About Finance OS
Two businesses on one domain, and we would rather you heard that from us than worked it out later. One is a publication that compares the software Australian mortgage and finance brokers run. The other is Finance OS, which we build and sell — and which gets scored by the same sheet as everything else.
Why this exists
Aggregator BDMs recommend what their panel pays them to recommend. Vendors demo their best five minutes. Facebook groups recommend whatever the loudest member bought last quarter. None of that is dishonest, exactly — it is just not independent, and it is what most software decisions in this industry are made on.
What a tool is like on day forty. Where the integration actually breaks. What the migration cost in hours. The parts that decide whether a purchase was right are the parts nobody writes down, because writing them down takes longer than a review is usually worth.
A published criteria sheet, the same weights for every product in a category, a named reviewer, a dated verdict, and a re-test when the software changes. If a review cannot meet that, it does not go up. That is a slower way to build a publication and it is the only one worth building.
The standard
Six rules. They are deliberately inconvenient, because a rule that is easy to keep is not doing any work.
Published criteria
The sheet is public before anything is scored against it, and the weights are the same for every product in a category.
A named reviewer
Every verdict carries a person’s name. Nothing publishes as “our team”.
A date on the page
Software changes. A verdict without a date is a verdict you cannot judge.
A stated boundary
What we did not test is written down alongside what we did.
Corrections in public
If we get something wrong and you tell us, it is fixed with a note saying it was fixed.
No paid placement
Position is not for sale, and no vendor sees a review before it publishes.
The mechanics are on the methodology page, and the scoring sheet with its weights is on the criteria page. Both are public so you can hold us to them.
The people
Every verdict is signed by a person, so here they are. If you think one of them got something wrong, they are the one to tell.
Ex-NAB, Bank of Melbourne & Westpac · Founder, Oakbury Financial Group (sold)
Tumai Meroiti spent his early career inside Australian retail banking — NAB, Bank of Melbourne and Westpac — before founding Oakbury Financial Group, a Collins Street mortgage brokerage he later sold. He now builds systems for brokers and tests the software the industry runs on.
Full profile
The entity
Publishing this is not a formality. A site that reviews software and sells software should be trivially easy to identify.
Corrections carry more weight here than compliments. If a fact, a score or a date on any page is wrong, it gets fixed with a note saying so.
