Our partnership with the leading telecom A1 has been an 18-year-long digital journey that brought forth a transformative customer app used by over half a million people.
They say that every journey starts with a single step, and Infinum’s long-term cooperation with A1 started with one simple map app built by two computer engineering students. This year, we are celebrating 18 years of partnership – almost two decades filled with tireless work, constant dedication, and building innovation.
Over the years, we’ve also been building our relationship, pushing boundaries, and raising the bar for the quality of digital products on the regional market.
Moj A1 – much more than a telecom customer app
“Tomislav Car and I started working together back when we were still in university, and one of the first products that we built was an app containing city maps called mobyMAP,” reflects Matej Špoler, Infinum’s CTO and co-founder.
“We offered that app to A1 Croatia and our relationship developed into an ongoing cooperation. Since it provided a steady income, it was just the push that we needed to start our own company. This is how Infinum was born – with A1 as our first big client.”
A major corporation recognizing the quality of their work back when they were no more than a couple of ambitious students was a strong motivation for Tomislav and Matej. A few years later, they received an even greater vote of confidence from A1 when Infinum was chosen to build the company’s first user-facing app.
Today, the app Moj A1 is used by over half a million people, and Infinum and A1 still work on its continuous improvement, providing a personalized digital experience to a wide and diverse user base.
“We knew we could do it, we just needed an opportunity and a little wind in our sails, which we got from A1,” says Tomislav. “The fact that we continue to cooperate successfully after 18 years is proof enough of how we clicked as partners. It wouldn’t be off the mark to say that we’ve grown and learned together and still continue to do so.”
Years have gone by, and both companies grew into leaders in our respective fields. The partnership is still going strong, and A1 Croatia’s IT Director Boris Gotovac shares Tomislav’s sentiment:
“Our company is a leader in digitalization in Croatia, which we prove every day by investing in infrastructure, services, and user experience. We are happy that we found a reliable partner in Infinum, which has been with us from their first days through all the dynamic changes brought on by the digital era.”
The head of product marketing at A1 Croatia, Iva Babić, fully agrees:
The quality of Infinum and A1’s cooperation is confirmed by Moj A1’s high app rating and over 500,000 users. We’ve transformed a telecom customer app into something that is so much more.
IVA BABIĆ, HEAD OF PRODUCT MARKETING AND BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT, A1 CROATIA
As Iva Babić explains, the app is now a central hub for A1’s customers. They can use it to check their balance, manage services, change the TV package every month, activate screen insurance, travel insurance, home assistance, or buy a gaming voucher, among other.
“Our two teams have been pushing boundaries together for 18 years, and what we’re most proud of is the fact that developing the app has become a platform for many experts’ professional development,” Iva Babić concludes.
Exceptional people make for exceptional results
Currently, the person probably closest to the A1 project Infinum-side is our star project manager Lucija Zlatar. For years, Lucija has led the Moj A1 project, and still continues to be involved in Infinum’s longest-standing partnership in her current role as project management team lead.
Marking this special anniversary, Lucija pulled up some data that speaks to both sides’ dedication to the project.
Since 2012, more than 50 Infinum experts contributed to developing over 100 versions and updates to the Moj A1 mobile app. UX and UI designers, engineers, PMs, and QA engineers employed their expertise to drive innovation on the project.
“The app’s early versions focused on the basic functionalities like monitoring one’s usage and tariff activation. However, we immediately recognized its potential for future scaling and started building an architecture to support it right from the start. It enables us to continually build up on the functionalities that make the app a key customer communication channel that it is today,” Lucija reflects, adding that only in the past two years there have been around ten significant app updates with a special focus on the user experience.
Apart from the intuitive mobile experience and the innovative features, what makes this project special are people. Some of those involved in setting up the architecture in the app’s first version still work at Infinum, so that all the knowledge and lessons learned stay in-house and are easily passed to newer team members.
“Our cooperation with A1 is characterized by open and transparent communication, which we’ve practiced from the very start. It’s also a philosophy that we live by internally and the way of communication that we promote within teams and the entire company. And when we find a client that we can communicate with in the same way – we don’t let go,” laughingly says CEO Nikola Kapraljević, who was an engineer on the A1 project back when it first kicked off.
Transparency, commitment, and a clear common goal were critical to the project’s success in the past 18 years. We are two teams working at two different companies, but our joint mission is already achieved – to deliver world-class functionalities to users.
The plan for the next 18 years is simple – keep on delivering exceptional results and unprecedented user engagement.
To learn more about our engagement with A1 and the Moj A1 app, check out the client case in our Work section.