Knoma

Overview

Knoma lent people the cost of a coding bootcamp or tech course, interest-free, repaid in instalments. Learn now, pay later. I was CTO: I led product and engineering, reported to the board, and set strategy with the CEO. The loan book grew from £0.5m to £15m during my tenure.

What I did

• Scaled the product, data and engineering team from 1 developer to 9.
• Re-platformed credit underwriting, integrating with Taktile as the decisioning engine. This cut the cost of decisioning a loan from £12 to £2.20 and fixed underwriting costs from £120k a month to £25k.
• Built a loan management system on top of Modulr for payments, handling disbursement and collection across the life of a loan.
• Built a data and compliance platform used by the FCA, investors and the risk team, on Rails, DBT and Snowflake.
• Created merchant tools that increased loan volume 800% over 10 months.
• Migrated from Salesforce/Apex and PHP microservices into a Rails monolith.
• Kept the platform aligned with FCA, auditor and banking compliance requirements.

The stack decisions that mattered

Replacing a bespoke Apex underwriting system with Taktile meant risk analysts could change policy themselves instead of queuing behind engineers, which is where most of the cost saving came from. Moving payments onto Modulr gave us a regulated rail we did not have to build or maintain, so the loan management system could focus on the lending logic rather than the plumbing.