Legacy systems and labor-heavy processes have held financial institutions back. Bluline’s co-founder Mark Atkinson A FIN shares how automation is changing the game.

Customer remediation remains one of the most complex and resource-intensive challenges facing financial institutions today. Fragmented legacy systems and inconsistent processes often lead to inefficiencies, backlogs, compliance risk, and regulatory fines.

Many institutions have attempted to solve this by throwing large teams at the problem, relying on manual spreadsheets, outsourcing to expensive consulting firms, or adopting piecemeal automation. But despite these efforts, costs continue to rise, progress is slow, and pressure from regulators such as ASIC continues to mount.

With the emergence of advanced technologies—including workflow automation and integrated data solutions—there’s now a real opportunity to reimagine how financial institutions deliver customer remediation.

In this Q&A, FINSIA speaks with Mark Atkinson, one of the Co-Founders of Bluline Technologies, to explore the drivers behind Bluline’s mission and examine how banks can address longstanding remediation challenges in smarter, faster, and more sustainable ways.

What experiences or patterns did you observe that ultimately inspired you to found Bluline?

What inspired the founding of Bluline wasn’t so much a single lightbulb moment, but a shared frustration across our founding team with how financial institutions were handling customer remediation at scale. From within the banking trenches, we saw firsthand how traditional approaches were falling short. In fact, according to ASIC’s Report 800, 217 customer remediation cases exceeded 12 months to resolve, indicating a significant backlog and manual processing. 

A common response was to throw more people at the problem or outsource to expensive firms, but these fixes are unsustainable. Manual processes couldn’t scale. Siloed teams slowed down decision-making. Tools weren’t integrated, so compliance checks, payments, and reporting were fragmented. As a result, timelines stretched into months, sometimes even over a year, and that delay wasn’t just costly; it was a reputational risk for the bank and a frustrating experience for customers waiting for compensation.

We founded Bluline to address these challenges head-on: to create a solution that automates the entire remediation process from end to end, built from within a bank’s secure environment. We’re out to help banks restore trust at scale faster, mitigate risks, and deliver better outcomes for both the institution and its customers.

Why do you think so many financial institutions still rely on legacy, manual processes for remediation?

Customer remediation is one of the most complex operational challenges in financial services, and many institutions have defaulted to legacy, manual processes simply because they’re familiar—and perhaps perceived to be safer. These processes often evolved as stopgaps: spreadsheets, standalone tools, and project teams of hundreds of people brought in to patch over issues when they arise. Over time, these fixes became embedded, even though they weren’t built to scale or adapt.

Now, the stakes are high: compliance, customer trust, fines, and significant financial outlays are all on the line. That understandably makes institutions cautious. There’s a natural reluctance to overhaul existing systems, especially when they sit across multiple business units and touch sensitive customer data. Many also assume that automation can address only parts of the problem, and that full integration will be too costly, disruptive or impossible due to the complexity.

But these concerns are now outdated. The truth is, manual processes introduce more risk, not less. They’re time-consuming, error-prone, and difficult to audit. As ASIC’s data shows, delays and inefficiencies in remediation are still widespread. The challenge isn’t that automation doesn’t exist; it’s that financial institutions need the confidence to adopt solutions purpose-built for this exact problem, designed to fit securely within their existing environments.

As regulatory scrutiny intensifies, how should banks rethink risk and compliance in the context of customer remediation?

We’re seeing a clear shift: risk and compliance are no longer just about reacting to problems—they’re about building systems that prevent them. With ASIC reinforcing expectations through RG 277, the institutions that lead will be those that move beyond manual patchwork and embed automation across the remediation life cycle. Automation reduces risk by enforcing consistency, accelerating timelines, and providing auditable transparency. The cost of inaction is growing—backlogs, fines, and reputational damage directly impact customer trust and share value. The winners will be those who treat remediation as a strategic priority, not a cost centre. Those who don’t will be left behind.

Can you walk us through what an “end-to-end remediation model” looks like in practice?   

Our end-to-end remediation platform brings together every stage of the customer remediation life cycle into one integrated, automated system. Rather than stitching together solutions—or relying on spreadsheets and manual workflows—it starts by securely gathering data and automatically identifying impacted customers and determining payment eligibility. From there, it calculates total customer impact, conducts compliance checks, generates communications, processes payments, manages exceptions, and closes out incidents, all within the same platform.

With our precise, compliant-by-design platform, every action is auditable. Every rule is enforced consistently. This eliminates guesswork and human error as well as reduces costs and incident resolution times. Our results for Westpac demonstrate what’s possible: in the first year of implementation, the bank halved its remediation operations spend, doubled its output, cleared the backlog, and resolved complex incidents that previously took more than a year - in just four weeks.

The impact of this is that the board went from red to green. The bank moved ahead of its compliance obligations under ASIC’s RG 277. And millions of customers received fast, accurate outcomes - helping restore trust at scale.

We’re now in active implementation discussions with three of the Big 4 banks in Australia, all facing similar pressures to improve customer outcomes while reducing costs and risk. Reach out to continue the conversation

Where do you see the biggest opportunity for AI to improve the remediation process today—and what are the limitations? How do you see the remediation space evolving as technology continues to mature?

AI holds real promise for improving customer remediation. Although much of the remediation process must remain deterministic and explainable, there are key areas where AI can help, such as reviewing customer contracts and flagging telltale signs of potential incidents early. That said, limitations remain around governance, explainability, and regulatory acceptance - especially in high-stakes financial environments. As the technology matures, remediation models will become more proactive and predictive.