Changing How Industry Thinks About REO

It’s been nearly 12 years since the foreclosure crisis rocked the industry and mortgage loan servicers found their portfolios filled with REO. Good software and large, institutional investors and hedge funds lessened the impact on our industry, but executives who lived through it will not soon forget it.

It was a trial by fire for industry default servicing and REO software and we are proud that our Exceleras DispoSolutions software was a valuable tool in use by servicers across the industry during that trying time.

Now, there are new clouds on the horizon suggesting another storm that could bring more problems for homeowners and servicers as pent-up forbearance ends and the industry works to get borrowers back on track.

How the industry will deal with this coming storm and the likely severity are topics we are tracking closely. We’ll share our findings in this space in the future.

For now, we want to tell you about some changes that have been happening here at Exceleras. While servicers have been busy dealing with non-REO-related issues for the past few years, we’ve been busy preparing for the future. Those who haven’t looked toward Exceleras in a while will see some exciting differences.

First, what hasn’t changed is our core development team. The same great engineers and programmers who created DispoSolutions have been updating and refining our platform during the pandemic lockdowns. We’re very pleased with the IT team we have attracted at Exceleras and have no plans to change that.

However, because we feel that it is now critically important the industry change the way it thinks about REO, we have made some big changes in our management team, our priorities and our platform.

New Leadership

Michael D. Romano — As CEO, Michael is the light that is guiding our team into a brighter future. He is a serial entrepreneur that understands the key to growing companies lies in exceeding customer expectations and driving constant improvement. He has worked in a range of industries in startups and large corporations and specializes in financial analysis, enterprise sales and team building.

Tom Simon — As Chief Experience Officer, Tom’s role is to make sure the way we think, act, work and lead internally at Exceleras is aligned with how we’d like to be perceived externally. His career has been built inside large, Fortune 100 companies. He specializes in building organizations, developing leaders, aligning culture, and optimizing talent. He also has deep expertise in Six Sigma and Lean.

Eve Cooper –As Chief Financial Officer, Eve brings business leadership, financial experience, strong process capabilities, organizational efficiencies and expertise that goes beyond the REO industry.

A term our new leaders like to use is “the power of objectivity.” We come into the REO market and look at it objectively with a fresh set of eyes and ask the dumb questions to uncover better ways to do things. If you combine deep REO expertise internally with objective and successful business acumen, we believe there are some innovative breakthrough ideas that can help change the way the industry thinks about REO.

The team will tell you that our level of transparency and engagement help bring the collective genius of our team to the table on behalf of those we serve. Along with a “best idea wins” mentality and our laser focus on our customers have transformed our company. As we interact with our customers, we seek to better understand what they do everyday to inform our priorities and or product development roadmap. what we’re doing every day to support them.

The Importance of Culture

New leadership almost always brings with it an updated corporate culture. Core to our new culture is advancing and enhancing the platform, offering new capabilities to our servicing partners. To make that clear, you’ll also see some new branding and marketing messaging coming out over the next few months.

Much of this springs from the Six Sigma expertise that Tom brings to the company. Constant improvement is part of our culture now and it drives us to always be mindful of the four F’s that drive everything we do.

• Flexibility
• Focus
• Fast
• Functionality

It’s no longer about having software that can withstand a national foreclosure crisis. Now, it’s about analyzing every process flow to really understand how properties get sold faster for a fair price. We’re gathering the data and we’ll be talking more about that in this space in future posts as well.

Until then, take another look at Exceleras and reach out to learn more about how bring value to your mortgage servicing or asset management business.