Powering What’s Possible in the Mortgage Servicing Industry: Meet Trey Barnes, VP of Product Management
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.
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 live in Fort Collins, Colorado, which I believe is genuinely one of the best places in the country. Outside of work, I focus on staying healthy, mountain biking, and being grounded and present. I have a house full of kids at different stages of life, so there’s always something going on. We recently lost our Bernese Mountain Dog, Mabel, to cancer, who was a big part of our world, so we’re in the process of finding a new Berner pup.
Where did you grow up?
I grew up in the South – mostly between Florida and Georgia – which taught me the value of working hard, staying humble, and problem solving. A lot of my childhood was spent on boats, jet skis, and at the beach. That kind of upbringing shaped me in ways I didn’t fully appreciate until I was older. There’s freedom to it, and a connection to something bigger than whatever’s directly in front of me.
What are your hobbies?
Music is a constant – I play guitar and sing, and my taste varies from classical to alternative to rap to country and everything in between. Outside of music, I stay pretty active. Mountain biking is a big part of my life, along with hiking and working through summiting all of Colorado’s highest peaks. Setting a goal that is physically demanding puts everything else in perspective, and Fort Collins offers a great base for all of it.
What are your favorite movies, music, or TV shows?
I’ve already talked about how big an influence music is in my life, so I’ll spare the repeat. On the TV side, I like shows where the writing and characters do the heavy lifting. Some of my favorites are Peaky Blinders, The Sopranos, The Office, Game of Thrones, and Succession. For movies, I lean toward the classics: Shawshank Redemption, Interstellar, Saving Private Ryan, Star Wars, The American President, and those types of movies (and maybe Rom Coms, too, but I’ll never admit it).
What is your educational background?
My background is actually in music and vocal performance, which isn’t exactly a traditional path into mortgage technology, but it built habits that carried over: discipline, quick thinking, and performing under pressure.
Tell me about any notable accomplishments that you’re proud of.
The accomplishment I’m most proud of is building a company that ultimately aggregated loan data from America’s largest banks and servicers and packaged it into a set of products we shared with the market. During the mortgage crisis, we were pulling data from the top 30 servicers and banks, and the analytics we built were being used by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Federal Reserve, and the Treasury Department to help shape legislation like the Troubled Asset Relief Program and Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP). Knowing that my work directly influenced policy that supported millions of homeowners nationwide isn’t something I’ll forget.
More recently, what I’m building now with Dara is the most technically ambitious work of my career. The scale, the AI integration, the real-world impact on how servicers operate is the culmination of everything I’ve learned.
Tell me more about your career journey. Highlight a particularly positive or negative experience and what you learned from it.
I started at a law office manually calculating reinstatement affidavits and payoffs on a figures team. As unglamorous as that sounds, it’s where I learned the actual mechanics of mortgage servicing from the ground up, the real numbers, stakes, and process. I also happened to be working alongside Shane Leonard, Sagent’s Chief Product Officer, which shows me this industry is smaller than it looks.
My entrance to mortgage fintech was in servicing, data, analytics, operational reporting, and metrics. Once I understood how servicing data actually works, the complexity, the volume, the regulatory stakes – it’s hard to look away. I’ve spent decades solving versions of the same problem, just with better tools each time. The data I helped aggregate during the mortgage crisis, the analytics that informed federal policy – that’s really where the thread started pulling me forward.
Throughout my career, I’ve had significant wins and genuinely difficult experiences. I’ve always been drawn to builders – people who create something from nothing, stay accountable when it gets hard, and don’t confuse noise with progress. That mindset is the model. The hardest lesson: alignment isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s vital. When incentives, people, and direction are misaligned, everything is harder than it should be. I learned that the expensive way, and it made me a much sharper leader.
What does your “day to day” look like in your role at Sagent?
As VP of Product Management, a significant part of my focus is on how we responsibly integrate AI across Sagent. Specifically, on how to accelerate our own internal development and to build it into Dara, ensuring it that holds up under real-world conditions.
On the operational side, I oversee our investor cash and escrow teams, which means managing day-to-day money movement, investor accounting, and the reporting infrastructure that supports it. It’s a combination of long-horizon product thinking and very real, very immediate operational accountability. Those two things must coexist for success.
In your opinion, what is the greatest impact of building cloud-native servicing technology?
I’m motivated by the enormous gap between what the industry has and what’s possible. The real opportunity is to use cloud infrastructure and AI to build systems that understand and enforce the laws and rules that govern every single process in mortgage servicing.
We’re not just automating workflows – we’re building them to be accurate, auditable, and designed with humans in the loop at every stage. When you can do that well, you don’t just improve outcomes; you meaningfully reduce the cost of servicing for clients. I’m excited by the opportunity to fundamentally improve how servicing works. It’s a complex space, and Sagent is moving it forward in a meaningful way – not just iterating on the status quo.
When you think about Sagent’s values of “Relentless, Relevant, Respectful and Reliable” which of those resonates with you most?
Relentless resonates most with me. In mortgage servicing, you’re operating in a regulated, high-stakes environment where the problems are complex and the margin for error is low. Being relentless here means staying focused on the right outcome even when the path gets complicated, and not letting process, ambiguity, or organizational friction become an excuse to stop short. It means finishing things.
What is your favorite thing about working for Sagent?
My favorite thing about working for Sagent is both the scope of what we’re capable of doing and how that’s transforming the industry. From calculating figures by hand at a law firm, to building analytics that informed federal policy, to now building Dara, I’ve seen what can be done to drive the industry forward. Sagent is in a rare moment where the technology, the data, and the regulatory environment are all converging, and I’m excited to be in a seat where I get to help foster what we build.
There are a lot of people here who genuinely care about building something better and a real entrepreneurial spirit inside Sagent, especially in how we’re approaching Dara. We’re building a next-generation analytics platform inside an enterprise environment, which requires staying nimble even as the core servicing system continues to scale.
I’ve spent my career in this industry and I’m more interested in what’s coming than what I’ve already done. The convergence of AI, cloud infrastructure, and real servicing data is a genuine inflection point. I want to be one of the people who helped define what it became.