Case Study

The Challenge

With offices in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane, this leading non-bank lending specialist has grown to become one of Australia’s leading originators and servicers of commercial and residential mortgages since launching in 2006.

In that time, over $11 billion in commercial, residential, and Self-Managed Super Fund lending solutions have helped borrowers achieve their goals of property acquisition, refinancing, and equity release. And the issue of over $7.5 billion in residential and commercial property securities bonds have bolstered investor portfolios in Australia and overseas.

Technology is critical to this organisation’s operations, underpinning almost every interaction with clients, brokers, lenders, and investors, spanning lending applications and agreements, settlements, payments, and more.

Capturing sensitive personal and financial data is another operational cornerstone. As is stringent security. Privacy remediation is equally vital. The redaction of applicant details, financial obligations, and other digital identifiers are table stakes to remain compliant.

But aging and rigid infrastructure was starting to crimp this organisation’s growth. Dependent upon a handful of increasingly fragile terminal servers, hampered with an environment no longer optimised for their needs and too rigid for their ambitions, faced with increasing security and compliance requirements, and stuck with an unresponsive provider, it was clear this lender needed a clean slate.

The Solution

Having appointed Brennan as their preferred Managed Service Provider, the client’s ask of us was clear: “Provide us with solutions and support in five core areas: Stability, Security, Resilience, Compliance, and Continuity.” Using discovery discussions to reveal their existing challenges, the call was made to start with a refresh of their aging infrastructure.

As preparations for migrating the existing infrastructure onto a Brennan hosted platform began in earnest, it became apparent to all parties that the client’s underlying infrastructure and network needed more attention than anticipated.

Keenly aware of the downside risks to business continuity, and conscious of the urgency for a rebuild from the ground up, we were quick to propose a switch in focus, reprioritise workloads, and detail the implications. Our client gave their full-throated support to the pivot, relegating planned enhancements and upgrades to future workloads.

With Brennan overseeing the transition to the new architecture, the server migration transformed our client’s legacy terminal environment into an open, modern workplace, accessible across the organisation, and supported with enhanced levels of server patching, compliance, and stability.

With the core workload complete, a sequence of enhancements and improvements followed. The ability to manage laptop and desktop machines was boosted with the company-wide deployment of Intune, further enhanced with the addition of mobile device management before our focus turned to rationalising and modernising our client’s servers.

To help our client meet evolving clauses with lenders and insurers, we introduced accelerated patching, enhanced vulnerability management, and integrated an application whitelisting platform, enabling our client to easily create and manage secure allowlists.

Taken as a whole, and implemented ahead of the curve, this body of works have helped align our client’s operating procedures with the Australian Signals Directorate’s Essential Eight mitigation strategies.

The Result

Our client’s core concern – an aging operating environment – has now been revitalised. An uplift in server availability and resilience, coupled with cloud-enabled disaster recovery and right-sized data backup services, have delivered greater peace-of-mind and protection.

As their security focus has grown, Brennan’s tailored solutions – accelerated patching, vulnerability scanning, and device management – have ensured our client’s security posture has become increasingly sophisticated. The evolution and adaptation of our services to align with our client’s evolving compliance requirements, including insurance obligations, has bolstered Board confidence.

As our client has expanded, Brennan-enabled hardware standardisation via InTune has paid huge dividends. InTune deployments have enabled our client’s workforce to work remotely, and from anywhere – a need that came into stark relief during COVID. Critical for operational continuity during the pandemic, quicker device builds and deployments continue to deliver value, streamlining processes and enhancing security as hybrid working becomes the norm. Improved failover states have also resulted in a far more resilient and responsive network.

Our client’s Managed Services resource, formerly overseen in-house, has been replaced by a dedicated full-time Brennan engineer, enabling rapid issue response and the flexibility to be directed to pressing IT issues, under the purview of our client’s IT team.

Brennan’s dedicated support has also strengthened endpoint control on our client’s email and network, protecting the company’s most valuable asset: their reputation.

And as this lender’s overall IT approach has matured, so have their ambitions. Having doubled down on the fundamentals – server performance, application enhancements, and security – our client is now in the box-seat to shift their focus from operations to applications, an area ripe with potential in efficiency gains and value creation.

Early discussions on leveraging AI to achieve greater efficiencies are yielding interesting opportunities in automation as increased market share and book growth continue to be key goals.