In this episode of Lykken on Lending, we sit down with Praveen Chandramohan of Cotality—formerly CoreLogic—to explore how data-driven strategies are transforming mortgage customer retention and growth. Praveen shares the story behind Cotality’s rebrand, rooted in collaboration, totality, and vitality, and unveils their powerful new platform, Arraya, which provides lenders with actionable insights for acquisition, retention, and homeowner engagement. From leveraging 22,000+ data sources to building AI-ready models, to launching innovative tools like OneHomeowner that foster lifelong borrower relationships, this conversation is packed with strategies for thriving in today’s purchase-driven market. If you’re ready to turn data into a competitive edge and boost retention rates well beyond the industry average, this is an episode you won’t want to miss.
[David] Welcome to another special episode of Lykken On Lending. Very excited about today because we’re gonna be talking about customer retention, working on the top of the sales funnel with an industry leader, CoreLogic, now rebranded as Cotality. We’re gonna hear about that and joining us on the podcast today is Praveen. Praveen, so good to have you back on the podcast. It’s been a while and you’ve got some exciting things, but for those that have not met you, we always start off, tell us a little about yourself and how you got to where you’re at there.
[Praveen] Hey, David. So great to be here. Excited to be back. For those who don’t know me, Praveen Chandramohan. I am a business exec at Cotality, leading a lot of the origination solutions focused on top of the funnel, which is all about customer acquisition, customer retention, market expansion strategies and a lot of the fulfillment capabilities as well when it comes to borrower underwriting. I spent, I can’t believe it’s been about 21 years in the mortgage industry. Wow. Prior to, so this is my 11th year at Cotality, and prior to Cotality, I was at Fannie for about 10 years.
[David] That’s amazing. Two great companies, and of course Cotality, we gotta get into that because we’ve known it as CoreLogic. You’ve recently gone through a new brand change. Talk about that. And I was really, when we were talking the other day, I loved how you describe, there’s three words that go into really describing how you came up with Cotality. Talk about it.
[Praveen] Yeah, no. Really fascinating story. We, as probably everybody knows, we went from being a publicly traded company to a private company in 2021. We reorganized the entire company around the three key industry segments we serve, mortgage, real estate, and insurance. There’s been a lot of changes in the company, both externally and internally. A lot of tech investments, strategic assets that we’ve acquired, divested non-strategic assets. Really shifted our focus towards customer being a NorthStar. And we thought it was a great point in time where the company’s very different from where it was before. And how else to tell that story by doing a branching.
[David] Doing a rebrand.
[Praveen] Exactly. A rebranding. And so we went through a rebranding exercise talk, try to figure out what would resonate with the culture of the company, the identity of the company. And three words resonated with the entire company and our external clients. So one is collaboration. Collaboration is all about this being a people-centric industry, we can only achieve success through collaboration. CoreLogic at that point is all about property. We know everything from the micro level to the macro level. And so totality was the word that resonated with us. And just the fact that we are so ingrained in the business processes for all of our clients, vitality resonated with us. So a combination of collaboration, totality, vitality, gave birth to Cotality.
[David] Oh, that’s good. I love it. It’s, you invented a new word. It’s when you create a new category king, you guys have done it again. We’ve got some really amazing products that you have launched over the way the last few years, especially a new way for lenders to experience leverage of data. Let’s talk a little bit about your data, what you’re doing are some very exciting things that are creating ongoing business opportunities for anyone who is working with you.
[Praveen] So there’s a spectrum of use cases that we try to solve with the data assets that we have. When it comes to the mortgage industry, it can go all the way from your top of funnel, which is all about your customer acquisition, retention. It can get into fulfillment in terms of streamlining data through the origination process. Or it can go into your capital markets risk management perspective. But where I’m focused on right now very excited about launching a platform called Arraya, which is really a front door to a lot of the awesome Cotality assets that we have. The platform itself, from a top of funnel perspective is all about tools to provide lenders on customer acquisition in terms of how they can bring in new borrowers into their pipeline. Customer retention. How do you recapture them for future businesses? Your market and competitive analysis? What are the different things you can do to understand who you’re competing with, where you’re winning, where you’re losing, what can you do from a product expansion perspective? And last but not the least, homeowner engagement. It’s all about the entire mortgage industry centered around home ownership. The goal of the mortgage industry is to provide a home owner a place to live, which is their home. And so that engagement is something that we focused on. Very excited about it.
