Mr. Cooper Group has made some changes to its technology leadership, led by the promotion of Sridhar Sharma to the role of executive vice president and chief innovation and digital officer, the company announced Wednesday.
Sharma served as the company’s Chief Information Officer for the past decade and led the development of Pyro AI, the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced machine learning platform. In his new role, he will continue to lead Mr. Cooper to implement AI and machine learning solutions.
Mr. Cooper also hired Jeff Carroll from a travel technology company Saber Corp. as senior vice president and chief technology officer. Carroll has more than two decades of experience leading technology operations and will focus on the “resilience and scale” of Mr. Cooper’s core technology infrastructure, the company said.
Jay Bray, Mr. Cooper’s chairman and CEO, emphasized in a statement that the technology team’s experience and its search for innovative solutions “will transform the mortgage world.”
“We are very excited to deepen our technology leadership expertise and build on our momentum while unleashing the power of responsible AI to deliver a better experience to our customers, powered by new tools, data and products to make homeownership more rewarding,” added President Mike Weinbach. .
Other changes to the company’s technology team include the appointment of Prerna Kandhari, who was previously director of software engineering at Capital One – as senior vice president of data engineering. In addition, David Graham will become senior vice president of data governance. Before joining Mr. Cooper, Graham held leadership positions at the Royal Bank of Canada And Standard Charter Bank.
In an interview with HousingWire in May, Sharma said Mr Cooper “had the opportunity to build our digital platform from the ground up” in 2016-2017, but the work is far from done.
“When I look at what other industries have been able to achieve, it provides opportunities for this industry to get there and gives us inspiration,” Sharma said. “I can give you an example. We have invested in automation, workflows, data and dashboards. But nowadays I usually wonder: why do we need a dashboard? A dashboard presents information that a human can look at and take action. Why can’t I just take that action?”
Mr. Cooper reached an unpaid principal balance (UPB) of more than $1 trillion in his maintenance portfolio this year. In July, the company reached a deal to acquire a third-party origination (TPO) platform and $356 billion in mortgage servicing rights (MSRs), retainers and sub-service contracts from Flagstar Bankowned by Community Bancorp of New York (NYCB).
Mr Cooper posted a net profit of $204 million in the second quarter of this year, compared with $181 million in the first quarter. It will report its third-quarter results on October 23.
