Case
AI acceleration year at Enklare: Setting the path towards becoming an AI-first lender
In an era where data is the most valuable currency, Enklare, a leading Swedish loan broker, recognized that staying competitive required more than incremental optimization. The company partnered with Avaus to accelerate the transformation from traditional sales-driven operations to becoming an AI-first lender. This collaboration focused on establishing a strategic operating model and a repeatable framework for AI development, ensuring that innovation would be sustained long after the initial engagement.
Challenge
The Swedish loan broker Enklare had reached a ceiling. Years of incremental, daily optimization of sales had stopped moving the needle, and the raw material for achieving more was sitting unused.
- A large and largely untapped data asset, with no structure or in-house ML capability to make intelligent use of it, and no shortage of ideas competing for attention
- An earlier AI pilot had pointed in a promising direction but left no scalable infrastructure and no repeatable way of working, so initiatives could not compound
- A regulatory track tied to the banking license raised the bar on how disciplined and well-governed the work needed to be
- The Enklare board and management team identified, that without a shared and systematic method for addressing the potential in data, AI and automation, the risk of failing to compound value was clear
“We had large amounts of data that were largely unused. We also had plenty of ideas, but we lacked the capabilities and expertise to turn that data into something meaningful.”
Solution
Enklare partnered with Avaus for strategic guidance as well as operational execution, working side by side with the ambition to accelerate the development of Enklare’s own capabilities. This included:
- A prestudy to define targets, strategy and a roadmap before any building started
- An operating model built around business objectives rather than technology
- A clear and scalable method for identifying, defining, prioritising and implementing use cases
- Acceleration of architectural decisions that otherwise could have taken months
- A gradual onboarding approach for Enklare team members, enabling continuous capability transfer over the course of the assignment
“The biggest value has definitely come from the ‘ways of working’ piece, or the Operating Model. How you source use cases, asses their value, prioritise between them, how you govern progression and prioritisation. That I’d say is by far the biggest contribution, the thing that now enables us to run this internally.”
Outcomes
In a single year, Enklare transitioned from treating AI as a future initiative to operating it in practice, elevating it from a project-based effort to a board-level strategic priority. The concrete outcomes included:
- A composable data architecture with decoupled services, enabling analytics, machine learning and operational activation
- A centralized data model with universal customer identifiers and standardized reporting IDs, ensuring consistent measurement and customer understanding across systems
- Reusable customer profile component that provides a governed foundation for segmentation, personalization and machine learning
- Operationalized AI through automated MLOps pipelines and Reverse ETL, allowing predictions and customer intelligence to be continuously activated in digital marketing and marketing automation platforms
- 3 machine learning models and ~14 use cases mapped across commercial and operational areas
- An operating model for data-driven growth, including enabling the Enklare team to systematically source, prioritise, design and implement use cases, as well as report on business performance and prioritize capabilities
- Increased confidence and shared understanding, enabling the Enklare team to judge what is possible and decide what to pursue next
- AI and machine learning established as a board-level strategic priority and a foundation for the business going forward, not a standalone initiative
- De-risked decisions, accelerated progress and Enklare set up to continue on their own