Mortgage consulting firm LendArch has hired Karthik Kumar, the former global mortgage practice head at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS).
He will serve as LendArch’s executive vice president and chief operating officer.
Kumar was a manager at Standard Chartered Bank from 2002 to 2004. He then spent 18 years at TCS, where he focused on solution architecture, operational delivery and entity transformation for most of the top-40 mortgage lenders and the largest vendors.
“We intend to change how lending is going to be done fundamentally – behavior, market dynamics, products,” Kumar said. “We’re not talking about huge Capex changes; we’re talking about minor changes that will have a significant impact.”
LendArch was founded in 2021 by Tammy Richards, whose CV includes high-level stints Bank of America, Caliber Home Loans. She most recently served as chief operating officer for loanDepot. Richards left the company in March 2021 and, after six months, filed a lawsuit alleging that the lender closed thousands of loans without proper documentation, among other misdeeds.
LendArch has over 30 clients, including lenders and broker firms. The company, with 25 employees, is focused on the origination side of the business. Clients include several top 10 lenders in the country.
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LendArch has a consulting arm to develop a plan for clients, for example, to reduce costs and improve their underwriting. According to Kumar, it works like a “C-suite in a box,” but with an independent perspective.
The company also has a technology development team creating a suite of small technology products intended to have a significant impact when put all together – Kumar likened these technologies to building blocks on a Lego toy.
“We are trying to create an API economy,” Kumar said, referring to exposing a firm’s digital services and assets through application programming interfaces (APIs).
Kumar sees potential for LendArch’s technology to complement and communicate with products from top vendors in the country, such as ICE Mortgage Technology and Black Knight, but not compete with them.
