In the technology world, we often narrowly define customer experience or CX as our reaction to software user experience or UX – how pretty, how intuitive etc. To me CX is much broader – how successful was the implementation, what does the customer tell peers when they are doing reference calls, how do they advise customers from other industries and countries, what enhancements do they prioritize from the vendor etc. I have written about many customers in over 200 case studies in our long-format content – especially our innovation focused books. Those take several conversations. It is rare after just one session that I tell an executive they are a “dream customer.”
I recently had a chance to spend about an hour at Workday Rising with Jennifer Edwards, SVP, Accounting Systems at loanDepot, based in Irvine, CA. Rather than just a narrow view of their Workday project, Jennifer shared valuable insights into the mortgage financing sector. We discussed Workday’s Accounting Center, Prism Analytics, and the innovative Illuminate AI agents, as well as her interactions within the Workday community. I couldn't help but express, on two occasions, that she exemplified what it means to be a “dream customer” for Workday.
Here are some excerpts from our conversation
About loanDepot
loanDepot was founded in 2010, right after the subprime mortgage crisis. The founder, Anthony Hsieh saw an opportunity to start a new, digital mortgage lending experience to make the home buying and financing process more efficient and transparent with modern technologies. They built third-party integrations directly into the originations process to collect a borrower’s income, employment, and asset information to deliver a fast and hassle-free transaction experience. That was revolutionary in a sector which used to be paper intensive. Since inception, they have funded more than $498 billion. Today, their nationwide team of 4,000 plus members assists more than 6,800 customers with mortgage originations transactions each month.
Her career in financial services, accounting and related systems
Jen started her career in auditing at KPMG, in the financial services sector in the Southern California area just before the 2008 crash. She got to see many troubled banks. She left KPMG after 7 years to join a regional bank as the head of their internal audit. That role expanded her exposure to systems, again on a timely basis, as companies were focusing on process automations, digital transformations, adopting cloud computing, etc. In her role, she reviewed process and controls around several new systems implementations. And loved the experience around the systems side of accounting. Since 2020, she has been involved in Workday (financials related) projects at loanDepot. She enjoys the financial services sector because of the macroeconomic lens it brings, and how it's so important for the health of the US economy.
The Workday product differentiation in their sector
in 2020, loanDepot decided to digitally transform their office of the CFO. They already had implemented Workday HCM and payroll. So Workday Financials, Accounting Center and Prism Analytics was the most logical, best-fitting solution as they facilitated the precision of the loan-level accounting at a low level of granularity and, importantly, did so at their large scale of volumes. They previously used an industry specific product but realized it could not easily scale to their exploding volumes. Jen had joined loanDepot to help with the Workday Financials implementation and then stayed to run that team post-go-live in a new organizational format.
The Workday decision was made easier because Fannie Mae, who they sell a large volume of loans to, had been an early adopter of Workday’s Accounting Center and Prism (along with the financial modules). Accounting Center is designed for the systems accountant, a functional knowledge owner, to automate the rules that summarize operational data into resulting summarized journal entries. They use Prism for its attribute-rich reporting dimensionality from the resulting data sets and ingested complimentary operational data sets. Accounting Center is also helping them automate their fair value process and month-end gains and losses, as they ingest loans held for sale, and interest rate lock commitments.
Most ERP systems don’t make it easy to store attributes like associated loan officer, loan purpose or product, or property state. With Workday, they are ingesting more related operational data fields for a single transaction compared to what you can normally do in a ledger. The Workday differentiation will increase as they continue making enhancements to analytics and reports by leveraging new features that enable reporting on prism attributes within hierarchical formats.
Her Workday community participation
She is very active in the Workday community and participates in early design and partner groups, testing and giving feedback. She sits on the Financial Services Industry Vertical Customer Council, advocating for a collaborative approach to problem-solving with vendors (and like-minded customers). She conducts reference calls, often fielding inquiries from customers curious about their support models, particularly regarding how financial teams should collaborate with HCM and Payroll departments. Given the sensitive nature of the data involved, this collaboration can present challenges, especially for organizations that do not implement both areas concurrently. Her reference calls and industry presentations are not restricted to peers in her sector. She speaks at Rising and has been part of the Workday – Intelligent Finance Tour – and gets questions from people interested in Accounting Center outside of financial services.
Her relationship with Workday has allowed her to appreciate the company's unique culture, which she feels genuinely values its customers. Jennifer notes, “It’s been a joy to watch what the new CEO Carl Eschenbach has been doing for the company, and the fun that CMO Emma Chalwin is having.”
More Workday innovation
At Rising, Workday revealed several AI agents and the acquisition of Evisort, a contract intelligence tool. She particularly liked the natural language user interface where you can ask the system via your mobile phone to do specific tasks. She is also excited about the various Agents and is excited to see what financial related agents will be “next”. In a document intensive profession (accounting) and environment that is loanDepot, she looks forward to learning about use cases Evisort could offer them particularly around areas like leases, supplier contracts, and supplier invoices. Not so much for loanDepot which is a nationwide nonbank mortgage lender, but for broader banking, she would like to see Workday build out the banking core. As well as offer, industry specific reporting packaged solutions for regulatory reporting requirements for the industry: for example- call reporting for banks and mortgage bankers financial reporting (MBFRF).
“Fail Faster” culture
Before our meeting, Workday had honored Dave Smoley with a lifetime customer appreciation award for his projects at Flextronics, Astra Zeneca and Apple. I mentioned to her I had written a case study of Flex’s risky decision to implement Workday as a global HCM system when Workday was still a tiny startup. I told her Dave had justified it as doable in Flex’s “fail faster” culture
Jen’s response was “That is a hugely important cultural thing that not all organizations do and I try to; loanDepot’s culture pushes me to lead by being daring in our pursuits and dynamic in our actions. We use the data we have to make the best decisions we can, but we know we're human. We're not going to get it perfect every time.”
I look forward to conversations with other financial executives as Workday crosses the 2,000 customer mark who use their financial modules. Jen has set a benchmark for them to pack a lot of content into just one session.
