After reducing and reshaping its workforce in 2022 – and losing its CTO – Lower.com is focusing its fintech ambitions on its distribution model quickly gaining traction, CEO Dan Snyder said.
Meanwhile, with a gradual shift to hybrid work, the digital lender has consolidated its New Albany offices, Snyder said in an interview. Lower could leave for downtown Columbus or the Easton area once its remaining lease expires.
"We still are empowering homeownership through technology," Snyder said.
Tech leadership shakeup
CTO Bill Kaper resigned in November after one year. Lower is changing the role, Snyder said, and close to hiring a vice president of engineering.
Kaper, a veteran of Root Inc., Huckleberry and Amazon, had been named one of Central Ohio's most-admired executives in Columbus Business First's C-Suite awards in September.
He remains a strategic advisor to Lower, according to his LinkedIn profile, and has founded a new startup near Pittsburgh. During the year he also moved back to his native western Pennsylvania after three years in Central Ohio. Kaper declined an interview request.
Losing Kaper was difficult, Snyder said, but the CTO had built an infrastructure to deploy products rapidly.
"Bill did a good job of really hiring in a lot of elite talent," Snyder said. "We've got a ... core group of some of the best engineers around, working on the mortgage-as-a-service product. We’re going to need to hire in."
Opendoor, the online residential real estate market, last month made Lower its exclusive mortgage fulfillment partner less than a year after first offering the digital lender as an option.
Starting with that first customer, Lower announced that its software now can integrate with home sellers, banks or other consumer finance companies to offer and service home loans with a seamless and efficient closing process.
The company is working to land new partnerships now that can't yet be named, Snyder said.
Lower's workforce changed with mortgage market
The engineering team remains about 30 people, and could grow to 50, Snyder said. However, that follows a series of cuts.
This month, Lower terminated an eight-person data analytics team, Snyder confirmed. The leader of that team had accepted another job offer, he said, and rather than replace the manager, Lower is focusing on the mortgage tech offering.
"We started out building last year several things and it started narrowing in the last 90 days," Snyder said. "The requirements are different than the skill sets of our (former) team."
Lower started 2022 with just under 1,600 employees, then acquired the 300-employee Hamilton Home Loans in Florida.
In July it restructured with voluntary separations and terminations based on performance, bringing it back to 1,600 as of August, a former spokeswoman confirmed at the time. The cuts were in both the lending and tech sides.
More employees were terminated due to the declines in the mortgage market in October, but the company did not enumerate them.
"We had to unfortunately part ways with a lot of talented people, especially on the refinance side," Snyder said
Snyder said the company's headcount is less than 1,200 today, but that is mainly due to normal seasonal fluctuations on the lending side of the operation.
The company is not making "mass layoffs" like other fintechs, Snyder said, and also is contending with talent getting recruited away.
"We're still hiring for certain positions," he said, and expected acquisitions this year could cause employee numbers to jump again.
Also during 2022, Lower consolidated back to its original building at 7775 Walton Pkwy. in New Albany. It had kept that as a secondary office after moving its headquarters to 8131 Smith's Mill Road at the end of 2020, according to a news release. The company allowed that lease to expire, Snyder said.
The move reflects the company's late embrace of hybrid work, Snyder said. When the Walton lease runs out, he said, the company will work with a broker to find an office with more collaboration space than cubicles.
"We held out as long as possible, because I love in-office work," he said.
