Gateless names new chief technology officer

Gateless – self-described as a visionary technology company providing the mortgage industry with intelligent automation – announced the promotion of Bryan Jackson, the company’s head of product delivery, to chief technology officer.

Mortgage Professional America reached out to Gateless for insights on the significance of the move. Jackson’s promotion comes on the heels of a wave of recent announcement by Gateless, including the hiring of company president Joe Langner, a strategic partnership with Google Cloud, and product integrations with Freddie Mac’s Loan Product Advisor® and Fannie Mae's Desktop Underwriter®. 

Asked what element of the company Jackson will oversee, Gateless ticked off a list of responsibilities under his new role – all of which are facets of the firm’s technology where he will lead teams concentrated on:

• Infrastructure;
• Vendor management and outsourcing of tech-related services;
• Information security;
• Dev Ops;
• System architecture;
• Engineering and data science, supporting product development – including AI capabilities.

MPA also asked Gateless COO Rick Lang to describe what part of Jackson’s background prepares him for his new role. “Over the course of his professional career,” Lang said, “Bryan has developed true domain expertise in all of these areas. In addition, during his time with Gateless, he has consistently demonstrated the creative, critical thinking, leadership and collaborative skills needed to be successful in this role.”

Lang outlined Jackson’s primary responsibilities in his former role with Gateless: “To be perfectly honest, Bryan was already responsible for many of these functions, except for direct oversight of our data science and document AI teams,” he said. “The combination of Bryan picking up these additional responsibilities, coupled with the realization that Bryan was already acting as our de facto CTO, led to the obvious choice of promoting him.”

Read more: Gateless strikes alliance with Google Cloud

Jackson’s longevity with the company also made him a good fit for his new role, Lang noted. “Bryan has been with Gateless since our inception and is one of our founding members. He was part of a small group of individuals who helped incubate the Gateless concept within Guaranteed Rate, over three years ago, before it was spun off as an independent entity two years ago.”

Lang spoke to the tech-heavy focus of the appointment as it relates to the company’s broader mission: “The Gateless suite of products, Smart Underwrite in particular, will drive a faster, less complicated, more self-empowered consumer experience,” he said.

“Bryan has and will continue to play a critical role in helping Gateless achieve that goal for our lender customers and ultimately the consumers they serve. We believe our product vision and technical capabilities are unmatched in the industry.

“We further believe that we are enabling the mortgage origination process of the future, something that every lender will need in order to compete more effectively. Bottom line: We expect to be very well-positioned for success withing our industry and, over the long term, the financial services industry as a whole as well as anywhere intelligent automation can be applied to drive the application processing experience and its efficiency.”

The tech-focused moves have led to company expansion, Lang noted: “There has been considerable expansion, particularly withing our technical organization, to the tune of 25% growth in the past year,” the COO said.

“These incremental resources have helped us finalize Version 1 of our Smart Underwrite product, which we expect to make broadly available to the market within the next 30 days. Gateless already has its first handful of initial lender customers in the queue, with additional technical resources needed to help us implement and ideally accelerate our push into the market.”

Gateless last made news in mid-April when it announced the establishment of a strategic partnership with Google Cloud to accelerate document classification and extraction coverage used by its Gateless Smart Underwrite solution. The partnership will connect Google Cloud’s DocAI capabilities, which uses machine learning on a scalable cloud-based platform, to help organizations scan, analyze, and understand documents, with Gateless’s proprietary technology to increase the number of documents that can be identified and used to extract meaningful data, officials said at the time of the announcement.

Read next: Guaranteed Rate completes spinout of its mortgage technology business

Company officials said that from the moment Smart Underwrite has visibility into loan data and documentation, it can identify required underwriting conditions, task the right parties to satisfy those conditions, then extract, interpret, calculate, clear and underwrite conditions, without an underwriter. The innovative technology can eliminate 10-15 days in unnecessary loan manufacturing time, drastically reducing the cost to originate a loan and creating a more seamless experience for borrowers.