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Mortgage giant Rocket Companies has ambitious goals to grow its purchase loan business in 2025 by building closer ties to real estate agents and mortgage brokers — and will raise its profile with consumers through its newly-acquired rocket.com domain and a “brand restage” that will include a Super Bowl ad buy, CEO Varun Krishna tells Inman.
Krishna, who will be a featured speaker at Inman Connect New York in January, also shed light on Rocket’s investment in AI, which he said allows the company to anticipate customers’ needs and rapidly scale its business according to demand.
In addition to Rocket Mortgage, Rocket Companies’ stable of brands includes the personal finance app, Rocket Money; real estate brokerage and search site, Rocket Homes; and title and settlement services provider Amrock.
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Those offerings — coupled with Rocket’s sizable presence in mortgage loan servicing — make the company a “fintech” (financial technology) platform, providing a range of tools to help people manage their finances.
Krishna, a veteran fintech executive who has held product management roles at companies including Intuit, PayPal, Groupon and Microsoft, was named CEO of Rocket Companies and Rocket Mortgage in 2023 and also serves on the parent company’s board of directors.
With his Jan. 22 Connect appearance just over the horizon, Krishna took the time to talk with Inman about volatile mortgage rates, AI, how Rocket works with agents and mortgage brokers, and the company’s plans for a brand refresh. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Inman: There have been dramatic ups and downs in mortgage rates this year. When the Fed finally started cutting rates in September, mortgage rates went up! Economists expect rates will continue to be volatile in 2025. How is Rocket dealing with all of this rate volatility?
Varun Krishna: It’s certainly been a dynamic market, and the way we think about it is you have to build a ship that’s designed to weather storms. The way the Rocket platform works is that we’re really focused on scalability. So as the industry was battening down the hatches and thinking about what we call the yo-yo effect of hiring up and hiring down — we’ve kept our investments basically the same.
The reason for that is really because of technology. We believe that this “higher for longer” interest rate dynamic is a headwind for the industry, but more of a tailwind for Rocket. Because even when rates dip or move up, we keep our fixed costs the same, and we’re able to scale up and serve more clients.
We bet big on technology. We’re at the precipice of the very earliest stages, I think, of the AI revolution, and we’ve started to see some significant impact in how technology is making us more efficient, driving a better experience, and allowing us to scale with a more elastic cost structure.
As a fintech platform, Rocket has insights into clients’ needs, like whether they might be ready to buy a home or refinance. Once they do make a move, AI is also helping Rocket take mortgage applications and process them more efficiently. But in terms of the big picture, what is the role of AI across the entire platform?
I’ll start by saying that this is the reason that I came to Rocket. I saw a company that is likely to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI transformation, in the earliest stages of that transformation. The potential for this technology to be transformative in mortgage and home ownership was very obvious to me.
I think it starts with having a strong foundation of data that [tracks events] homeowners have experienced. For us, data is financial documents, the 65 million call logs that we have with our clients, the 300,000 to 500,000 transcripts that we generate every week. It’s the process of underwriting, servicing, appraisal management — all of the various aspects of the business that generate data.
Our data foundation is very strong — we’ve spent, over the past five years, almost half a billion dollars building the data AI infrastructure to be able to do some transformative things. You then take that data foundation and say, “Hey, what can you do to make the experience better?”
A lot of it is just the basics, right? You can make your team members significantly more efficient by automating the mundane. You can leverage things like predictive analytics to understand your client’s sentiment, their state of mind, their level of readiness to be able to execute on a transaction.
You can simplify the friction that goes into the process by automating things like document creation, document application extraction, underwriting, credit analysis, appraisals — and you can also do that as you extend into servicing and use capabilities like chat to make the client experience better, but also more automated and more self-service.
Just to give you a couple of examples, we have an AI-powered chat experience, and this allows us to have a single team member speak with multiple clients at the same time, with no degradation in personalization. So our chat interactions have doubled quarter over quarter, and conversion rates from initial interaction to credit pull have tripled with no increase in cost. We’re also using chat for things like disaster response so that clients can get immediate help 24/7.
Varun Krishna
Another example is we have a tool called Synopsis, and this is essentially an AI platform that will look through millions and millions of calls to understand things like call purpose and pain points. It creates insights that allow us to achieve higher conversion rates because we can extract significant value from super massive data sets. This technology is creating more productivity so that we can serve more clients.
