Mr. Cooper exec: lessons to learn from tech changes in other industries

“We had to launch forbearance plans for our borrows and our call center was under severe stress, [but] were able to launch our self-service platform for handling forbearance requests in about four weeks,” Sharma recalled. “That was much faster than anybody else in the industry [and meets] the level of agility and speed that our business demands. We were able to do it because we had a lot of the technology in-house to do it.”

When quarantines and lockdowns kicked in, that agility became an asset once again. According to Sharma, it took three days to switch his 1,000 tech team members to working remotely. In addition, that time frame was all that was required to move the call center setup to work remotely, so team members could take calls using their cell phones.

“We were able to do it because of the architecture we were very familiar with [and] the technology we had control over,” Sharma said.

While Mr. Cooper’s core system has been around for 25 years, Sharma doesn’t necessarily want to change something because it is old. Instead, the company has invested in its team member experience and customer service platforms, focusing largely on cloud-native apps for a lot of its technology. This, he said, has allowed the company to move a lot of its internal workflows to the cloud.

What’s more, he said, Mr. Cooper has been able to build newer systems on top of the old core platform, making sure the company has “the most modern cross-channel experience that can be delivered, but still on that same core.”