Sagent COO Marianne Sullivan Honored with HousingWire 2023 Women of Influence Award
After leading some of the largest innovation milestones in mortgage and consumer finance over the course of her career, Fannie Mae veteran and mortgage fintech pacesetter Marianne Sullivan turned to the mortgage servicing sector for her latest challenge: architecting the industry’s first and only cloud-native software platform that powers homeownership and loan servicing lifecycles for servicers, consumers, investors, and regulators.
At Sagent, both as a member of the Sagent board and later upon assuming a full operational role as COO, Marianne has provided definitive technical insight and key industry knowledge as Sagent deepened its relationships with customers, grew its team in partnership with Mr. Cooper (with the intent to benefit the entire servicing ecosystem), and enhanced its core open-API platforms, giving lenders cost control, optionality, and real-time compliance with real-time policymaking.
It comes as no surprise, then, that Marianne has been recognized by HousingWire with a 2023 Women of Influence award.
Tech innovation is nothing without the humans powering it, and under Marianne’s leadership, Sagent remains relentless in keeping the grand, transformative vision we all seek connected to the compassionate, detailed execution we all need as we grind it out in the trenches.
Read on for a few highlights from Marianne’s background and what she’s accomplished in her time at Sagent so far.
A Fintech Innovation Pacesetter
At Fannie Mae, Marianne opened the floodgates to the modern mortgage era by spearheading the development of instant home valuation verification (Collateral Underwriter® — which boosted lender efficiency by reducing time spent on appraisal review and better-informing requests to appraisers) and digitally native loan origination infrastructure (Day One Certainty™ — which served as the first digitally-native loan origination infrastructure for the modern mortgage era) before enabling automated borrower cash flow data at Finicity, driving growth and leading to its marquee Mastercard sale.
In the decade-plus since, Marianne has shaped the industry even further as she’s injected the industry expertise gleaned from her time at the top GSE into the mortgage fintech world. At Finicity, she helped welcome more Americans to share in the dream of homeownership by automating borrower cash flow data — including rental payment history — into lender credit decisioning. A fintech pacesetter, industry titan, and scale execution specialist, Marianne arrived with the perfect resume to further Sagent’s servicing vision as she joined the company’s board and then assumed an operational role soon after.
Now, Marianne accelerates progress on Sagent’s next-gen software platforms, helps lead the company as Chief Operating Officer and drives nuanced, progressive innovation in the highly regulated servicing space. Her role is crucial to advancing Sagent’s aim to fundamentally change the dynamics of America’s $14T housing ecosystem.
Over the last 12 months, Marianne’s influence — as both Sagent board member and COO — was crucial in the renewal of key Sagent customer relationships, the integration of the Mr. Cooper fintech team into the wider organization, and the rapid advancement of the next-gen suite of platforms that are integral to Sagent’s servicing-modernization mission.
Leading the integration of the Mr. Cooper and Sagent fintech teams, Marianne aligned the new organization under this nuanced approach to innovation, oversaw headcount growing to 520 global employees (and hundreds more in contractors), and invited Sagent’s first full-time international team to share its mission, vision, values, and passion for creating the future of servicing that’s transformational for servicers, consumers, investors, and regulators.
Most recently, as Sagent welcomed its newly incorporated software engineering team from its 2022 partnership deal with Mr. Cooper, Marianne facilitated the graceful transition of over 120 fintech professionals to the Sagent team by personally hosting the opening of the company’s non-U.S. headquarters in Chennai, India.
By embracing Mr. Cooper as both a Sagent customer and a key partner with an experienced servicing fintech team, Marianne solidified Sagent’s status as the only major fintech firm with a global team dedicated to building core, default, and consumer mortgage servicing platforms for America’s top banks and lenders.
Congratulations, Marianne!
We’re honored to celebrate this well-deserved win for a proven innovator and role model for women in fintech and housing finance.
By aligning Sagent’s fintech and product teams with strong subject matter expertise in the servicing trenches, Marianne continues to earn the trust of and deepen relationships with America’s largest servicers as Sagent enables specialized modernization of the largest and most complex sector in consumer finance.
A visionary who gets the details, she encourages thoughtful, iterative innovation across aging infrastructure, building highly compliant operational pathways within the old systems while incrementally replacing them with the new.
Throughout an acute market cycle adjustment that began in 2022, Marianne simplified the extremely complex servicing space for Sagent clients and promoted its open-API enterprise platform so servicers could configure workflows for their unique needs. Trusted to power more than $2 trillion in outstanding mortgage balances today while building the industry’s first cloud-native, homeowner-first servicing platform for tomorrow, Marianne and Sagent help servicers track every single loan detail for consumers, regulators, investors, and partners.