Social Finance — the online lender better known as SoFi — will be laying off dozens of workers in its mortgage division, despite the fact that the home loans department was one that the firm was holding up as a potential generator for future growth.
According to Wall Street Journal reports, staffers were informed earlier this week that around 65 jobs, roughly 5 percent of the staff, will be cut from the lender’s workforce of 1,300.
According to a SoFi spokesman, the company “made some changes to staffing to ensure we have the right people in the right roles and locations to power our growth.”
The spokesman went on to note that the firm is looking to fill 175 open jobs.
But its biggest open job has already been filled, as last week the firm announced it has hired former Twitter executive Anthony Noto to be the CEO as of the first of March. SoFi has been without a chief executive since the resignation of Mike Cagney in fall 2017 in connection to a sexual harassment scandal.
SoFi has been a player in mortgages since 2014 and has sought to disseminate its mortgage offering among the same target audience for its student loan refinancing programs: college grads with decent earnings but low wealth. SoFi would allow borrower options like multi-million mortgages with down payments of only 10 percent, for example.
But mortgage lending has remained a comparatively small business for SoFi, with about $3.7 billion in loan volume — as opposed to the $5.7 billion it has out in personal loans and the nearly $8 billion it has lent out for student financing.
SoFi reports that going forward, it aims at further automation for its mortgage underwriting process. To that end, it recently hired around 20 employees from Clara Lending Co., a digital mortgage startup based in San Francisco — though the Clara team has no comment on the hire at this time.
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