Carrington's $200B in servicing goes AI-native with Kastle deal

Carrington Mortgage Services and artificial intelligence fintech Kastle struck an agreement to deploy the latter's AI agents for servicing operations, including in customer-facing roles at its contact centers. 

The AI agents, which have the ability to handle collections and provide real-time responses to clients based on analysis of data and past interactions, will serve Carrington's clients either autonomously or as technology assistants alongside human personnel within the contact centers. 

"We needed a partner with both proven performance and deep domain expertise at scale," said Elizabeth Balce, executive vice president, loan servicing for Carrington, in a press release. "Kastle stood out because they are specialized in the mortgage servicing space, and have received strong positive feedback from clients already using their solution."

The partnership is the latest in a series of moves at Carrington as it looks to modernize its servicing operations through advanced technology. Earlier this year, the Southern California-based mortgage firm made another major strategic pivot when it announced it would transfer its entire servicing portfolio onto the AI-backed Valon operating system over the next several months. 

"Looking ahead, we see AI as a core enabler of mortgage servicing transformation – enabling us to reduce manual touchpoints and help our teams better support our customers," Balce continued. 

The workload ahead of Kastle

Known for its expertise as a servicer of Ginnie Mae-backed mortgages, Carrington held more than $200 billion in unpaid balances on its books as of mid-January. The total comprised more than 1 million individual loans. 

Just a few months later, Carrington's deal with Valon brought with it an acquisition of the latter platform's servicing and subservicing portfolio, leading to the addition of approximately 800,000 conventional mortgages and $197 billion of unpaid balance to its books.

"Carrington is setting the standard for what AI-native mortgage servicing should look like at scale," said Kastle Co-Founder and CEO Rishi Choudhary. "We're proud to support an operating model that combines Carrington's expertise in consumer loan servicing with enterprise-grade AI infrastructure."

Founded in 2024, Kastle was among the first to introduce an agentic voice-enabled operating system, which caught the mortgage industry's attention thanks to its conversational customer-facing communication. Combined with AI-backed analysis and data parsing capabilities, an agent, which the fintech refers to as an AI teammate or employee,  autonomously generates solutions and answers to mortgage borrowers' queries.  

While the company initially introduced its platform for servicers, it has since developed its AI further to assist with originations. In a big win for its software, Kastle announced earlier this year its operating system would be able to integrate with Intercontinental Exchange's servicing platform, which leads the mortgage industry by market share.

Alongside its servicing business, the parent company of Carrington counts a host of other mortgage-related subsidiaries among its holdings, including lending and title units and a capital management firm. In addition to its 2026 acquisition of Valon's servicing book, the company also struck a deal to merge with Reliance First Capital, a retail lender from Long Island, New York, in the fourth quarter of 2025.   

Carrington becomes the latest prominent mortgage name to make a decision to introduce customer-facing AI in recent weeks. Last month, PennyMac Financial announced it would expand its partnership with Amazon Web Services to roll out agentic AI initiatives across both originations and servicing operations. Upgrades will include the use of AI team members.