How Brighten scales lending without sacrificing trust

Brighten is a specialised non-bank lender with a wide funding program, offering Full Doc, Alt Doc, Expat, Non-Resident, Bridging, Construction, SMSF and Commercial products to borrowers. Brighten pride themselves on excellent, personalised customer service for every applicant.

The innovative lender has grown their loan portfolio by 66% in the last year – all while maintaining zero fraud losses.

Maintaining a flexible risk appetite to accommodate non-traditional loans means ensuring the decisions are made with strong fraud guardrails in place.

The Challenge: Expansion Increases Requirement for Strong Risk Controls

Brighten set out to strengthen its fraud-prevention ecosystem, identifying document analysis as a key opportunity for technology to deliver faster, more effective fraud detection. At the same time, they aimed to increase confidence in application documents while creating a clear path to automating repetitive income-assessment tasks.

As we scaled, we needed technology to strengthen document integrity without slowing down approvals.
Stuart Murray, Head of Credit

While Brighten’s manual assessment remains a key strength in evaluating non-traditional loans, growth has introduced two document-related risks. First, subtle document alterations can be difficult to detect through manual review alone. Second, manual verification processes can slow the approval of transactions Brighten is keen to progress quickly.

The Solution: Give Credit Assessors Better Document Transparency

By integrating Fortiro into application workflows, Brighten now processes documents including payslips, Business Activity Statements, Bank Statements and others, through Fortiro. Fortiro’s ‘Protect Investigator’ surfaces discrepancies like previous versions of documents, data mismatches and font anomalies, so that assessors can confirm ‘gut feel’ of an application they felt wasn’t quite right, or pickup otherwise innocuous alterations of documents in seconds.

“Fortiro supports our risk appetite. When something feels off, Fortiro Protect Investigator gives assessors  quick, objective proof.”
Stuart Murray, , Head of Credit

The team has also tuned their review policy, so extra checks happen where they matter most, without inviting unnecessary attention. Fortiro strengthens already thorough credit teams to validate their decisions, while picking up inconsistencies invisible to the human eye.

The outcomes

By minimising fraud and associated losses, and maintaining strong risk controls, Brighten can offer better interest rates to customers via brokers.

Future Fortiro integrations will also enable Brighten to better use technology to improve service delivery.

“Stronger fraud prevention protects both our investors and the business, while also supporting sharper pricing for customers by reducing losses.”
Stuart Murray, Head of Credit

The Impact

• Cleaner, confident straight-through decisions on genuine applicants
• A robust fraud detection ecosystem that maintains near zero fraud losses
• Deals declined that may have slipped past manual review alone

Book an Intro call with Fortiro today to understand how document fraud detection fits into your application workflows.