Sagent, the mortgage servicing software company, has promoted President Sridhar Sharma to chief executive and named former Fannie Mae executive Andrew Bon Salle chairman of its board, the company announced Sept. 21.
The changes come seven months after Sagent hired Sharma and took its Dara platform live for U.S. servicers, and they hand the company’s top executive job to the person it recruited to build out its artificial-intelligence strategy.
Sharma joined Sagent as president on Feb. 11, 2026. Before that he spent a decade at Mr. Cooper, serving as chief innovation and digital officer from 2015 until that company’s 2025 sale to Rocket Companies. Sagent says Mr. Cooper developed several patented artificial intelligence and machine learning platforms under his technical leadership while growing into the country’s largest mortgage servicer.
As CEO he will focus on large-scale Dara implementations, broader adoption of the platform and new capabilities for servicers, according to the announcement.
“Mortgage servicing is entering an era where processes evolve in real-time and human capital is focused only on the most complex issues and in delivering amazing customer experience,” Sharma said in the release. “DaraIQ, the platforms underlying AI engine, is designed to help servicers continuously optimize for scale and speed with a robust catalog of compliant agentic workflows.”
A Fannie Mae veteran takes the chair
Bon Salle spent nearly three decades at Fannie Mae in a series of senior leadership roles, where Sagent says he shaped some of the industry’s most significant strategic, operational and technology initiatives. His understanding of housing finance, servicing, capital markets and regulation will help expand Dara’s reach, the company said. That matters commercially: for large institutions, replacing a servicing system is a multi-year compliance exercise as much as a technology purchase.
“Dara is truly differentiated in the market. It is designed to meet servicers wherever they are on their AI transformation journey, giving them the flexibility to balance human expertise and AI-driven automation in the way that best fits their business,” Bon Salle said. “The company is at an important point in its evolution.”
The two appointments together amount to a succession. Chris Marshall held the chairman and CEO titles as recently as February, and the announcement credits him with turning Sagent’s vision for servicing modernization into Dara. It does not say what role, if any, Marshall retains.
Servicing moves to the center of the business
The transition lands as the economics of the mortgage business tilt back toward servicing. Freddie Mac’s Primary Mortgage Market Survey put the 30-year fixed rate at 6.95% on Sept. 17, up from 6.26% a year earlier, and the Mortgage Bankers Association’s Sept. 16 finance forecast projects the rate averaging 6.8% in the fourth quarter and holding between 6.7% and 6.8% through 2027.
The MBA expects refinance originations to fall from $700 billion this year to $634 billion in 2027 on that outlook. When refinancing slows, loans stay on the books longer, servicing portfolios age rather than churn, and the cost of servicing each loan becomes a larger share of what a lender earns β which is the case Sagent and its competitors make for replacing decades-old servicing systems. Competitor ICE Mortgage Technology reported $557 million of second-quarter revenue, up 5% year over year.
Sagent is backed by private equity firm Warburg Pincus and says it powers trillions of dollars in outstanding mortgage servicing for its customers. Sharma, describing Dara in February, called it “one of the most significant innovation overhauls the $14 trillion U.S. mortgage industry has seen in decades” β a claim the platform’s new chief executive now has to make good on. Rocket Companies, which bought Sharma’s former employer last year, posted its most profitable quarter in four years in the second quarter.
