Bluestone

24 Feb 2020

Modernising financial services and improving customer experience with cloud

Operating for more than 20 years, Bluestone manages over $9 billion in mortgages and employs more than 250 people across Sydney, Auckland, and Manila. Bluestone helps customers by providing home loans that are personal, accessible and designed to help more customers, more often.  

A leading operator in Australia’s non-bank lending market, the organisation has a vision for further expansion and growth. 

Bluestone sought to modernise several aspects of its business. In particular to improve its ability to securely integrate technology with partners without changing their legacy loan platform. 

With growth in their digital business, they needed a solution that could keep up with their customers’ changing needs. As a financial institution, Bluestone required flexibility without compromising the protection of their customers’ data. 

“But not having that skillset native to our business, we could not deliver a project of this scale on time and to the standard that we’re looking,” 

Tim Miller, Chief Operations Officer at Bluestone. 

Key issues

  • Bluestone sought to modernise aspects of its business
  • A key focus of modernisation was to improve its ability ot securely integrate new technology without changing their legacy loan platform
  • Bluestone required flexibility without compromising the protection of their customers' data
Mother and child playing on lounge

Solution

Telstra Purple brought the experience and expertise to deliver an end-to-end solution that addressed Bluestone’s needs at present and could adapt to meet their needs in the future.

The modernisation of Bluestone’s core mortgage platform with Azure involved near real-time integration and data flows with customers to improve business communications.

Telstra Purple delivered a complete cloud solution while also providing Bluestone with process improvements, training, and reference architectures. The Telstra Purple team co-located with Bluestone for eight months, fully immersing themselves into the company and culture. 

The solution delivered is highly automated, reducing risk and deployment time while maximising quality. The Telstra Purple team brought in their deep knowledge of solution architecture, Azure infrastructure, application development and DevOps to modernise this area of operations, and prepare it for future expansion and upgrades.

“By bringing together their experts and co-locating them in our business, Telstra Purple was able to quickly deliver a flexible cloud solution that will grow as our business does,” said Tim.

Outcome

The solution, delivered from design to deployment, is aligned with Bluestone’s growth strategy. Having a co-located team, not only brought expertise, but also exposure to opportunities to improve process and culture which resulted in better solution delivery.

“As a business, we’ve got a pretty tight culture, and Telstra Purple have seamlessly folded into our team. The experience was absolutely trouble-free, and the work was of the highest quality,” said Tim.

The shift to Azure infrastructure allowed Bluestone to rapidly upgrade ageing hardware without requiring expensive on-premise infrastructure.

The capability and architectures developed for the project have been used for subsequent projects and will continue to be used in future, cutting down the duration of future designs and builds. 

“Our intention is to move our business to the cloud, and I think the framework we’ve built with Telstra Purple has set us up for future projects as we go further along our cloud journey." 

Satisfied with the solution and the experience of working with Telstra Purple, Bluestone is looking to continue the collaboration beyond their initial project together.

“After delivering this first project, the Telstra Purple team went immediately into another one which they are currently finalising, before they start scoping work on a third project,” said Tim.