Case Study

The Situation

RedZed Lending Solutions is one of the most rapidly growing challengers in the finance space. A specialist lender focused on the needs of the self-employed, the team of 20 accepts applications from a core group of mortgage brokers and are known for their experience, expertise and focus on customer service. This process ensures that each customer gains a personalised level of service that most lenders cannot offer. Resonating strongly with the community, RedZed has been experiencing rapid growth, and this has impacted on their IT needs.

The Challenge

With a rapidly growing business and infrastructure nearing its replacement date, RedZed Lending Solutions were in need of an IT partner what could help them with their changing requirements. They needed to move from a small service provider with limited specialist expertise to a provider that could design an IT solution more suited to the growing complexities of their business.

As Tina Georgiadis, RedZed Lending Solutions IT & Systems Manager stated, “we’re in a position where a service provider is our only real option – we could hire someone to be our IT team but we could come up against a problem where, with a single point of contact, if something goes wrong and that person is on annual leave or is sick, we would struggle to get it resolved in time. Alternatively, if we only had the one IT staff member and the issue was beyond their capability where do they go to for support themselves? And for 20 people recruiting a team of IT people to address those two challenges is not good from a cost benefit point of view.”

RedZed Lending Solutions also required an IT partner to help them determine the best plan of attack to address their current and future technological needs.“We’re not experts on IT, and we don’t know what’s new out there, so we needed someone who could help us and help our strategy moving forwards,” Georgiadis said.

The Solution

RedZed Lending Solutions opted to partner with Brennan after a period of due diligence, despite some concerns from Georgiadis in partnering with a larger provider. “Sometimes when you’re a smaller company like we are, you run the risk of not being important enough to your providers,” she said. “But at the same time I didn’t want to go with a smaller provider again, like the one we had, as that was the root cause of the issues that we had been encountering.

“We were assured by Brennan we would be treated the same regardless of our size, and we’ve been with Brennan for two years now and have found that to be the case.” After partnering with Brennan, the first stage of rollouts focused on updating RedZed Lending Solution’s IT infrastructure. Brennan implemented a virtualised application layer on top of two redundant physical servers, along with SAN, a separate back-up server, and provided managed services through the process and thereafter. From there, Georgiadis said the company has adopted further Brennan services, including Internet services and the Brennan Cloud. There is more to come too through this long-term partnership.

“In about a year’s time our infrastructure will need to be upgraded again and we might look at moving some of our services to the cloud,” Georgiadis said. “We’re always looking for ways to improve the business.”

In finding ways to improve the business, the Brennan relationship has been very beneficial, Georgiadis said. “Because we need someone who can help us develop an IT strategy, Brennan has always been proactive in talking to us about the best ways to help us out and keeping us informed on what is happening in the broader industry. We have come to rely on that expertise.”