[David] Yeah, it is very, I listened to all that you’re doing without getting into how the sausage is made. But you were talking about gathering this data and how you bring it together. I got some other things I want to go to, but just give our listener an appreciation for how much goes on inside of your shop to bring this data together so that, especially as it relates to this top of the sales funnel because that’s when you, there’s so much activity with looking at what Rockets purchased lately, there’s a lot of activity and focus at the top of the funnel. How can your clients benefit from all of that you’re doing there? Give us insights to what you’re doing behind the curtain.
[Praveen] If you think about Cotalities data assets, just to appreciate the complexity, the sourcing is a massive supply chain. So there’s about 22,000 different data sources that we go out to through a combination of automated.
[David] Let’s say that again, did what, how many?
[Praveen] 22,000 data sources. So that’s a big number, right? and so it’s a huge supply chain. We have people, technology processes. All trying to automate and maximize and maximize the data sourcing and the accuracy of that. We’ve built about 200 plus different models on top of that because sometimes it’s not enough that you get raw data. You have to provide a little bit more insights. So that becomes actionable to our lenders. And we’ve collected this for over the past 50 years. So imagine having 50 years…
[David] Historical practice value of something like that. So you don’t you’d be able to look at trends as a result of that. That goes into the analysis there. So when you’re talking top of the sales funnel, what are some of the data elements that you guys are really focusing in on?
[Praven] Yeah so where be focus on is really, the three big pillars from a data perspective. One is what can customers do with our data to drive their customer acquisition strategies? So in this, you can really think about using these data assets to create a buy box and say, this is the sweet spot where I do my business in. Can you help me with identifying the right set of borrowers, potential borrowers? And then combine that with your analytics on propensity to buy, propensity to refi, propensity to do a home equity and give me that right combination. So that’s one area. The second area is all about what are called retention recapture, which I think is pretty huge right now. We’ve all heard, we’ve all heard mortgage stats, right? It is gonna be a purchase based market for the next, I would say 3, 4, 5 years, at least. And so everybody’s honing in on this idea of mortgage is no longer a transactional relationship, it is relationship based lending. And so retention recapture become the top most priority for every, it doesn’t matter whether it’s an IMB, whether it is a bank, whether it’s a credit union. We keep hearing that all day long. And so from a retention recapture perspective, there’s a lot that we can do without necessarily going into personally identifiable information. Just based on property and ownership records, we’re able to provide a lot of insights into who they are where their customers live, what are their sort of preferences in terms of buying properties, giving them insights into actionable things that their customers are doing in real life. If they walked into an open house, that’s a signal that their customers are shopping. If they listed their home for sale, that’s a signal that they’re shopping. And then we just launched a cool new product called One Homeowner. Which is all about investing that relationship into a long term thing. So I think what is pretty obvious, but understated in the industry is retention is a long game. It is a long game. It’s not an instant gratification. You can’t just retain a customer today, get a customer today and retain them tomorrow. You need to put in the effort to retain and tools like OneHomeowner help you do that.
[David] Yeah. And that’s really a homeowner engagement solution. And so let’s get a little more into what that looks like.
[Praveen] Yeah. You said it right. It is a homeowner engagement solution. It it is the most recent offering that we did in Arraya, which is our central gateway platform. It’s an engagement platform that allows a lender to engage with their customers throughout their home ownership journey. We’ve talked to several homeowners during the build of this product. And what we realized is, there’s a spectrum of homeowners, and for most of them it is a very complex task. Home ownership is, comes with its own set of joys, sorrows excitement challenges, and OneHomeowner helps you connect all of that throughout the home ownership journey. More importantly, from a lender perspective, if you look at the industry stat. The retention rate for our mortgage industry is less than 15%. That’s like you spend all your money acquiring your customers and then only 15% or less end up staying with you for their next transaction. And so how do you solve that? And so OneHomeowner helps you build that trust and you get that trust in customer for life.
[David] Yeah, and that’s what really starts getting excited. Everyone’s trying to figure out how to change that. I’ve been in this business for 51 years. It is, we’ve always suffered. It’s come up a little bit. But we’re still not holding onto that relationship. So this is a significant issue that lenders should be paying attention to.
[Praveen] Yes. Agreed. Agreed.
[David] When you launch this, it, it really gets into where you are it’s starting to talk about Cotality the rebranding of this and how that’s work. What makes Cotality unique when it comes to solving customer retention? Let’s dive into that a little bit deeper. What are the growth challenges that you’re also looking at there?
