegian business press, including DN, Finansavisen, E24 and Shifter, along with regional papers, quarterly reports and stock exchange notices. It concentrates on the past year and skips anything already in the report.
What comes back is a short assessment, green or yellow, with the key findings in bullet points and a link to every source.
Milun tested the first version himself before it was rolled out. He wrote that it suits the sales team especially well, since they don't need to dig deep into the details.
Bjørge Pedersen, Head of Group Risk Management & Finance at Elmera, called it “a good step in the right direction”. Today the news agent is part of the credit report for every Bislab customer that uses AI decision support.
“The internet search is gold. I use the portal every day, and it's much better now than when we started.”
Milun tests it first
Milun works through credit cases every day and is quick to spot what isn't working. Early on, he offered to help with testing and to act as a sounding board, and he has played that role ever since.
When a rule hits a group of customers the wrong way, Elmera tells us. Bislab looks at the numbers and Elmera's developers adjust the rule. Several of these cases have been resolved in under a week. Other times, a new need comes up. Elmera wanted to see how a customer's creditworthiness has changed over time, and Bislab now offers historical credit scores.
“With AI, we can go from a customer's problem to something they can test in a matter of hours. Elmera has shown us just how much building together is worth.”
