RapidScale, a Cox Business company and leading provider of enterprise managed and professional services for public, private, and hybrid cloud environments, announced how it delivered measurable growth outcomes in partnership with Barrett Financial Group, one of the largest mortgage brokerages by volume in the US, using AI to eliminate operational bottlenecks, reduce costs, and build a scalable cloud and data foundation to support the company's rapid national growth.

The Challenge:
After nearly 20 years in business, Barrett Financial more than quadrupled its headcount from 300 to 2,000 employees between 2021 and 2025. With an ambitious growth plan to become the largest mortgage broker in the country, its technology and operational processes had not kept pace.

Several labor-intensive manual processes limited the company's ability to scale. In one instance, Barrett relied on a team of six people to manually track more than 30 data points for each loan—a complex regulatory puzzle, with different requirements in nearly every state. While this process was sustainable when closing 300 loans per month, it quickly became a costly operational bottleneck as volume grew, mandating a fundamental workflow redesign.

Brokering New Ground:
Barrett initially came to RapidScale for Microsoft 365 license management and expanded email security support, but executive conversations about the company's growing pains sparked a broader digital transformation initiative.

"RapidScale and Cox Business spent two days onsite meeting with every team to understand how our business actually runs, the data and tools our teams need to support loan officers, and where there were opportunities for improvement," said Zach Barrett, chief strategy officer at Barrett Financial Group. "They came back to our leadership with AI-driven solutions tailored for our business that we didn't realize were possible."

RapidScale built several cloud-native applications tailored to Barrett Financial's operational and regulatory requirements. Key initiatives include:

• Automated regulatory loan data reporting: Replaced manual, spreadsheet-based tracking with a custom cloud-native application, reducing the process from six employees to one, enabling staff reallocation to focus on growth initiatives and delivering an estimated $150,000 in annual cost savings.
• Centralized data foundation for AI-powered lending operations: Implemented a governed AWS data lake to support AI initiatives, which reduced repetitive data entry while improving loan processing speed, data accuracy and operational efficiency.
• AI-enabled employee intranet and internal chatbot: Built a modern intranet with unified access to business tools and resources, integrated with an internal AI chatbot that accelerates information discovery and streamlines employee workflows.
• Payroll automation modernization: Deploying a high-volume payroll automation system designed to streamline finance operations and deliver projected savings of more than $1 million annually.

Transformative Outcomes:
Barrett now operates on a secure, fully managed cloud foundation designed to support aggressive national growth. RapidScale's partnership enabled Barrett to scale from closing roughly 300 loans per month to more than 3,000, representing more than $11 billion in mortgages annually. Backed by Cox Business fiber connectivity solutions, Barrett's time-sensitive operations are more agile and positioned to grow with the company as it plans to onboard 10,000 employees by 2030.

"Evaluating AI service providers revealed most offered out-of-the-box tools built for generic use cases, but RapidScale helped us realize we could create solutions tailored to our exact needs," said Brayden Farr, chief growth officer at Barrett Financial Group. "The rollout has been smoother than anyone expected, with our entire team trained to use our cloud tools, securely sharing data between employees and across offices, and has truly changed how much each team member can accomplish each day."

"Our goal is to become an extension of our customers' businesses and focus on measurable outcomes that deepen their competitive edge—an approach that allows us to intelligently solve for nearly any business problem," said Duane Barnes, president of RapidScale. "By deeply understanding how Barrett operates and continually working with their teams to optimize as they grow, we're privileged to continue to make an impactful difference in achieving the outcomes that matter most."