Advancements In Technology: Dan Sogorka Leveraging AI At Rocket Pro TPO
By KIMBERLEY HAAS
As lenders work to stay on top of advances in artificial intelligence, companies are hiring the top minds in mortgage technology.
Mortgage technology expert Dan Sogorka officially joined Rocket Pro TPO as its general manager on Sept. 3.
He has been running mortgage tech companies for the last 25 years.
“I love the industry. I love the people. I love the challenges that we continue to work through and I’m really excited about where we are now, specifically, where we’re going with Rocket,” Sogorka said.
In this newly created role, Sogorka will be responsible for establishing the end-to-end vision and growth of Rocket’s broker business. He will ensure the lender’s products and processes align with the needs of the mortgage broker community while leveraging Rocket Mortgage’s AI technologies and platform, according to a press release.
You can listen to the full interview here:
Sogorka took about eight months off after leaving his role as president and CEO of Sagent Lending Technologies before coming to Rocket Pro TPO. He said the use of generative AI is going to disrupt a lot of industries and he wanted to decide where he would like to be as that comes to fruition.
Sogorka said when it comes to how mortgages are originated and serviced, a lot of the underpinning technology is old. It’s also siloed in terms of enabling data to get to the right place at the right time, he said.
Sogorka said that consumer satisfaction is not where it could be because the process takes a long time and is often associated with anxiety.
“This is something that we feel should be a joyous occasion in someone’s life when they’re dealing with, a lot of times, their biggest investment that they will ever make,” he said.
Streamlining the process while providing certainty and transparency is the opportunity here. When asked how brokers are embracing new technologies, Sogorka said every broker owner he has engaged with wants to use tech.
“That’s what’s going to make, I think, next year really phenomenal, because it’s kind of like the end of this year is getting all the playbook together, putting everything in line, packaging the technology together, and then 2025 is really rolling that out across the industry at scale in a way that I think is going to be really meaningful,” Sogorka said.
Sogorka said he envisions a world where people can take a picture of a QR code and they are preapproved for a mortgage.
Leaders at Rocket Companies are keenly focused on using AI to grow their business. During an Investor Day in September, CEO Varun Krishna said they started this journey years ago and feel good about their AI strategy.
“We are leading the charge in the AI revolution,” Krishna said. “This is not something that is going to go away. It’s going to transform our industry. I say this as a technologist, as an engineer, and as someone who has been deeply involved in this space for years.”