How We Execute on A Vision: A Roundtable with Cenlar Executives

How We Execute on A Vision: A Roundtable with Cenlar Executives

Our persistent investment in people, process and technology, executing the vision laid forth by President and CEO David Schneider, has positioned Cenlar for success over both the short- and long-term.

How exactly? We’ve asked the leaders at the front of the organization’s evolution to sit down and discuss how they’re enhancing their areas and how these changes have benefitted Cenlar as a whole.

Our panelists are COO Leslie Peeler, Chief Risk Officer Sara Avery and Chief Digital Officer Josh Reicher.

Peeler started with Cenlar as COO in July 2024. She has deep expertise in the banking and financial markets and more than 20 years of experience transforming organizational productivity efficiency and profitability. Prior to Cenlar, Peeler was a Senior Partner at IBM. She also led Promontory Financial Group, a global risk and compliance consulting and managed services business for IBM. Leslie also held leadership roles at Fannie Mae and GMAC Mortgage.

Avery is a strategic risk management executive with extensive experience in mortgage finance and fintech startups. She joined Cenlar in 2021. Avery most recently served as the Chief Risk Officer for Common Securitization (CSS), a financial technology joint venture that represents one of the largest and most efficient mortgage securitization services in the industry. Prior to CSS, Avery spent nearly a decade working with Freddie Mac in a variety of risk management leadership roles.

Reicher joined Cenlar in 2016 and has helped usher in the organization’s digital evolution. He manages Cenlar’s digital technology and operations and is at the forefront of the work Cenlar is doing using AI and automation to revolutionize mortgage servicing. With 20 years in the financial services industry and 30 years in technology overall, Reicher has served in various IT leadership positions at organizations like Morgan Stanley and Bank of America.

Question One: President and CEO David Schneider has been clear on his vision of Cenlar as a modern, agile and service-focused organization. How are you driving that from the perspective of continuing to transform Cenlar for clients and homeowners?

Leslie Peeler: First, we are focusing on our culture. Cenlar’s core values were a driver in my decision to join Cenlar. One of our core values is being client and homeowner resolute. We want to always put the client and their homeowners at the center of everything we do, every single day. With every investment we are making, we are contemplating how we will create a better experience for these two primary constituents.

In the core work we do today, the organization has already been focused on its Digital First strategies in performing loan servicing. Cenlar has been on a journey of finding more ways to allow homeowners to connect with us digitally. We have quickly become an industry leader here within only a few years of sharpened focus. For example, more than 80% of homeowners have signed up for our CenNet homeowner website. More than 50% of homeowners make their payments through ACH, and the majority of homeowners also have opted for the electronic delivery of data and documents.

The team is very creative on how to drive additional engagement. Consumer preferences have changed. As consumers experience interacting with businesses in other industries, they’re bringing those desires into the mortgage space.

We’ll bring that same creativity and energy to interacting with homeowners experiencing financial distress. In the next year, we will be replicating a similar experience across the entire loan life cycle with the adoption of a new loss mitigation platform with omni-channel capabilities. Homeowners will be able to understand what options are available to them, digitally exchange information and documents with us, see where they are in the underwriting process and whether they need to provide additional information and opt to receive digital documents around the solutions being provided. Once solutioned, we will connect with ecosystem partners that are involved in that loss mitigation cycle to facilitate the closing process, whether its title agents or electronic signature, all with the goal of utilizing tools that bring the same level of experience to homeowners under financial distress.

Then there is the work we’re doing for our clients. Because we expect interest rates will continue to be elevated, we know products that enable homeowners to tap into their home equity are important. You want more flexibility, and we’re investing to drive that flexibility. We are actively working on more modernized payment and draw methods, and fraud detection technologies. We’re looking to bring our data closer to real-time. And we’re looking at expanding our capabilities around HELOC and home equity servicing. A lot of energy is being placed on this product suite because of the interest you have expressed in having access to new products.

I am very excited to be here at Cenlar. Every day, we’re looking at ways to raise the bar. That is one thing that really keeps me motivated.

Question Two: How is today’s Cenlar different? How can our clients see that in the work we do with them and their homeowners?

Sara Avery: I’ve been at Cenlar for three years now, and the change here in that time has been significant. It’s night and day.

The leadership and talent at work here now is incredible. We’ve recruited a tremendous amount of new skills throughout the organization, in our first, second and third lines of defense, in our technology and operations areas. That has introduced a much broader variety of experiences that have strengthened the fabric of how we do business.

We’ve also had substantial program implementation and operational improvements, such as:

• Our Core Risk Infrastructure (areas like Risk, Change and Issues Management) allows us to manage and measure the environment consistently and effectively given the stronger program standards and better access to data we now have.
• Our Metrics and Monitoring areas, like Quality Control/Quality Assurance and control testing, have implemented and enhanced monitoring processes and metrics which strengthens our ability to identify and correct issues in the environment. This results in faster mitigation. We’ve also invested in our metrics and reporting, which not only helps us manage risk but to also share some of that data with our clients so they’re aware.
• We’ve made significant investments in our cybersecurity infrastructure, and that can be seen in our ability to actively manage pending risk in the environment.
• Across technology, we’ve made significant investments in our data infrastructure. We’ve implemented things like PowerBI, which is making self-serve data available to our employees on a much more real-time basis. In the operations area, we’ve implemented our Guided Flow process, which makes information in our call center much more readily available, so our agents are more effective serving homeowners when they call in.

