Cotality's Robin Clayton on leaving the lender side for what she calls a 'bucket list' company
Robin Clayton wears crazy bright colors to work, at a company she describes as very serious and very behind the scenes. She says she is neither of those things.
That's part of the job. Clayton (pictured top), head of product strategy for mortgage data solutions at Cotality, was brought in to help shape products for lenders and to get the company's name out, after a career on the lending side.
She has been at it a couple of months, and her measuring stick for a new product is a scene she says she has watched play out before.
"I've watched loan officers very unsafely access technology while on their phone driving a car at the same time," Clayton told Mortgage Professional America. "And so that's what I think of, right? When they show me technology, I'm like, ‘Could someone do this if they only have one eye on it and they're kind of zoning out and they're taking a phone call?’ And like, that's my litmus bar for usability."
Climbing a different tree
Her path ran through Countrywide, Bank of America, and home builders before Paramount Residential Mortgage Group (PRMG), where she was most recently a marketing executive. At the Mortgage Bankers Association's mPowering You summit, speaker Hoda Kotb gave her words for what came next.
"She talked about this, ‘I climbed that tree and now I want to climb another one,’" Clayton said. "And I'm like, 100%. Like, I climbed that tree. I did all the things that there were to do in lending."
Cotality first approached her as a prospective customer, asking whether she would buy its products. She was still at PRMG at the time.
"I said, ‘Your products are cool, but well, if you did this and this and this, maybe lenders would be interested,’" she said. "And then later on, after I sort of finished my time there, they said, ‘You know, that's actually a job. You can help us shape products so there's something lenders actually need and will use.’ Nobody has engineering resources to spare to build products that nobody wants."
The move also changed what she sees every day. She said she keeps finding capabilities inside the company that she didn't know existed.
"Now I'm like, ‘Okay, give me all the little things,’" she said. "I'm in the candy store now, and now I want to build stuff that I wanted as a lender that I didn't have access to."
Cotality wasn't her only option. She weighed it against other employers before accepting.
"I talked to a lot of companies before I made the decision to come to Cotality, and this was a bucket list company for me," Clayton said.
Tools built for the road
Years of daily conversations with loan officers shape how she builds, Clayton said. She doesn't want them to carry the work of defining what they need.
"I've talked to loan officers every single day of my life for the last 20 years," she said. "These are my people. I love them. They're great. But, you know, they may not think of it. You know the whole thing about Ford? It's like they would ask for faster horses instead of asking for a car."
One idea she is helping build layers property, listing, consumer, and mortgage data and scores it. She walked through what that could look like with a made-up list.
"So instead of a spray and pray of, ‘Okay, here's your database, go call everyone, send them a postcard,’" she said. "First of all, mail and printing are expensive. What if I told you, ‘Out of 1,000 people, 24 of these people are likely to buy a home in the next 90 days?’ Or what if I told you, ‘22 of those people are going to get a HELOC in the next couple of months.’ That's incredibly powerful data."
A July survey by AD Mortgage of more than 300 industry professionals ranked relationship building and communication ahead of technology and AI tools as the skill that will matter most in 2027, 82% to 58.4%. Respondents also expected AI to take over CRM follow-ups, data entry, and document collection before anything else.
Clayton sees better data as the way smaller lenders compete with the biggest names. She said they are who she is here to serve.
"I came from the world of IMBs, scrappy regional banks, credit unions," she said. "Like, how do they compete? And I believe the way that they compete is by having more intelligent data and having more precise data. I'm not going to say, ‘Go blow your marketing budget contacting 100,000 people.’ Just work really hard on relationship building with 20 people."
Her test comes back to the car. She keeps the same driver in mind when she thinks about everyday friction.
"I want the solution that doesn't require them to change their habits, right?" she said. "Like asking them to log into a system. If they're anything like me, I don't remember my password. It doesn't work on my mobile phone. We had to think through all these really dumb problems to just be like, ‘How can I get them the answer in the way that they need it, not necessarily what they expect?’"
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