Sagent Standouts: Greg Lane
In this series, we’re focused on the humans who make up Sagent. We’re fortunate to have a team that is constantly evolving – both professionally and personally – folks from all over the world who bring a variety of experience, education, and perspectives to advance our challenging mission. We’re excited to introduce you to some of these talented people who make Sagent a vibrant, productive community.
We often say that one of Sagent’s key differentiators is the expertise and experience of the people on our team, and that’s true whether we’re describing our executives or anyone else in the organization. So many folks are making a difference for homeowners and our customers as we execute our complex mission to lead the evolution in loan servicing by solving its most complex challenges. One of those people is Greg Lane, who has leveraged his specialized knowledge in FP&A (financial planning and analysis) to make an outsized impact on some of our biggest moves to date, and whose reliability proves that anyone at Sagent can be a visionary who gets the details. Introducing our latest Sagent Standout, Greg Lane, Director of Financial Analysis.
Tell me about your family, pets, where you live, and anything else you’d like to share about your life to help people get to know you.
I have a wife, 3 kids, ages 6, 4, and 1, a dog who’s 5 months old, and a cat. We live in Springfield PA.
With kids that age it sounds like you have a busy house. Do you have time for any hobbies, or is free time nonexistent?
The 3 times a year I actually get out and play golf, it makes me very happy. But for the most part, it’s wrangling the 3 youngsters. We love going to the beach, we go to the Outer Banks for 2 weeks every summer, and we’re excited for summer pool season to start. Our 6-year-old is a good swimmer for being 6, so she has joined a swimming team. Our four-year-old goes to preschool 2 days a week, and when she gets home on Tuesdays and Thursdays she comes to my desk and — whatever call I’m on is irrelevant — she holds up her school bag with some lovely art that she’s super excited about, so most of my team has met her.
Haha, that’s adorable! So, you’re based in PA. Did you grow up there?
Yeah, I grew up about 10 minutes from Sagent’s office in King of Prussia. I went to high school here, then went to the University of Pittsburgh for college.
Being so close to Sagent’s King of Prussia office, do you ever go in?
Yes, I go in once every couple of weeks, and I’m one of the few people who do. But most of the time I work out of my den.
I noticed that one of your first jobs was in Marketing for Stella Artois. Tell me about your education and how you ended up there.
Well, my first job was a bagger for Acme grocery, and I thought ‘maybe this isn’t for me’ so it taught me I needed to go to college.
I was a Finance and Marketing major, and I had several Marketing internships, one of which was in Beijing for 3 months for a company that was the sole distributor of the European brands for AB InBev. For instance, Stella, Hoegaarden, Leffe… anything they owned outside the US, I got to sell. So, during the 2010 World Cup I was going around to different bars doing promotional giveaways, sales stuff — with my zero Mandarin knowledge — and watching soccer at 3AM… it was a super healthy job for a 20-year-old.
I can only imagine! And then you were at a couple of other companies before you joined Sagent. Tell me about that.
For a while I was in mutual fund accounting at Vanguard, then I went to FXI which does foam manufacturing for pretty much anything that has foam in it. The area I supported from a finance side was the FP&A work related to their healthcare business. It could be a foam mattress in a hospital bed, random equipment with foam on it, anything going into healthcare… it gets a lot more regulation and rules than just your standard piece of foam in a couch or something like that. I know a lot more than I should ever know about foam and foam manufacturing, but the FP&A work led me here to Sagent.
You joined Sagent in 2020, and for a company of our age, that makes you a long timer. Share a little about your role on our team.
I’ve specialized in pricing and forecasting revenue, so it’s been a good fit for my role here where I’m heavily focused on forecasting revenue, pricing, strategic finance, and M&A deals.
Did you have any intent to find a job in mortgage fintech?
I’m probably not the norm, but humbly, I’m very good at math and Excel. You can just put me in front of a computer and let me run some numbers and it works out. It doesn’t matter what the numbers are supposed to do, whether it’s investments, foam pricing, or fintech software FP&A, it’s what I like to do and I think it’s a pretty transferable skill. Once I learn what the business is trying to do, I can support it pretty easily.
Has there been any accomplishment here at Sagent that you’re particularly proud of?
Yes. I worked very closely with Warburg Pincus supporting major deals and the due diligence process as we created the ‘One Sagent’ that we have today. And there were countless pieces of information that we provided to counterparties. At the same time, we were working on renewals with current clients. So, from the end of 2021 until March of 2022 was a busy, busy time, but it was also a really cool thing to be a part of.
Having been here as long as you have, I’m interested to hear your thoughts about Sagent’s culture.
I’ll say that everyone here is doing all they can for the benefit of Sagent. Even fully remote, the camaraderie and the openness are extremely helpful. If I have questions when trying to build out an ROI for a new product and I need help from anyone on any team, I can get what I need. We don’t have boatloads of red tape or minutia that slow us down, so we move fast like a small company, and I appreciate that.
Something else I enjoy is that we’re willing to learn what didn’t go well the first time and constantly make it better. We continuously review our processes and will make updates as many times as needed to make it work well for our customers, partners, and Sagent. During my 2½ years here, I’ve learned that we look back so we can keep doing better, but we don’t let that stop us from moving forward because if we had stuck to what we did in the beginning it wouldn’t be working as well as it is today.
Considering Sagent’s values —Relentless, Reliable, Relevant — which of those resonates with you most?
For my role in finance, I think it’s being reliable… being as consistent as possible so the partners I work with know what to expect from me. If I was bouncing around asking for random information, I’d be a roadblock. By being consistent, partners know what questions I’m going to ask so they can come in prepared, and we can move quickly without getting bogged down with 40 meetings.
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We always like to ask our Sagent Standout’s colleagues for insights into what it’s like to work with them. Joe Peterson, EVP Chief Financial Officer for Sagent, had this to say about Greg:
“Greg exemplifies how the finance organization should partner with the business to drive successful outcomes. While leading our Pricing and Financial Analysis team, Greg works closely with Customer Success and Sales teams to provide insightful analytics to help Sagent come to better overall business decisions on many customer renewal and new logo pricing decisions as well as a number of other strategic opportunities impacting the business. He has become an integral part of the organization and is sought after for his insights and perspective.”