Credefence

The problem

Device financing works on trust that the borrower keeps paying after they walk out with the phone. Retailers in the market this targeted had no mechanism for that beyond hoping, so they either priced the risk in heavily or did not offer financing at all.

What I did

Built the platform end to end, alone.

An admin portal for the financing operator, a retailer portal for the shops issuing devices, and an Android device-owner agent that does the enforcement: remote lock, factory reset protection so a wipe does not clear the obligation, and QR-based zero-touch provisioning so a retailer can enrol a device without touching a settings screen. More than 70 API endpoints behind it, with payment collection integrated.

The device-owner agent was the hard part. Android’s device owner APIs give you real control, and the provisioning flow has to work in a shop, in one pass, by someone who is not technical and has a customer waiting.

What changed

It reached production. The launch was then blocked by a Google platform policy change to the device owner APIs the whole enforcement model depended on. That is the risk of building on someone else’s platform controls, and I did not price it in.

It is here because the engineering holds up, and because how it ended is worth saying plainly.