Chase Home Lending CEO on AI, growth, and market volatility

May 16, 2025 8:00 AM

Sean Grzebin stepped into the role of CEO of Chase Home Lending in November, armed with the advantage of having worked across functions at the bank since 2011. With a career that has taken him from PHH Mortgage in 1997, to Countrywide, to Goldman Sachs and then Chase, Grzebin has seen his share of market cycles and today describes how he's leveraging data and AI in order to help the business thrive amid whatever volatility external circumstances bring.

During a discussion with National Mortgage News, Grzebin discussed the advantages Chase had over many of its competitors. According to Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data, Chase was the nation's sixth largest mortgage lender and third largest depository in the space in 2024, behind Bank of America and Navy Federal Credit Union.

Sean Grzebin is the CEO of Chase Home Lending — Sean Grzebin became the CEO of Chase Home Lending in November 2024.

Chase's home lending business produced $40.8 billion last year, with $25.5 billion generated through retail channels and $15.3 billion via the correspondent channel, according to its 10-K filing. As a key player in correspondent lending, Chase maintains a complex relationship with independent mortgage banks, and Grzebin highlighted how the bank balances those connections.

Chase serviced $648 billion for other investors as of Dec. 31, 2024.

Grzebin began at Chase heading up its default operations, his first job on the servicing side of the business. By 2015 he was back on the origination side, and since 2016, he headed up consumer originations, which brought together home equity, consumer direct and retail as well as the operations associated with them.

National Mortgage News's conversation with Grzebin has been edited for length and clarity.

On his early days in the CEO job

Grzebin: I really spent a lot of time listening. I was very familiar with the strategy. I helped to craft it. My role was pretty big before I got the CEO job, and the previous CEO gave me a lot of opportunities to be involved in the strategy generally. In 2020, I took the transformation work over for the entire business, not just for my area. So there wasn't a whole lot for me to come in and necessarily change. The one thing that we're going to be very, very focused on is trying to grow our business, like every mortgage company.

His plans for Chase Home Lending

Grzebin: We have a unique opportunity because of our access to our customers. We'll continue to invest in our digital capability so that we can take advantage of our advantage, which is the data. We have relationships with almost half of the customers in the United States, and that relationship gives us a tremendous amount of access into the things that they're looking to accomplish in their financial lives.

Through that, we get a lot of clues about ways that we can help customers on the mortgage side. We're one of the few that has both amazing digital capabilities, as well as a physical presence, with about 1,300 folks out in branches sitting knee-to-knee with customers every day. Not a whole lot of change in strategy, more doubling down on it, is how I would describe it.

On its relationship with IMBs both as customer and competitor

Grzebin: I think what the non-banks have been able to do over the last 10 years is really impressive. Many of them are customers of our bank in one way, shape or form. It's an interesting place to work because we have our own standalone mortgage company.

But, we fuel a lot of the IMBs; they interact with our investment bank and our commercial bank, and we kind of are really at the backbone of the real estate industry, frankly, at JP Morgan. While they're competitors, many of them are clients and customers as well. That's a unique balance we maintain. I try not to focus as much on the competition, other than paying attention to what's going on in the trends, stay more focused inwardly on our customer base.

On the recent market volatility

Grzebin: We're always paying attention to macro indicators and how they impact the market, how they impact customer behavior, and how they impact competitor behavior. It's something that's unique to 2024, 2025 that the interest rate environment has been really volatile. Sometimes it looks like it's going to improve and go our way, and then some news comes out and it goes a different way. It is really about positioning for those episodes.

I think that the big shift in our strategy is not so much a shift, but more of a focus on when rates drop for some period of time. Whether it's a day, a week or two weeks, you need to be able to be very quick and responsive to the fact that that happened.

There's a certain amount of customers now that are in the money for a refi that bought a home in the last couple of years. How do we target them, get them in the ecosystem, get them engaged and get them refinanced? That has been not a change of strategy, but more of an execution of something that we've been building, which is a quicker response to rate drop episodes. I really look at the volatility as a test of our capabilities, and not so much a shift in the strategy.

How higher prices changed the market

Grzebin: A $2 trillion market now versus five years ago is about a million-unit difference in terms of actual units available in the marketplace. The notional market size isn't what it used to be. You have a lot of competitors going for even a smaller amount of units. Even though the notional market size looks like it's kind of getting healthier. It's still very competitive and very tight.

On Chase's borrower retention efforts

Grzebin: Retention has been improving. Purchase retention is a lot harder, any servicer would tell you that. The advantage that we have and the investments we've made since 2019 around modeling have really helped us get out in front of those customers.