A third example I’m really excited about is a platform that we call Navigator. It’s essentially a low-code, non-technical front end that we’ve developed for team members who are not super technical, who are not data scientists, who are not engineers. This platform works with our data set, but it also connects to OpenAI and Amazon Bedrock. You can ask it questions, and it can take action for you.
This is really the start of what we call the “agentic AI” revolution. You can say things like, “Analyze the call and based on the client, send me the right three text messages that I should send them to maintain their confidence.” Or, “Figure out, based on these 1,000 calls in this particular area, whether we’re losing business by not handling a specific objection.” That kind of power at your fingertips, I think, is just incredible. It’s a great example of where the AI construct, and the humanity of a home ownership conversation, are really coming together.
How do real estate agents and mortgage brokers fit into how Rocket Homes is using AI?
The first thing I would say is Rocket, collectively, is an end-to-end homeownership platform. Mortgage is the core part of that platform, but so is home search, and so is [mortgage] servicing. So are the stakeholders that play a part in those transactional relationships, so that they’re not transactional, but they’re actually relational.
For the Realtor, for the mortgage broker, we think about them as partners, and we deliberately use the term “partners” to describe our mortgage brokers. This coming year, we’re doubling down on the investments that we’re making and cultivating those channels.
We have very ambitious goals around growing our purchase mortgage business, and the real estate agent and the [mortgage] broker are part of the bedrock of that experience. They are very, very important to us. Realtors and mortgage brokers want responsiveness, competitive pricing and top-tier service. What we’re doing is taking the capabilities and products of our core retail origination platform and extending them to our [mortgage] broker partners and our Realtors to allow them to grow their businesses and to be able to better scale in every type of type of market.
Dan Sogorka
We’ve recently hired [former Sagent CEO] Dan Sogorka [as general manager of Rocket’s wholesale lending division, Rocket Pro TPO], and we’ve also strengthened the size of the team across the board, from marketing to technology to strategy. That’s just an indicator that we’re betting big with our resourcing as well, to make sure that we are strong in terms of our value proposition to both Realtors and [mortgage] brokers.
We have an incredibly powerful Realtor network with Rocket Homes. We recently acquired [the rocket.com domain] and rocket.com is going to be the centerpiece where we’ll combine the home search and the financing experiences that Rocket Homes and Rocket Mortgage provide into a fully integrated, holistic experience. The beauty of Rocket is that we are not a “house of brands,” we are a “branded house.”
We can create an experience that stretches across the entirety of homeownership — from the search experience to protecting and serving our Realtor partners and our [mortgage] broker partners, to having an amazing digital experience that’s frictionless and goes all the way into things like appraisal and settlement, then ultimately a great [mortgage] servicing experience. Mortgage brokers and Realtors are an incredibly important part of that ecosystem. They play a key role in that relationship with the client that’s very important to us.
Adweek recently reported that Rocket Mortgage is gearing up for a brand refresh with creative agency Mirimar and global design studio Otherway. Thinking back to the days of Quicken Loans and the Super Bowl ads and viral advertising, does Rocket have plans to do that kind of thing in the New Year?
Jonathan Mildenhall
One of my first hires was our [chief marketing officer, Airbnb veteran] Jonathan Mildenhall — one of the best, if not the best, CMOs on the planet. The reason we wanted to bring Jonathan to Rocket is because we are [already] the brand in homeownership, but we’re still nowhere near the brand that we aspire to be.
We think about the experience of homeownership as being just as important as what Apple does to the world of hardware. We are working on what we call a brand restage, something that Jonathan has done many times in the past. He led the brand transformation of Coca-Cola, and these agency partnerships really strengthen the way we think deeply about connecting with consumers in the communities and the localities in which they exist.
We’re going to be adding a new visual identity system, a new brand narrative, and we are definitely returning to the Super Bowl. Feb. 9 will be the day that Rocket will return to the Super Bowl with a significantly strengthened value proposition and concept that we think is exciting, that will resonate, that will be durably impacting the market. I’m really excited about it and I would encourage everyone to keep their eyes peeled because the brand is going to show up like never before.
It’s also just important because home ownership needs to show up like never before, right? That American Dream has got to be back on the market. We view ourselves as stewards of that American Dream, so we take that responsibility seriously.
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