All of this comes together to form a clear picture of how we’ve transformed the risk culture at Cenlar. Our teams understand managing risk in the environment. They know how to respond to it, and it’s part of our DNA. This makes us better service providers and better stewards of your homeowners’ mortgage.

Leslie Peeler: To briefly follow-up what Sara has said, the investments we’ve made in Cenlar make us the most risk aware culture you could ever keep your loans.

Question Three: Can you offer a tangible example of how these improvements are happening across your areas, again, detailing the benefit to clients and/or homeowners?

Josh Reicher: Certainly!

I like to make sure we’re focused on providing best-in-class solutions to three distinct audiences: our clients’ homeowners, our clients themselves and our agents and operations teams.

You heard some examples from Leslie and Sara about our improvements already. When it comes to homeowners, you heard some amazing digital adoption metrics. We achieved this by making sure we’re meeting homeowners on their terms. Homeowners who want to be able to self-serve need to be able to do so through a website, mobile app, chat bot and live chat. Whichever technology they’re most comfortable with, we want to make sure we’re providing the optimal solution. If they want to interact with a human, we want to ensure the best possible interaction. We want the best experience in every channel.

With that, you see these impressive digital adoption metrics. September marks the 22^nd month in a row we’ve had month-over-month improvement in all five of those metrics, whether that’s website registration, online billpay, automatic payments, paperless. Cenlar’s mobile app has a user rating of 4.9 out of 5. We have top-notch technology solutions because we continually invest in it.

What does that mean for homeowners? We have satisfied homeowners because they’re receiving clear solutions to solve their needs. Homeowners can easily manage their mortgage on their own terms.

For our agents and operations team, we continue to introduce automations designed to maximize their effectiveness, which allows us to provide our clients and their homeowners with top-notch customer service. We’re looking at what we can do to eliminate the tedious activities, so our operations team can be more effective and focus on more thoughtful items.

We’ve expanded beyond automation now and have added Artificial Intelligence (AI). We’ve been talking about our jump into AI since last year, and we’re taking the next step now with the ability to summarize and transcribe calls. It minimizes the time our agents have to spend offline doing repetitive activities so they can spend even more time helping homeowners.

In addition, we are building an “agent copilot,” an AI solution that will assist representatives in finding answers to homeowner questions more quickly, improving first-call resolution and the experience for both the homeowner and the agent.

We’re really excited about the opportunities in the AI space. What we’ve heard from clients is that they want to make sure we’re introducing AI responsibly. We make sure that every use case we consider when it comes to AI comes with three core principles. First, keeping data safe. Sara talked about that already, but it’s even more important when it comes to AI. We need to keep homeowner data safe. The data stays here with us.

Second is Quality Control. QC does not go away when you automate a process. It stays at the same high level, if not higher.

The third one is, we’re not putting AI directly in front of a homeowner. AI can be fallible, so we don’t want responses going directly to homeowners and we don’t want AI decisioning outcomes for homeowners. We want a human in the loop at every step. We have our agents, our QC, our supervisors overseeing the responses. We’re using AI to reduce time spent on administrative work so we have more time to help homeowners out.

For our clients, we have delivered and continue to deliver technology to improve the client experience. We want our clients to have a best-in-class technology solution.

As Sara mentioned earlier, our Information Factory initiative is delivering improved data accessibility and dashboard solutions. Some of our clients will be piloting this new technology shortly. We’ll be rolling it out slowly, with it being available to all our clients next year.

Question Four: What excites you about what is ahead?

Leslie Peeler: I’ll gladly go first. The talent here is tremendous. People are learning and growing every single day. There’s so much change in this industry on an ongoing basis. On top of that change, we’re driving so many improvements at Cenlar at the same time. But it hasn’t caused fatigue. There’s excitement here for all the change and what it means for the future.

Second, one of the things I love most is coming into work and having the ability to create something. This is a company where people really want to create things that are new and do things in new and interesting ways.

Josh Reicher: From a tech perspective, I’m very excited about all the technology we have in place.

My team and I love solving problems. We like to be out there making things better.

I’m excited we now have all these tools in our toolbelt. We have RPA, workflow, bots, AI. We have all these capabilities, and we’re using them to solve more and more problems. My team and I are constantly thinking: what’s the next thing we can improve or solve?

Sara Avery: We’re clearly a panel of problem-solvers.

We’ve spent a lot of time investing in some foundation enhancements and programs. Now, we really get to look forward to embracing better technology and really upping our game in terms of what we’re able to deliver to our clients and to the industry as a whole. That’s a really exciting prospect.

And because I’m a risk nerd, I’m very excited that we’re undergoing our first SOC-2 assessment. We’re scheduled to issue that in 2025.