Turning aged care strategy into delivery capability

Alyve helped South East Community Links design the AI foundations for a financial counselling programme serving more than 2,000 community members a year — reducing administrative pressure while protecting the trust that makes the service work.

8 weeks

Rapid delivery cadence

2

Priorities held together

1

Unified governance framework

Opportunity

South East Community Links runs Bring Your Bills Day events across South East Melbourne.

The model is deliberately human. Community members sit with financial counsellors, talk through debt, understand their rights and leave with a practical plan. For many CALD and First Nations community members, that face-to-face trust is central to why the programme works.

Demand was growing. More than 2,000 people were supported each year, with approximately $1.5 million in debt resolved.

But the service model was under strain.

Triage relied on English-language paper forms. Counsellors spent hours preparing debt summaries, case notes and creditor documentation. Client information sat across multiple systems. At one point, more than 110 people were waiting for support while the team worked through the administrative load behind each case.

SECL had already improved the process with manual tools, including a debt summary spreadsheet and an intake tracker. Those changes helped reduce the waitlist to 33.

The next constraint was more structural. The programme needed a way to reduce repeated administration, support multilingual access and reuse information safely across the service.

Solution

Alyve designed a four-layer AI foundation for the programme.

The first layer structured the documents and data that sit behind the service: client information, service records and organisational knowledge.

The second layer captured the context needed for AI to respond appropriately: service rules, financial counselling logic, referral pathways and the judgement points where a human needed to stay in control.

The third layer focused on how the capability would be used in practice: by community members preparing for an event, and by counsellors working through triage, case notes and debt documentation.

The fourth layer defined the guardrails: privacy, acceptable use, human review, data minimisation and the situations where AI should not be used.

Two products were then designed on top of that foundation.

The first was Billy, a multilingual AI companion for community members navigating the Bring Your Bills process. Billy supports registration, document preparation, triage translation, event navigation, referrals and follow-up.

The second was a set of internal workflow tools for counsellors, including debt summary generation, case note support, creditor letter templates, triage support and caseload dashboards.

Counsellors were involved from the start. The tools were shaped around the work they actually do, where time is lost, and where automation could help without taking judgement away from the practitioner.

The Ethical AI Charter was co-designed with SECL leadership, CALD community representatives and First Nations stakeholders. That work set the rules for acceptable use, privacy, client dignity and human accountability.

Outcome

SECL now has a reusable AI foundation for its financial counselling programme.

Billy is near completion. Internal workflow tools are in progress. Both use the same architecture, which means future tools can build on the same data structure, context logic and governance model.

The immediate benefit is time. Debt summaries, case notes and standard documentation can be prepared faster, giving counsellors more capacity for client-facing work.

The longer-term benefit is scalability. SECL can extend AI use across the service without rebuilding governance, data handling and design principles for every new use case.

The work also positions SECL to scale the model more broadly. The organisation has applied for a Scaling Up Innovation Grant from the Financial Counselling Innovation Fund to extend the approach across the sector.

For a service built on trust, the design choices were critical. Alyve helped SECL use AI to increase capacity while keeping human judgement, community input and client dignity at the centre of the model.

Planning a platform change?

AI can reduce administrative pressure in community services, but the early design decisions matter.

Alyve helps community-service organisations design AI around trust, governance, frontline workflows and long-term scalability.

If your team is exploring AI in a setting where the people you serve are vulnerable, multilingual or navigating complex systems, start with the infrastructure that responsible adoption requires.