defi SOLUTIONS recently sat down with Rory Ragsdale, VP of Managed SERVICING Technology Delivery at defi SOLUTIONS, to learn a little bit more about what he does and how he helps defi customers.
Q: How would you describe your role at defi?
A: I have a couple of roles. I lead technology for the managed servicing business unit at defi, and my team is focused on building automation that enables increased efficiency across the organization and for the clients that we serve. I also lead tech support for all of our commercial products. The job there is identifying the root cause of issues, fixing them quickly, and delivering client excellence as a result.
Q: How did your career path lead to defi SOLUTIONS?
A: I’ve had the opportunity to work with some good leaders over the years, including some that are here at defi. A few years ago, they reached out and asked me to come join the team. I learned about what was going on here, the industry, the clients that we serve, and decided it was a great fit. I made the move, and I’ve been here the last three-plus years.
Q: What are the most common issues or inefficiencies you see in servicing operations today?
A: Our clients are in a very complex and regulated operating environment. Oftentimes, over the course of years, they build processes that might have made sense years ago, but the environment they’re responding to gets more and more complex over time. As a result, a lot of things that they do on a day-to-day basis (like back-office operations or customer support processes) become increasingly complex. I think many companies could automate those processes to reduce their cost and improve their efficiencies.
Q: Why do servicing operations, especially call centers, tend to become inefficient or costly over time?
A: Clients will slowly refine their back-office and customer support processes over time, and they don’t always step back and look at the end-to-end process as a whole. There’s often a tremendous opportunity to increase the efficiency of those operations. What made sense five or 10 years ago might not make sense today, and there could be dramatically better ways to perform some of those operations.
For example, one of the things we focus on at defi is how we automate workflows. We build process orchestration to complete complex, sequenced, multi-step processes in a more efficient manner, without as much human interaction. That means the skilled staff that our clients have can focus less on routine transactions and more on unique circumstances where they can add value to the process.
Q: Where are lenders underutilizing in automation or technology today?
A: One unique area that not a lot of people talk about is batch processing and file exchange. We have a lot of clients who exchange data through the traditional nightly batch process: we send them files to feed their data warehouse or ERP systems. Over time, that has become an inefficient, latent process. It doesn’t provide real-time data, and depending on the operating environment, can be error prone as well.
And so, one of the things that we’re excited about is data replication, which enables near real-time transfer of data to feed all of the client’s in-house systems. It’s much more efficient, much more reliable, and it gives clients an increased level of information and control.
Q: How are you thinking about AI’s role in servicing and customer interactions?
A: It’s difficult to overstate the significance of what AI is bringing to the industry right now. I think every client should be thinking about what they can do to drive efficiency and quality through the use of AI. We’re certainly looking into that at defi, in the originations process, the servicing process, the back office, and client support.
A: These agentic-type capabilities are extremely powerful, and they can handle routine activities that we would normally dedicate significant staff to cover. We can do these activities faster, with more efficiency, and with better quality. Especially in the engineering space — the tooling that is available allows us to do the same thing with the applications we build. We identify problems faster, and move faster to get them resolved. We’re accelerating almost every aspect of the process through the use of AI, and I think it’s something every client should be thinking about.
Q: What does your team do day to day that clients don’t see?
A: My tech support team is focused on identifying and resolving issues as quickly as we can. If a client reports a case, we will triage that quickly and try to resolve it for the client as fast as we can. Clients never see the process that goes on behind the scenes. When a case comes in, a typical organization would route it around to various internal parties. People would look at it, they would update the case, they’d send it back and forth. We decided that we needed to dramatically accelerate that process for clients.
We implemented a practice called swarming, where we bring all the subject matter experts together in one place and collaborate to resolve problems in real-time. That process has dramatically increased the speed and the throughput with which we address client issues. It’s been a complete game changer for us internally, and it’s literally eliminated thousands of days of latency to the client support process. The clients never see it, but it’s a significant contributor to the level of service that we provide.
Q: What are you most excited about in your work this year?
A: I would say, hands down, the transformation that our business is seeing as a result of AI is probably the most exciting thing I’ve seen in many, many years, maybe in my entire career to be honest. I think the tools that we have available now change not just the way we do our work, but the speed with which we do it, and the level of quality that we can deliver. And at the end of the day, the better job that we can do, the better value we can deliver to clients in the products and services that we make available. So, I think these tools are only going to get better. I’m actually really excited about the capabilities that we’ve seen so far, but I think this is a technology that will be more impactful to our industry, really than anything we’ve seen in a long, long time.
Q: How do you recharge outside of work?
A: I discovered pickleball not too long ago. That’s a fantastic sport. So, my wife and I play a lot of pickleball; we really enjoy that. I’m also a musician, so I play music on the weekends, and I get a lot of enjoyment out of that. I’ve got three grown kids and a couple of grandkids, so I spend as much time as I can with them and use that as an opportunity to recharge.
Q: What’s one product, app, or tool you can’t live without?
A: ChatGPT. I used it from the start, and now I use it literally every day. I ask random questions that might come up in conversations. I do research when I’m making a major purchasing decision. I’ve even used it to remind me of pickleball rules. I would say it’s probably my go-to app for pretty much everything.
