Cenlar’s Leslie Peeler addresses ‘disruptive AI’ solutions in mortgage servicing

Artificial intelligence may be known for its speed, but in mortgage servicing, the real opportunity is in reshaping decades-long relationships with homeowners, according to Leslie Peeler, executive vice president and chief operating officer at Cenlar FSB.

Speaking at HousingWire’s AI Summit on Tuesday, Peeler told the audience how her time at IBM shaped her view of the technology’s disruptive potential.

One project in the recruiting space, Peeler said, compressed weeks of talent acquisition work into minutes by automating job posting, candidate screening and interview scheduling tasks.

“That really informed my thinking around how AI could be disruptive beyond smaller point solutions by stringing things together,” she said.

Now at Cenlar, Peeler is applying these lessons to mortgage servicing, a process that can span up to 30 years. Her focus is to use AI to reduce costs while also elevating the homeowner experience.

“There’s a lot of cost opportunity, certainly, to use AI and generative AI to take cost out of servicing,” she said ” … If you think about the initial work that we did around using generative AI with the chatbot to enable better, more high-quality responses — faster responses to homeowners who wanted to engage online — that’s an example of a lot of people today using generative AI for things like call auto summarization

“I think that there are a lot of things that are opportunities. There’s certainly a lot of cost benefits in these use cases for a servicer that is the scale of Cenlar — over 2 million loans. That’s a lot of interactions that you’re driving every day.”

Peeler hopes that AI can address regulatory compliance around servicing — specifically in speeding up compliance requirements and communication. To address this concern, Peeler told the audience that Cenlar has partnered with PhoenixTeam to utilize their AI product, Phoenix Burst.

“We did a proof of concept in the wintertime. … The process that we’re putting together takes that from a five- to six-week effort down to one to two days, which then allows people to really focus on that implementation and how to drive that implementation with more automation, as opposed to more manual efforts,” Peeler said.

“And then, once you do the automation, you can use generative AI to create user acceptance testing or modify policies and procedures.”

The need for speed

Peeler said that time-saving capabilities are a key to servicing in 2025 and beyond.

“I think servicing had a reputation for a number of years as being kind of second to origination. And I do think that with all of these capabilities, I don’t think servicing needs to take a back seat to all of the technology investment that always comes with origination,” she said.

She added that Cenlar is launching a “value network,” a system designed to give servicing managers real-time data to guide their daily operations.

Peeler likened the system to an airline cockpit, offering managers full visibility into thousands of processes running simultaneously and helping them identify potential issues before they escalate.

“It’s the equivalent of moving from a lack of visibility to what’s under the water to complete visibility,” she said.

The platform also reduces the time managers spend on monthly business review reports, which traditionally required hours to compile. Instead of reporting on issues from the prior month, managers now receive daily insights and prioritized recommendations on where to focus their attention.