Mortgage servicing technology provider Sagent has hired another former Mr. Cooper executive to a leading role, naming Sridhar Sharma as president.

Sharma joins Chris Marshall, the former Mr. Cooper president who became Sagent's executive chairman in January 2024, and two years later added the CEO title, replacing Geno Paluso, who is now vice chairman.

While announcing this appointment Sagent also stated that its Dara servicing platform, which uses artificial intelligence architecture, is now live. This announcement, as well as one from ICE Mortgage Technology, came out ahead of next week's Mortgage Bankers Association Servicing Solutions conference in Dallas.

Dara rolled out onto the broader market

Sharma was Mr. Cooper's chief innovation and digital officer from 2015 through the sale to Rocket Cos., completed at the start of last year's fourth quarter.

"My primary role right now is to take Dara to scale for the rest of the industry," Sharma said in an interview. "I've been fortunate enough to have a front row seat to Mr. Cooper's growth as they've gone on to become the largest servicer and part of my task here is to bring a lot of those learnings through Dara to the rest of the industry."

Last February, Sagent launched a demonstration version of Dara with Mr. Cooper, but it is now out to the broader market.

Part of what Sharma brings to the position is the ability to view Dara from multiple perspectives, he said, starting from the technology side, having an operator's standpoint from working at Mr. Cooper, and even looking at this from the homeowners point of view.

While Dara is a new, ground up platform, Sagent's existing technology has over 40-plus servicers. The "battle scars" from those experiences helps Sagent incorporate those learnings into Dara and features which are new to the marketplace, Sharma said.

Most servicer system implementations take months, if not years. But this technology coming from scratch allows Sagent to be nimble and roll out new features quickly.

What makes Dara different

While most platforms are just a core technology, with a separate system needed for documents, Dara has that latter piece built in as a native feature, Sharma explained.

It has three modules: Dara core, Dara default (which handles loss mitigation) and a consumer-facing platform. All three components are "natively available," Sharma said.

"You have heard the term agentic AI, the approach that Dara is taking to this is bringing in interoperability," he continued.

For example, if a company already has a call center with its own AI agent, Dara will work with this, and not try to replace it. The aim is to reduce friction in the process.

"You have the ability to understand what is happening in your operation in real time," from reconciliation to investor reporting.

Sagent has pending contracts with new customers for Dara.

The musical chairs with Rocket's buy of Mr. Cooper

Mr. Cooper has owned a 20% stake in Sagent since February 2022, which it received for providing the intellectual property rights for its own cloud-based servicing technology.

As part of this transaction, Rocket will be onboarding its servicing portfolio at Sagent. In turn, United Wholesale Mortgage ended its subservicing relationship with Mr. Cooper, elected to bring servicing in-house on ICE Mortgage Technology's MSP and entered into a deal to acquire the parent of Roundpoint, Two Harbors, which brands itself as Two.

Meanwhile, Dan Sogorka, the CEO at Sagent prior to Paluso, recently departed his position as general manager of Rocket Pro.

"Sridhar Sharma is one of the mortgage industry's top fintech leaders because he has both the technological expertise as well as the intimate, ground-level knowledge of mortgage operations," Marshall said in the press release. "His exceptional leadership and innovation expertise will be instrumental in driving the next phase of growth for Sagent in 2026 and beyond."

ICE Mortgage Technology pushes MSP updates

Separately, ICE Mortgage Technology launched an enhanced user experience for the MSP platform it acquired along with Black Knight.

"This new UX is a foundational step in modernizing MSP," said Bob Hart, president of ICE Mortgage Technology, in a press release. "Phase one is not just about improving platform navigability; it is already allowing us to roll out second-phase enhanced automation and AI-driven productivity agents that reduce manual effort and help servicers scale more efficiently."

The company promised a new look and a modernized version of MSP in February 2024.

This change lays the groundwork for broader initiatives, as ICE is working on a long-term modernization of the underlying architecture behind the most used mortgage servicing platform. Being able to support more data rich displays will make it possible for users to improve automated workflows and their management of exception-based loan processing.

Those second phase items ICE brought out include what it termed "enhanced" escrow and investor reporting automations. The first reduces manual touchpoints by as much as 87%. The second reduces the manual steps for Freddie Mac loan-level investor reporting by 68%, it claimed.