More often than not, we're getting a shot at the next purchase when the customers in our servicing book. I think that's healthy and a good trend for us in our business. But again, we continue to look at all of the customers.

The reality is anywhere from 700,000 to 1 million Chase customers buy homes every year. The opportunity for us is just very unique because of their otherwise relationship with the bank. I think retention will continue to improve as our capabilities keep evolving. We're getting more 'at bats' than we have historically on the retention customer, is how I would put it.

Chase’s strategy on artificial intelligence

Grzebin: AI is going to be a pretty dramatic change for the industry, and not just at Chase. When you look at it and boil it down, obviously it's relationships first, but after relationships, the manufacturing process is voice, documents and data.

If you want to know what's ripe for disruption from AI, it's docs, voice and data. There is going to be a lot of evolution. The jobs are going to change. The relationships are going to matter over time, which plays nicely into our strategy with our customer base and how we're trying to serve them.

You're going to see Chase lean in and be a leader, frankly. We already are on this point. We don't talk a lot about it because we try and just let the results speak for themselves. But I see a tremendous amount of cost savings on sales and fulfillment over time.

On the use case for generative AI

Grzebin: Every year we go to Silicon Valley and look at the disruptors in this space. We just were there a month ago. Everything I just said is supported by what is going on with some of the investments that are happening in Silicon Valley.

When you think about the process in general, it is just very ripe for that, because it's very rules-based, which AI does better than human beings most times. Ultimately, if the documents can become digitized and it all becomes data, I think it can become very fast for customers, a great customer experience, and very efficient for mortgage companies through time.

On AI replacing loan officers

Grzebin: I don't see that. I don't see that at all. I think the loan officer's value is the relationships they have and their ability to talk and manage anxiety through the process as well as present the best deal and the best terms for a customer. The winners in today's business are the ones that do that more often than they do docs, data and chasing things.

The successful loan officers today have a process whereby they rely on their back office to deliver the actual experience to the customer, and they manage the anxiety, they manage the relationship with a customer, and at the end of that, there's a winner there.

What you're going to see with loan officers is not elimination, but the ability to scale way bigger than they've ever been able to go. You're going to see that productivity ramp pretty dramatically. I don't expect a replacement at all. I think the transaction is one of the biggest decisions a customer makes in their life. When you have that kind of a decision to make, unless there's some price differential, I think you're going to always seek and rely on expertise. Human beings deliver expertise better when it comes to this particular transaction, because it's so emotional, because it's something bigger than just an investment.

How AI will help the servicing function

Grzebin: I see a lot of efficiency through the servicing process as well, through AI. In the secondary markets, it's going to make a difference in terms of speed and execution. Every basis point matters. I think there's going to be an evolution here that is going to be pretty seismic for the industry, is my prediction. When it comes to just nuts and bolts, we're using it already in all of our processing. We've rolled out a large language model to all 14,000 of the employees that are in the home lending business today, and we've been using AI for all of our modeling for years. When it comes to core AI, that's been in our DNA for several years.

On Chase using voice AI in servicing

Grzebin: The use cases around voice are pretty robust. Particularly if they're update calls or status calls, those are pretty easy for the machines to handle today. I, again, just got back from Silicon Valley, and when I looked at voice two years ago, and I looked at voice this year, the voice evolution is exponential. So there are going to be a lot of use cases around voice again, to make everyone more productive, to make the customer service process better.

The machines don't get fatigued, they can handle most of the actual use cases. It's going to create scale for anybody that buys into it. We're not going to be ignorant to anything. We're going to look at every single thing that can make our process efficient. It's very difficult to make money in an environment like we're in right now, markets the way they are.

Anyone that's not looking at ways to make their business more efficient are going to probably struggle through time. How do we make the service experience better by leveraging some of this technology that's coming and making it real time and self-service, and all the things that you're able to do when you have something that can run 24/7?

On Chase reentering wholesale

Grzebin: We do not participate in the wholesale origination business today. We have a correspondent business that does a really good job helping IMBs, and we'll continue to do a good job managing that business, but wholesale is not part of our strategy.

His message to Chase customers

Grzebin: The main message I'm trying to put out there is, if you're a Chase customer, regardless of where you're at, you should always check with your bank. Every big financial decision you make, you check with your bank, and for the mortgage process, you don't always do it. It doesn't mean that we're right for every single customer. There's a lot of good competitors out that do a great job with this product. But I think when you have a relationship with Chase, if you end up coming here, you can amplify that relationship in a lot of different ways.

My message is just, all banks aren't the same, and we've done a lot of work on improving our customer experience and our delivery, and there's a benefit if you're a Chase customer to do business with Chase.