Red Ventures (RV) has been building a portfolio of digital brands and premiere companies. Acquiring brands is challenging on many levels—especially when trying to align culture, operations, and technology at breakneck speed.
But with the right tools, it’s possible to use an acquisition to launch a new venture within a bigger company. Red Ventures has done just that with Sage Home Loans. In less than four years, the company went from the inkling of an idea from leveraging their expertise in mortgage marketplaces to building a fully-fledged digital mortgage business.
To help make this happen, Sage Home Loans’ lean PM and engineering teams used Retool to iterate quickly and ship apps that power their operations. Read on to learn how they did it.
When the Product and Technology team at Sage Home Loans started working in the mortgage lending space, everyone agreed on what needed to be built: a tool to track and manage the applicant journey and a POS system for loan officers to submit applications. But when it came to the details of the system’s UX, the team needed a shared vocabulary between subject matter experts, product managers, and engineering teams. The mortgage experts didn’t have much experience working with software teams. And Sage Home Loans’ engineers and product managers tracked customer journeys through web sessions—which didn’t reflect lending journeys that could take up to 13 months(!) to complete. Mock-ups and documents weren’t going to cut it—Sage needed to quickly get to a working prototype with live data.
Sage Home Loans is now a direct lender in 49 states and Washington, D.C. Apps built with Retool support loan officers, data processors, sales leadership, and operations. This allowed Sage to evolve from a mortgage broker to fully managing the end-to-end pipeline of a direct mortgage lender.
Retool started as a prototyping tool for Sage Home Loans but proved capable of maturing with the business and powering the CRM and POS tools in production. The team used Retool to connect all their different systems and data stores—from credit score vendors to a loan origination system—to power the entire loan journey. Then, they created frontends in a few hours by dragging and dropping Retool’s pre-built UI components.
Because Retool takes care of mundane and time-consuming day-to-day tasks like managing dependencies and handling permissions and authentication, Sage Home Loans’ engineers have been able to focus on impactful work, like building lead scoring features with custom React components and integrating with Amazon Textract to extract content from physical documents. “Convincing engineers to work on legacy admin tools is not the easiest thing. We’ve been able to obfuscate a lot of the functionality and say you’re going to work on cutting-edge integration, not updating the button or grid layout on the dashboard,” said Chris Jaynes, a former Vice President at Sage. “It’s helped us attract and retain technical talent.”
Regarding production readiness, Sage Home Loans easily deployed Retool in their AWS infrastructure with source control, CI/CD, tests, and security scans. Sage Home Loans got so much value from the mortgage use case that other brands at Red Ventures started using Retool. The Red Ventures parent company even built a reusable Terraform module for all new brands to quickly spin up their own Retool instance, which protects each brand's application data and PII—enabling teams across its portfolio companies to build securely and safely.
The partnership between Retool and Sage has equipped teams to work more efficiently together to enhance the customer experience.
Their custom-built loan officer dashboard has made it easier for Sage Home Loans to deliver better services to its customers. Sage has found that this app alone has improved a loan officer’s efficiency by as much as 50%. “Retool has allowed us to think about standardizing how we integrate officers and manage their capacity,” Jaynes said. “We’d rather scale how much volume each officer can take with better tools, instead of adding more loan officers.”
Sage Home Loans is also evolving how sales and operations leaders can measure and manage their teams. It’s building features that centralize the communications along a loan applicant’s journey—call transcripts, text messages, emails—and is thinking about using generative AI to drive actions from this unstructured data. For example, Sage Home Loans is working to generate call summaries, automatically detect follow-up tasks for loan officers, and even coach loan officers to be better communicators.
The team can also now respond quickly to changes in the mortgage landscape, which can happen overnight as interest rates shift. If a PM at Sage Home Loans sees an opportunity to innovate on the lending tools, they’re usually able to implement a solution as needed within Retool, without needing to put in a full design and eng sprint.
“Coordinating a designer, frontend, backend, and DevOps engineer to build even a small screen requires extensive communication and a clear vision.” Jaynes said. “With Retool, you don’t need as many people to make changes that can directly impact the consumer. It’s a lot cleaner and smoother.”
Sage has always valued the power of leveraging data to simplify the mortgage experience. Now analysts have an app development platform sitting on top of the hard work, where they can try out new and exciting ideas—like creating a visualization over tens of thousands of customer reviews or building a better way to manage software CapEx—all without needing extra engineering resources.
“After we’ve done a big backend integration, we can plug it into Retool and make it accessible that day. We can deploy the right solution for the right challenge—and there isn’t a lot of learning required to become effective,” Jaynes said. “As we keep adapting our tech stack to ingest new brands, Retool is helping Sage move quickly.”
This is one example of how Sage and the larger Red Ventures portfolio has improved its operating efficiency with Retool. The team has leveraged Retool across different business verticals to help internal teams and customers alike.
Ready to see Retool in action? Schedule a Retool demo or sign up for free today.
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