Case Study: Bright Finance
Short form
Bright Finance helped people pay off their home loans far faster than the 30-year default, using a specific process built around offset accounts. From 2005, Redgum built that process into software that let clients enter their own income and expenses and watch their financial future redraw itself on a graph. The advice stayed with Bright Finance; the picture moved into the client’s hands.
The challenge
Bright Finance’s process worked, but it ran on staff time. Every client’s figures were gathered by hand, modelled in a spreadsheet behind the scenes, and presented back at the next monthly or quarterly review. The banks offer versions of this thinking now; back then it was a distinct service, and every client added weight. The service that made the business distinctive was also the thing that limited how many people it could serve.
What we built
We built the process into a planning system. Clients logged in and entered it all themselves: monthly income, monthly expenses, the yearly items that ambush a budget. The system did the modelling that used to live in the spreadsheet and showed the result as a forward projection, a predicted graph of where the money was going.
What Bright Finance discovered was that clients did not treat data entry as a chore. In most households one partner filled it in diligently and watched the graphs change over time, so the household had a clear, current picture of its own finances, often for the first time. A client wondering about a holiday, a new car or a major purchase could add it in, watch what it did to the overall picture, and decide at their own kitchen table. Bright Finance still provided the advice; the client now held the information.
The outcome
The manual gathering, modelling and presentation cycle came off the staff’s desks, and the distinctive process scaled past the hours available to run it. For Bright Finance’s customer group in particular, people who often could not afford ongoing paid advice, this was access to a financial picture they otherwise could not get. The relationship changed shape without weakening: the client ran the picture, Bright Finance guided what to do with it, and client engagement deepened and held over the following eight years.
“Your Blueprint process and advice for a non-technical person made it clear what I was getting and allowed me to meet my needs within the budget I had … I look forward to engaging Redgum in future projects.”
— Chris Bright, Bright Finance