Aktiv Kapital

"For an ordinary debt collection agency, growth depends on acquiring new corporate customers with many bad payers. The secret is to recruit diligent employees and create good routines for following up on cases. In the fifteen years Norbrekken ran collections, it was good business, but his major coup came when he realized the gold mines hidden in the major banks' loan portfolios. Aktiv Kapital's first coup was to buy all the loan letters from Storebrand Finans. There was a lot of consumer loans, not too high amounts on each. Thus, he could let the fee machine run, and the poor customers soon discovered that it was not enough to pay the original debt. Now, interest and fees had to be paid. A loan of 4500 kroner could easily end up costing over 17,000 kroner in the end. The really big coup for Aktiv Kapital was in 2003, when they secured all the defaulted loans from Nordea, formerly Kreditkassen. For just 262.5 million kroner, they took over the debt relations of 21,200 Norwegian private individuals who collectively owed 3.7 billion kroner."

"From Nordea, they thus bought debt for 3.7 billion kroner, but only paid about seven percent of the outstanding amount. In Steinar’s example, this means that Aktiv Kapital took over the debt relationship of 1.5 million kroner, but only paid 105,000 kroner for the debt letter. Then it was just to turn the thumbscrews on the poor debt slave: If you brought in more than 105,000 kroner, everything above was pure net. And if the debtor could only manage to pay interest, it was calculated from the whole loan amount of 1.5 million kroner – which gave Aktiv Kapital 15 times as high interest as normal. Such business could not fail!"