Leaving legacy behind: Sagent leaders on data, legacy systems, and the future of servicing

In a recent conversation with HousingWire’s Allison LaForgia, Shane Leonard, SVP of Product Management at Sagent, and Monika Peltz, SVP of Customer Success, discussed why servicing has been so difficult to modernize and how Sagent is approaching the challenge.

“I have the fun job,” Leonard said. “We get to reimagine servicing, get together as a group, maybe argue a little bit, shake hands, agree to disagree at some times. But ultimately we get the joy of seeing our thoughts, our desires, our dreams come true right in front of us as we rebuild and reimagine what a servicing system should be going into the future.”

Peltz said her role is just as rewarding. “The customer success management team, we are the representatives for Sagent for all of our customers. We have the customer support team that handles any issues that come up or tickets or enhancements that our customers are looking for, and our training and advisory team…help businesses look at their current processes and help them improve them.”

When asked why servicing has been so hard to modernize, Leonard pointed to decades of complexity. “Simply put, it’s 60 years of changes, 60 years of regulations, new products piled into systems that while they were at the time state of the art, we refer to them as big iron now. And those big iron systems are great…But over many, many decades, those systems have become outdated from a technology standpoint.”

According to Leonard, lack of adaptability in legacy systems is a major barrier. “It’s hard to unwind that…So from the standpoint of Sagent, what we’ve tried to do is look at 60 years of new products and new compliance and new requirements, look at it holistically and make sure that we’ve covered all the bases.”

Peltz added, “…servicing is so complex and people get really nervous when you start moving their cheese around and talking about, well, maybe we could do this in a different way altogether. Because it’s so foundational to even our entire economy, it does give people a lot of pause.”

Both leaders highlighted Sagent’s legacy systems as a unique advantage. “Servicing people building a servicing system,” Peltz said. “LoanServ has been around for many, many years and it’s good. It’s solid. It’s iron, like Shane said, but it also is ready for retirement…Care is very much a transitional type of system and so is Tempo. Both of them are moving right into the Dara ecosystem. It’s super smooth. It’s great.”

For Leonard, this history provides necessary insight. “We get to see what works and what doesn’t work. And we do it in such an amazing partnership way…working with a team of people that’s trying to retire the thing that he’s put so many years into. And we do it with a smile on our face because we can see the future.”

A big part of that future is real-time data. “Data is king,” Peltz said. “If you’re stuck in a multi-day process, you really are struggling for a point in time with data that tells the story right now. What is the story of this process, of this customer, of this loan?”

Leonard offered a real-world example from disaster response. “Communicating directly with FEMA, having those codes come into the system, giving the servicer the opportunity to hit one button and actually publish that information out at the loan level…We’re talking about moments. From that standpoint, data is everything to us, and having it immediately or within moments is an incredible transition.”

Looking ahead, both executives said they are motivated by the impact on servicers and borrowers. “It actually, we can bring some joy into this,” Leonard said. “Simple things like how fast the system can recognize a problem and allow an IVR to react to it…is going to change how Monica sees her job on a daily basis.”

Peltz agreed. “My heart has always been in servicing. I love taking care of customers. Of all the things we’ve demoed…it’s the user experience that really gets me excited. It’s going to bring a real change for everything that our servicers do. And then the impact to the borrowers is huge.”