Offshore Excellence in a Highly-Regulated, High-Complexity Niche with Brian Jones of VA Platinum

Brian Jones, CEO and founder of VA Platinum, joins the Outsource Accelerator Podcast to explain how he built one of the largest offshore staffing firms serving a single, highly regulated niche: Australian financial planners and mortgage brokers.

With 850 staff and eight years in a field most providers avoid, Brian lays out why deep specialisation, heavy training, and trust — not low cost — are what make complex offshore work succeed.

VA Platinum

VA Platinum places dedicated offshore teams in the Philippines for Australian financial services businesses, working across two sites in Cebu and Davao.

An ex-financial planner, Brian started the company to solve his own staffing problem. He now serves around 400 clients and is the second-largest provider to Australian financial planners and the largest to mortgage brokers.

“VA Platinum’s been going for eight years. I fell into the business as an ex-financial planner, and a few friends asked if I could help them find some team members in the Philippines.

Fast-forward to today, we pretty much deal 95% with Australian financial services businesses. We’ve got about 850 team members across two locations, one in Cebu and one in Davao.”

Why a regulated niche is an advantage, not a limit

Far from confining the business, Australia’s compliance burden is what created the opportunity. Brian estimates the total market at 35,000 potential clients — with only around 3% currently outsourcing.

“The Australian government loves to put red tape upon red tape upon red tape in financial services. A simple advice document for a financial planner could go up to a minimum of 20 pages, but up to 100 pages long…

So when [our clients] lose [an employee] in Australia and replace them with two in the Philippines, working from our office in a compliant environment — they just can’t do it without us.”

Clients rarely arrive at scale. The average VA Platinum client has just 1.9 team members, growing gradually as trust builds.

“They never replace Australians with Australians. They only replace Australians with Filipinos.”

A training team, not a staffing desk

VA Platinum recruits per client rather than in bulk, and runs an in-house training operation that Brian compares to a university course.

“We have a training team of 14 headcount… seven on the mortgage broking, seven in the financial planning.

It’s almost like going to a one-year TAFE course. We don’t ever hire green VAs out of university. They’ve got to have at least three to five years’ work in the industry.”

That bar has risen sharply as clients demand specialists who can hit the ground running.

“Three years ago, 80% of our hires were just green to financial services.

It’s now flipped — only about 40% green to the industry, and our clients now really want 60% of the hires to be specialized with at least two, three years’ experience and some form of AI experience.”

AI in a highly regulated industry

Brian is an outspoken AI advocate, but in his niche the tools are prescribed from the top down, by the licensees clients belong to, which removes the guesswork.

“Without AI, our team members at VA Platinum could not support their clients as well as they can. Most of our clients don’t want to learn the AI tools themselves…

So the clients are saying to their team members in the Philippines, ‘Please learn all the AI tools.'”

He sees AI reshaping the work without replacing the people, and expects regulation — especially around data sovereignty — to define the limits.

“It’ll only take one AI tool to have a leak of Australia’s client data in financial services, and it’ll put the cat amongst the pigeons.

I believe that businesses must use it, but there will be some guardrails that will come in the next five years that will combine people and AI. I can’t see AI ever totally replacing the people element.”

From back office to client-facing — and the trust behind it

Most clients start out adamant their offshore team will never touch their customers. It rarely lasts.

“Over 90% of our team members working for clients are already customer-facing… Most of our new clients come to us saying, ‘I don’t think I’ll ever want my Philippine team member dealing directly with my clients.’

Within four months they’re like, ‘Oh my God, please handle those things directly with my clients.’ It’s that aha moment that brings a smile to my face.”

Earning that trust rests on a government-grade secure environment and on getting clients into the office.

“We literally run a government-grade data secure operation… It’s pretty rare these days that we don’t have at least one or two clients over in our office every single week.

They come to check it out, work beside their team members, and once they get that confidence, they go back home to Australia.”

Coaching the client, not just supplying the team

VA Platinum trains its clients as deliberately as its VAs, through a dedicated course and relationship managers.

“For the clients I’ve also built a 35-module course just to teach them how to run better businesses…

If you only tackled one, it just wouldn’t work. Tackling both gives the clients a better chance of success — but it also means the team members in the Philippines are getting pay rises of 10% or 20% a year. Some are even getting 50% in their first two or three years because they become indispensable.”

For Brian, eight years in the niche prove that even the most regulated, relationship-driven work can be delivered offshore. The key is deep training, secure infrastructure, and people clients learn to trust.

To learn more about VA Platinum, visit vaplatinum.com.au or connect with Brian Jones through email at brian@vaplatinum.com.au.

If you’d like to learn more about what we do in the outsourcing space, send us an email at ask@outsourceaccelerator.com.