Jesse Decker, Sagent EVP of Customer Success, Named HousingWire 2021 Women of Influence Winner

Customer care underpins every aspect of Sagent’s approach to modernized loan servicing. Jesse Decker, EVP of Customer Success, leads her team in this customer-first approach under the organization’s guiding philosophy: If originators are the finders of loan customers, servicers must be the keepers of customers.

As COVID-fueled hardships sent millions of borrowers into forbearance and swift policymaking challenged servicers to adapt at a breakneck pace, Sagent’s EVP of Customer Success, Jesse led the company’s rapid-response with unwavering empathy as its central tenant. With her help, America’s top banks and lenders had a head start in supporting borrowers facing hardship throughout a tumultuous 2020.

Given Jesse’s profound impact on Sagent’s servicer clients and the borrowers they serve, it seems only fitting that Jesse Decker has been named a winner of HousingWire’s 2021 Women of Influence award.

According to HousingWire:

“The 2021 Women of Influence winners represent 100 of the most influential women in leadership in the housing economy. More than just breaking records in the housing finance space, the HousingWire 2021 Women of Influence are shattering glass ceilings and leaving a legacy for years to come. During a year that has been dominated by never-before-seen challenges, these women have overcome the barriers and paved the way for future women leaders.”

Read on to learn about how Jesse has driven Sagent’s consumer-first modernization vision and empowered servicers across Sagent’s comprehensive suite of servicing technology platforms to offer a smarter, faster experience to their borrowers.

Jesse’s Impact at Sagent

The impact Jesse and her customer success team have had on Sagent’s customers and their millions of borrowers is unparalleled. 

In 2020, Jesse spearheaded a revamped customer success strategy aimed at better understanding and serving the needs of customers. Primed by her background modernizing mortgage originations as customer success lead for two of the industry’s top fintech firms, Roostify and Cloudvirga, Decker infused the consumer-first sensibility seen in the origination space into her team’s COVID response. Her role on the front lines positioned her to both redirect and accelerate Sagent’s product roadmaps, rolling out its growing and evolving suite of products to customers at scale.

She delivered the following results within a year of joining the executive team:

• Executed discovery and relationship health-check calls with nearly the entire customer base within the first three months at Sagent. As a result, she implemented new customer success team process and tool changes to emphasize the focus on customer delight, adoption, and timely value realization.
• Rapidly scaled the Sagent customer success team by more than 300% to respond to the needs of customers and their borrowers in the COVID-era; Jesse managed recruiting, onboarding, and training strategy for all new hires.
• Coordinated with Sagent’s product team to deliver on 200+ customer enhancement suggestions. Jesse translated and delivered more than 50 monumental CARES Act-related technology changes in 2020 alone.
• Delivered Sagent-driven product roadmap roll-outs for the consumer-facing, self-serve platform, CARE (formerly Account Connect), and servicing platforms LoanServ and Tempo, to provide the necessary tools to help servicers quickly process forbearance and loss mitigation requests with a goal of empowering borrowers to remain in full control of their loans.
• Managed and coordinated a company-wide partnership with the National Association of Minority Mortgage Bankers (NAMMBA) to improve Sagent’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives aimed at supporting and growing non-traditional lending and recruiting strategies.

Within one year of joining Sagent, Jesse advanced two years’ worth of servicing modernization for lenders throughout Sagent’s technology suite. She makes sure Sagent’s customer success strategies protect servicers and borrowers alike, especially when uncertainty in the market causes anxiety to run high. Above all, Jesse continues to make a lasting, customer-focused impact on Sagent’s vision of delivering modernized loan servicing to borrowers and top financial institutions at large.

The Bottom Line

Jesse Decker knows that if servicers are to be stewards of consumer protection to regulators, stalwarts to investors, and — most crucially — heroes to their borrowers, they must be powered by nimble technology. 

Our industry is now ready to show consumers and regulators that servicing is where lifetime customer care is managed and grown, but servicing is the last, most complex frontier of consumer finance.

This industry transformation cannot and will not happen without the rare executives like Jesse who understand every facet of the ecosystem: the institutional perspective of banks and lenders, the challenges of borrowers seeking an engaging loan experience, and the role of dynamic software solutions that can connect the two groups and positively impact the full loan lifecycle.