[Praveen] Yeah so when we think about some of the challenges that the lenders are facing, it’s all about creating those actionable insights. I spoke about the 22,000 different data sources that we have. And it’s amazing what you can do with data but what’s challenging is how do you convert that into an actionable, an actionable use case, right? for example, when you think about customer retention. You have to think about it as a spectrum, and I talked a little bit about this being a long game. So you have to be ready. For example, doing the best in class customer segmentation, approaching a customer with the right message at the right time is critical. But how do you do that?
[David] So the segment, and you do that by having what you’re saying, there’s segmentation and timing. Those are the two. Exactly. Is there another component that goes into that?
[Praveen] So it’s all about understanding what your customer wants. I’ll give you, I’ll give you a classic example. My own personal story. I went through I get an automated email from one of my lenders saying that I’m pre-qualified and eligible for a refi opportunity. And I was like, great I’m gonna be saving $200. So they got the messaging right and I got excited about it. And I went through the process. And it turns out that towards the end I was not eligible because there was a minor clause in that saying that is intended for your primary home only. And the home in question was a rental property. I used to own that, but it’s no longer something that I own. And that built a little bit of friction in inside me saying you knew that this was a rental property. Why did you even gimme the offer?
[David] This, what you’re really hitting on Praveen here is that we blow our own credibility by not having the data. And so here you’re opening up something going, oh, this looks interesting. But then they almost, they better, they not even do it at all than do what you did.
[Praveen] Exactly. Exactly. And then you, if you continue making these errors, at some point you start to lose credibility. And then I’m like, oh, I’m not gonna open this email again. Yeah. So it’s all about, it’s all about right messaging. And then when you add in additional customer intelligence like some of the signals I talked about, higher propensity to buy, or higher propensity to refi or some cool tech, like being able to being able to identify shopping patterns through location intelligence or identifying through a vast array of our MLS data sets identifying things like a home listed for sale. You now blend in. I know everything about the property. I know for the most part I can accurately predict intent, and now I’m starting to get signals about timing. You nail down timing, you nail down content, you nail down intent. That’s in Nirvana, right? And that’s how you get your customer for life.
[David] Yeah. I, and then it’s also, then you talk about. The way you communicate to them. Do you, what was that? the intelligence. You mentioned it just a minute ago. It’s not coming back to me. But you just mentioned about something about how you speak to them. It is also critical. I think there the that messaging, sorry, and we’ll…
[Praveen] You gotta build trust and you build trust with making sure that you land on the right messaging and the right content. And that’s all driven by data.
[David]Let’s talk about messaging. ’cause that is such a key part. So many people struggle with messaging. They got all the data, right? They got all this great stuff, but it’s that messaging. How do you guys help on the messaging.
[Praveen] By helping them with timing. So sometimes it’s not just the messaging in terms of in terms of you are eligible for so and or we can help you with and. It’s also about timing. You you have to understand sort of the ownership journey that they’re in or the buying journey that they’re in, and if you land that accurate messaging at the right time. So that’s when it starts to converge, and then you start to see benefits from that opportunity.
[David] This is really for those that are using this, it’s almost creating an unfair and advantage. When it comes to this, I’m, I just was out on a bass boat and I’m amazed at the technology that they have now with bass boats where we can go find the fish. It’s almost like you’re, you’ve created a fish fighter, a borrower fighter that really allows you the, whoever’s using your service. To have a much higher conversion and a much higher retention rate than is what you’re saying.
[Praveen] That’s right. So the way I would phrase that is it’s all about democratizing the data. We wanted to help level the playing field in terms of opportunities for the lender to connect with the borrowers. What we cannot guarantee is that the borrower will have a repeat business with you. But what we all strive for is, yes, it is human tendency that the borrowers will shop, but we wanna make sure that you are the first person they call. They’re gonna call others. But we wanna make sure you are the first person they call.
[David] Yep. That first move or advantage is always the one that you wanna have, but this does give you a much stronger. Your ability to connect with them, as you’re saying, I’m really interested about what’s going on, especially where you’re going. I’m excited to hear Cotalities future vision. AI is all over everything. What do we, what can we anticipate with where we go from here?
