Brian Jones built a business on less paperwork

A signature is a small thing to lose a customer over. Yet a loan can spend an astonishing amount of its working life waiting for one, along with the documents, explanations, and follow-up that accompany it. Brian Jones built Gravity Lending around this inconvenient stretch of the journey. The car may already be in the driveway. The financing still has somewhere to go.

Jones is the Austin-based co-founder and CEO of an auto refinance brokerage. His business connects borrowers with lenders and helps the transaction reach completion. It is work with a practical audience: people who would prefer their car payment to demand less of their money, and their paperwork to demand less of their afternoon.

There is a pleasing lack of romance in that proposition. Nobody buys a car for the pleasure of assembling a loan package. Jones’s professional story is about paying attention to the part most people would happily skip.

Thirteen years before the new beginning

Gravity Lending’s operating launch came in May 2019. Jones arrived with a long view of the business. From June 2005 to March 2018, he had been president of RateGenius, working in vehicle refinancing before starting this next chapter.

Nearly thirteen years in one presidency gives the opening of a new company a different character. The transaction was familiar territory. The challenge was to put together an operation that could handle its complications while asking less of the customer.

His professional profile also lists The University of Southern Mississippi. The more substantial education for this particular venture, though, is visible in his career: years spent working in the same lending category that Gravity would enter. The new company had an experienced founder behind its unfamiliar name.

In October 2020, Jones was announced for an Auto Finance Summit discussion alongside Nathan Hecht, founder and chief executive of Rodo, and Toby Russell, co-chief executive of Shift. Their subject was the shift toward online car buying and financing. For a recently launched business, it was a relevant conversation to join: how to meet customers where they wanted to transact.

The signature has to arrive

The problem Jones took on becomes clearer after the application. A borrower still has to provide information and complete the required documents. An appealing website can introduce the business beautifully; the remaining work decides whether the customer gets through it.

Gravity adopted Lightico for digital signatures and document collection. The implementation took days. A customer could receive a secure text message while speaking with an agent, then supply documents and signatures through the phone already in hand. The conversation and the administrative task could move together.

That arrangement gives technology a modest, useful role. A person can help explain what happens next. Software can make the next action easier to complete. The elegance lies in how little ceremony the customer needs to observe.

Early results included a reported 16% faster time to funding and a 90% package return rate. These are historical implementation figures, rather than a promise about every transaction today. They nevertheless describe the kind of improvement Jones was pursuing: a completed process, measured after the application had attracted someone’s interest.

Trade coverage also recorded $25 million in loans during the company’s first fourteen months. A loan volume is a business result; a returned document is an operating detail. Putting them beside one another helps explain the founder’s interest in the machinery between the two.

A company has two customers

Jones’s early writing about Gravity treated lending partners as a central part of the design. The company wanted to give borrowers an easier experience while helping financial institutions process business efficiently. A broker has to make the connection useful at both ends.

In his 2021 account of the model, he described an integrated software setup, customized processes, and a partnership with Stellar Auto Loans for prescreened applications. The lending institution retained control over underwriting. Gravity’s proposition was to help it add lending volume without a corresponding increase in internal staffing.

That is a less conspicuous side of customer service. The borrower sees the instructions and the conversation. The institution needs a workable flow of applications and documents. Jones’s explanation put those needs in the same picture.

His leadership team included Holly Gleason and Tommy Predmore. Gravity’s own account emphasized the team’s accumulated consumer-lending experience and its national network. The founder’s name belongs in the story; so do the people and institutions required to turn a broker’s introduction into a finished transaction.

The company also received Austin Business Journal Best Places to Work recognition in 2020 and 2021. Those company honors add a workplace dimension to the early operating story. Building the customer process also meant building a place where the people handling it would work.

The useful art of leaving things out

Jones’s technology preferences are practical. In a 2021 conversation, he described buying established tools where they already solved the problem and developing internal systems where the business required something particular. He also described comparing the cost, effort, and likely return before committing to a project.

He encouraged listening directly to employees doing the work. His own interests included reading about technology and The Wall Street Journal. Asked what he enjoyed about the job, his answer was disarmingly plain: “waking up every day”.

“Take your time.”

Brian Jones, on choosing technology, 2021

It is advice with a useful tension for a founder selling efficiency. The customer should be able to move easily. The person buying the machinery has reason to pause. Haste at the purchasing stage can leave everyone else living with the decision.

Play the conversation ↗

Trust takes a seat at the table

Jones’s Austin business life has included a role beyond his own company. In December 2021, he addressed members as board chair of BBB serving the Heart of Texas. The organization’s 2022 annual report also lists him as chair.

Its 2024 annual report identifies him as the 2023 Immediate Past Chair, alongside other business and community representatives. This gives his career another documented setting: the boardroom of an organization concerned with business conduct and consumer trust.

For a lending executive, the connection is easy to understand. A borrower is being asked to share information and follow a process whose consequences extend beyond the screen. Trust has to survive those ordinary administrative moments.

A board title alone cannot tell that entire story. It does show Jones taking part in the wider business community while running his own operation. His public career includes both the transaction and the institutions around it.

Beyond the monthly loan payment

In September 2023, Gravity announced a partnership with Marble, an insurance-shopping platform. Customers who had refinanced an auto loan could explore auto insurance options through another service. The relationship extended Gravity’s interest in the household car bill beyond the financing contract itself.

Jones explained the partnership in terms of helping customers make choices and find insurance suited to their needs. Marble’s chief executive, Stuart Winchester, described the collaboration as a way to help consumers explore insurance options and earn rewards through its platform.

It was a specific expansion through a partner. For Jones, whose earlier writing paid close attention to the connection between borrowers and lending institutions, the arrangement placed another provider alongside the customer journey. The car remained the common thread.

The years after the launch

The later operating story also has a market backdrop. In early 2024, industry discussion described steady interest in Gravity’s refinancing services and the return of some large credit unions to its platform after liquidity constraints. A broker’s business depends on willing borrowers and participating lenders.

By December 2024, Jones was describing approximately 30,000 refinance applications a month. Application volume had risen around 25% to 30% year over year. That update, published in January 2025, connected the increase with declining rates and renewed lender liquidity.

The next annual comparison was stronger. Gravity’s reported 2025 results showed applications up 35% and originations up 78% year over year. Those figures were reported in January 2026 and shared on the company’s blog the following month.

Applications and originations deserve their separate labels. One records demand entering the business; the other records loans originated. The percentages do not supply a conversion rate, and they do not explain every reason for growth. They do show movement at different points in the operation.

That distinction brings the story back to Jones’s original territory. Attracting a borrower starts a relationship. Getting the required work finished gives the relationship a result. His career has involved both, from the RateGenius years to the company he helped launch in Austin.

The satisfying detail is how ordinary the work remains. Documents arrive. Someone explains the next step. A signature lands where it belongs. For the customer, the achievement may be the welcome freedom to stop thinking about the process and get on with the rest of the day.