Lumiant

Overview

Lumiant is a SaaS platform built to help financial advisers shift client conversations beyond money and markets — toward life values, goals, and what genuinely matters to people. I was engaged as product lead for over a year, taking the product from initial validation through to launch and a revenue-generating operational state, on track to generate over $5M in annual recurring revenue in 2023.

The engagement was through strategic design consultancy Tobias, brought in by a foundational group of Australian financial advisers who wanted to build a compliance-first, human-centred advice platform.

My Role

Product Lead / Head of Product — a startup hybrid role spanning research, product design, product management and delivery management, QA, and community management. I played the product owner role within an agile scrum team that grew to include a product designer, scrum master, one backend developer, and two front-end developers.

The Problem

Financial advisers and planners play multiple roles for clients — financial guide, trusted counsellor, and in many cases life coach. The trouble is this level of service is difficult to charge for, deliver consistently, and demonstrate value from.

The Australian financial planning industry faced compounding headwinds: regulatory change following the findings of the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry, combined with a shift in client expectations toward self-service and tangible value for the cost of advice. The status quo was an industry moving slowly away from a product-based commission model, with fragmented toolchains, increasing compliance overhead, and rising fees with no clear client benefit.

Our hypothesis was that by providing a tool to shift the conversation to a higher level — based on life values, not money — advisers could foster longer and more valuable relationships with their clients. Values-based advice had been espoused by experts such as Bill Bacharach since the 1970s, but had never been delivered at scale in the Australian market.

Process

Discovery

We researched pain points and opportunities across the adviser-client journey through interviews with the foundation group of advisers. Key adviser pain points fell into four themes: coaching and compliance friction, operational friction, and service model friction. Several platform modules were mapped and prioritised from this work, supported by a service blueprint spanning the full advice journey.

Design and concept testing

The concept design phase ran over eight weeks divided into four two-week sprints, each focused on validating the most important question for each module — in the spirit of lean UX.

One of the key modules — Your Values — a card-based interactive experience drawing on five behavioural frameworks to structure genuine conversations between advisers and clients:

• Dimensions of Wellness (Swarbrick)
• Core Motivators (Fogg — Stanford Persuasive Design Lab)
• Theory of Basic Values (Schwartz)
• LifeValues (Vitt)
• Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (Hayes)

Various rounds of concept testing were conducted with advice clients and advisers around Australia before build commenced.

Build phase

We used agile scrum to iterate toward releases. Technical foundations and the first two modules were prioritised for initial alpha build. Alongside the product and tech stream, branding workshops established the Lumiant name, brand, and go-to-market strategy.

Alpha validation

Due to COVID restrictions, early product testing was largely remote — fourteen sessions using the RITE (Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation) approach. Both physical card-based and digital versions of the experience were designed and tested. Recordings and verbatims from real advice clients informed both product development and marketing materials for sales and capital raising.

Beta validation

Putting the product into the hands of foundation customers to self-serve surfaced a significant change management challenge — the product did not yet cover an end-to-end process and support was not yet operationalised. Training documentation and induction sessions were critical. During this phase we observed how different advice practices were adapting the Lumiant process to their existing workflows, which shaped the product’s flexibility going forward. Analytics instrumentation including HotJar complemented direct adviser feedback.

Transition to operational phase

Once the value proposition was validated, the focus shifted to setting up operations to deliver the SaaS solution at scale. My involvement included:

• Setting up support and training infrastructure
• Supporting sales and marketing with product information and conversion optimisation
• Setting up billing and BI dashboards for product analytics
• Onboarding new staff and defining roles and responsibilities
• Refactoring earlier work as new insights emerged
• Setting up a modular design system and rationalising product elements
• Incorporating lean UX and rapid prototyping workflows into ongoing agile delivery

The Product

The platform comprised adviser and client portals with five foundational modules:

• Your Confidence — a survey for clients to self-assess areas of their financial life
• Your Values — a card-based interactive conversation to surface what matters most
• Your Goals — a method to align goals and strategies to living values
• Your Investment Preferences — video courseware to collect informed investment consent
• Your Lifebook — a high-fidelity client dashboard and Record of Advice generated at the click of a button

Banking and investment portfolio integration was built for the client side; practice management software integration was built on the adviser side.

Outcomes

During my tenure, Lumiant achieved:

• Establishment of annual recurring revenue — on track for $5M+ in 2023
• 14 advice practices, 39 advisers, 150 active households, with contracted agreements for a further 900 households
• 2 successful capital raises grossing over $2M

Lumiant’s social impact extended beyond financial advice — driving financial inclusion for women, investment strategies aligned to client values, and higher engagement from millennial investors prioritising values-based investing.