[Praveen] You brought in the buzzword. And I’ll tell you, we are all in. AI has been so just taking a step back, Cotality as a company, that’s always…
[David] by the way, AI all in Oh,
[Praveen] That’s right. Ai, Ai. Cotality has always embraced artificial intelligence in many forms. From the time of learning machines where you would build in predictive models. I talked about the 200 predictive models. They all are in the broader category of AI, but I think there’s a recognition in the industry that the new wave of generative AI that has come in is got potential. It’s got some real potential. So what I’m excited most about is our approach to how we use AI. We talked about democratizing data. We talked about how AI can help. One thing about AI is it’s only as useful as the data that powers it, And so the first thing we’re doing is we’re making our data AI ready. And what that means is…
[David] That’s a really good point. Get into a little bit AI ready because that you’re hitting on something. I’m just learning about how do we make our data AI ready.
[Praveen] So if you think about how these large language models operate is that they scour the internet, build all of the knowledge from based on public knowledge that is written in articles, YouTube videos, different websites, news, and it tries to form a mental map of what is that? What is the state of the affairs of the topic that is being asked? And then it has predictive functions in saying, alright, now that I understand the topic, the user’s talking to me about understanding something else, and I’m researching my knowledge base and trying to give you the answer. Now, if you narrow this down to the world of mortgage and the world of real estate. There are two separate things that will start to emerge. One is what I call public knowledge, so public knowledge is all about consumer education, helping them, guiding them through the buying process, which large language models are ready today, right? But when it gets to specifics about that specific property, that specific loan parameters, that specific borrower, court, borrower conditions and things like those. LMS cannot solve it because that’s not publicly available information, or not easily available information. And so we’ve the models that we built, the data that comes out of it, they’re all proprietary to Cotality in addition to some of the public data sets. So when you’re making this data AI ready, you’re essentially training a large language model to understand Cotalities data. So now you can interact with it like you’re interacting with ChatGPT today.
[David] Wow. That’s all exciting. This gets really exciting.
[Praveen] Yeah. So we’re we definitely see a big future in where I’ll give you some examples. For example, you can imagine a world of, you as a loan officer, you have a loan officer assistant by your side, which is really an AI agent, and that’s helping you convert all of your outbound leads, taking care of your calendar appointments. And essentially all they have to do is manage the call, manage the inbound lead, because an inbound lead is so much more powerful than you going through your phone book and calling a whole bunch of people. You can imagine I’ll give you another example. A chief strategy officer who’s responsible for sort of growth strategies for the lender. Imagine having a chief strategy officer assistant right by your side that is telling you about the right product strategy based on all the data you have, the right LO that you have to go hire if you’re in distributed retail, the right realtor network that you have to build for your loan officer pool. Just imagine doing all of that served in a platter. So that’s where array is going, and that’s exciting. That’s the piece that I’m most excited about.
[David] I applaud you on the rebranding, and I can see why it’s so timely with, how the broadening of the services, the growth of your services from what CoreLogic did to now, what all of that you’re doing inside of Cotality, this is just amazing. I could, I’d love to dive in. I’m a geek head when it gets into the data nerd. I love getting into all of that, but we won’t bore our audience with that. Glad to have you come back. because I’m really interested in the home ownership, the OneHomeownership. I really wanna get into that in a much bigger way.But that’s gonna take another podcast because I know you have some exciting announcements. So we’re gonna have a, I wanna tease that up just for our listeners. Okay. Be paying attention because we’re gonna be coming back with a another podcast here soon about some of that. Praveen, thank you so much for being here. So fun to talk to you. Always. Your energy enthusiasm is crazy where data is concerned. I share that with you, but not everyone understands the importance of it. You guys are doing a brilliant job and I love the new name, Cotality.
[Praveen] Thank you David. I share the energy. I get a lot of it from you, so thank you for that. This is an awesome conversation.
[David] It’s excellent. I appreciate it. Thank you so much, Pravin
Important Links
Praveen is a Business Executive at Cotality and currently responsible for products and solutions that helps lenders retain their customers, grow their business, and originate loans in a cost-effective manner. He has been in the housing finance industry for over 22+ years. In the 10+ years he has been with CoreLogic he led a variety of business units – Rental Property Solutions, Loan Origination Systems, Credit & Borrower Solutions. Prior to Cotality, he spent about 10 years at Fannie Mae running technology for Market Data, Valuation Analytics & Capital Markets Risk Management.
With a combination of Rental, Retail, Wholesale, Correspondent and Secondary Market experiences, Praveen brings in unique perspectives on the housing finance ecosystem and it’s impact on US economy.
Praveen has a Masters in Computer Science from Old Dominion University and an MBA from Smith School of Business, University of Maryland.