Sagent has promoted President Sridhar Sharma to chief executive officer and named longtime board member and former Fannie Mae executive Andrew Bon Salle chairman of its board.
The leadership changes come as the Dallas-based mortgage technology company works to expand deployment of Dara, its cloud-based servicing platform built to combine core servicing, borrower communications, default management, analytics and automated workflows in one system.
Sharma joined Sagent as president in February, putting him in charge of day-to-day operations, product, technology, and customer engagement. His promotion gives him responsibility for Sagent’s broader growth strategy, including current Dara implementations and efforts to bring the platform to more mortgage servicers.
Before joining Sagent, Sharma spent roughly a decade at Mr. Cooper, most recently serving as chief innovation and digital officer. He led product, technology and artificial intelligence initiatives while the company grew into the nation’s largest mortgage servicer before its acquisition by Rocket Companies.
“Mortgage servicing is entering an era where processes evolve in real-time,” Sharma said.
Sagent said DaraIQ, the platform’s underlying AI engine, is designed to automate servicing workflows while allowing employees to concentrate on more complicated borrower issues. The company describes the system as having compliance controls embedded throughout the servicing process.
The promotion marks another quick change at the top of Sagent. Chris Marshall became CEO in January, moving from chairman into the executive role to oversee the rollout of Dara. Sagent credited Marshall with guiding the platform through its development and launch but did not announce a new role for him.
Sharma’s appointment also deepens Sagent’s connection to the leadership team that helped develop the technology behind Dara.
In 2022, Sagent agreed to acquire certain servicing-technology assets from Mr. Cooper and combine them with its own software to build a cloud-native servicing platform. Mr. Cooper received a minority ownership stake in Sagent and became a multiyear customer. At the time, Sharma was named senior technology adviser to Sagent’s board.
Dara has since moved into commercial deployment. Sagent announced earlier this year that Click n’ Close, Land Home Financial Services and Evergreen Home Loans would implement the platform across various servicing operations.
Bon Salle brings nearly three decades of experience at Fannie Mae, where his roles included executive vice president of the government-sponsored enterprise’s single-family mortgage business. His work covered mortgage operations, servicing, capital markets, and housing-finance policy.
He has been connected to Sagent for several years and was identified as a company board member when the Mr. Cooper agreement was announced in 2022. His elevation to chairman adds a former GSE executive to the top of Sagent’s board while the company pursues adoption among bank and nonbank servicers.
“The company is at an important point in its evolution,” Bon Salle said.
The appointments put two executives with experience inside some of the industry’s largest mortgage institutions in charge of Sagent’s next phase. The company now must move Dara beyond development and early customer commitments into large-scale implementations — where servicers will be able to measure its effect on operating costs, compliance controls and borrower service.
