Product & Platform Leadership

Frank Barilone

Product and platform leader at the intersection of AI governance, vendor strategy, and mortgage servicing: turning regulatory mandates into systems, contracts, and capital decisions across an $8B portfolio.

Lead Product Manager, VP Corporate Officer Rank · Wells Fargo Home Lending Servicing

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Frank Barilone
Differentiation

Three disciplines that rarely appear together.

Most platform leaders own one. The intersection — where a federal mandate, a vendor relationship, and a capital decision arrive in the same room — demands someone who can navigate all three. That's the role this background is built for.

AI Governance

From mandate to contract clause.

Formal MISMO FRAME AI working-group reviewer. Contributing author at HousingWire on AI accountability and third-party risk in mortgage servicing. Built Barinhall, a personal AI project that produced working regulatory-intelligence tooling for financial services.

  • MISMO FRAME Reviewer
  • HousingWire Contributor
  • Barinhall AI Project
Vendor Strategy

From RFP to capital outcome.

Directed five enterprise-scale RFPs covering $35M+ in technology and managed-service spend. Led the vendor decisions and platform transitions that delivered $117M in annualized cost efficiencies — including a $17M vendor-decoupling program that replaced a core third-party platform.

  • $35M+ RFP Program
  • $117M Cost Efficiencies
  • 5 Enterprise Contracts
Mortgage Servicing Regtech

From regulation to system.

Twenty-plus years in mortgage servicing, from frontline operations to enterprise product strategy. Designed governance frameworks and KPI structures that translate federal regulatory mandates into operational controls, risk reporting, and capital decisions across an $8B portfolio.

  • $8B Portfolio
  • 20+ Years
  • Federal Compliance Frameworks
About

Background

Frank Barilone is a product and platform transformation leader with 20+ years in mortgage servicing, AI governance, and regulated technology environments. He leads product and vendor strategy for an $8B Home Lending Servicing portfolio at Wells Fargo, working at the intersection of three disciplines that rarely appear together: AI governance in production financial services, enterprise vendor strategy at scale, and the regulatory and operational mechanics of mortgage servicing. That combination defines where the industry's hardest decisions land — and where he's built his career.

His vendor and platform strategy work has delivered $117M in annualized cost efficiencies across a portfolio of RFPs, vendor decoupling programs, and platform modernization initiatives — including a confidential platform replacement that cut $17M in annual licensing and workflow costs. He has directed enterprise RFPs covering $35M+ in technology and managed-service spend, and built the governance frameworks and KPI structures that translate federal regulatory mandates into operational controls and capital decisions.

Frank holds an MBA from the University of Redlands, where he received the Whitehead Leadership Award and served as cohort president, a Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) credential, and a Google Generative AI Leader certification. He is a contributing author at HousingWire, where he writes on AI governance, third-party risk, and vendor accountability in mortgage servicing, and currently serves as a formal industry reviewer for MISMO’s FRAME AI working group.

Outside of work, Frank is based in Eastvale, California.

Career

Experience

January 2020 – Present
Remote, California

Lead Product Manager

VP, Corporate Officer Rank

Wells Fargo Consumer Lending

  • Lead a team of 9 product and project managers alongside multiple third-party vendor delivery teams, owning product roadmap and capital prioritization for an $8B servicing portfolio with decision authority spanning platform investments, vendor contracts, and regulatory response across Product, Technology, Risk, Compliance, Finance, and Operations.
  • Lead vendor decoupling and platform modernization programs that have delivered $117M in annualized cost efficiencies, including a confidential platform replacement delivering $17M in annual savings through licensing reduction and workflow automation.
  • Direct enterprise RFP and vendor evaluation efforts covering $35M+ in technology and managed-service spend, incorporating financial modeling, risk scoring, regulatory alignment, and scalability analysis.
  • Define KPI frameworks covering adoption, cost-to-serve, operational risk, and service quality to guide executive and board-level decisions.
  • Design and implement AI and vendor governance frameworks — including formal contribution to MISMO FRAME AI standards — supporting compliance with heightened federal regulatory expectations.
2015 – 2020
San Bernardino (Hybrid), CA

Assistant Vice President, Senior Business Systems Consultant

Wells Fargo Servicing

  • Translated complex investor, operational, and regulatory requirements into technical product specifications for high-visibility servicing and preservation workflows.
  • Supported platform releases and SDLC execution for regulated servicing environments, improving release quality and operational stability.
  • Partnered with business, risk, and technology stakeholders to close process gaps and strengthen the end-to-end operator experience.
  • Advanced modernization efforts through process design, test readiness, and implementation support.
2011 – 2015
San Bernardino, CA

Operations Analyst

Wells Fargo Home Preservation

  • Developed data models, reporting frameworks, and portfolio performance analyses used by leadership to monitor operational health and prioritize interventions.
  • Produced structured insights informing resource allocation, performance management, and escalations across high-volume operations.
2008 – 2011
San Bernardino, CA

Team Lead / Supervisor

Wells Fargo Home Mortgage

  • Managed a team of 10–15 in high-volume mortgage collections and delinquency operations, ensuring service levels, productivity, and regulatory adherence.
  • Supervised queue management, escalations, quality oversight, and employee development while maintaining compliance with borrower-protection requirements.
Work

Selected Projects

Multi-Vendor Platform Modernization Strategy

Led a confidential multi-vendor modernization program covering platform replacement, vendor decoupling, and RFP strategy across an $8B servicing portfolio. The program delivered $117M in annualized cost efficiencies — including $17M from replacing a core third-party platform — while reducing vendor concentration risk and advancing modular, API-first capabilities.

Vendor StrategyProgram GovernanceFinancial ModelingExecutive Communication

Enterprise Vendor & RFP Leadership

Directed five enterprise-scale RFPs covering $35M+ in technology and managed-service spend, balancing financial return, scalability, operational resilience, and regulatory alignment.

Vendor GovernanceRFP LeadershipRisk ScoringCapital Prioritization

Regulatory Governance Framework Design

Designed governance frameworks integrating SLA oversight, operational risk controls, regulatory requirements, and executive KPI reporting in response to heightened federal regulatory expectations.

Regulatory ComplianceGovernance DesignKPI FrameworksExecutive Reporting

Industry Standards Contribution — MISMO FRAME

Serve as a formal reviewer for MISMO’s FRAME AI working group, contributing industry feedback on AI governance standards adoption for mortgage technology, alongside published industry commentary on AI accountability in vendor contracts.

Industry StandardsAI GovernanceThought Leadership
Perspective

Writing & Thought Leadership

Contributing author at HousingWire and formal industry reviewer for MISMO FRAME AI standards — writing on AI governance, vendor accountability, and regulatory intelligence in mortgage servicing.

HWHousingWire · Contributing AuthorNew

Your AI Vendor Can Be Wrong. Regulators Will Still Look at You.

Third-party AI risk is where most servicers are exposed today, and the gap almost always lives in the vendor contract. Examines why AI errors remain the servicer's responsibility to regulators no matter who built the model, and which provisions — from sub-processor data-use prohibitions to model-change notification — are routinely missing from the agreements servicers are signing right now.

Read on HousingWire →
inLinkedIn · Essay

A Seat at the Table, or the Whole Table

JD Vance correctly diagnosed the conditions — 40 years of bad economic policy, an AI-accelerated entry-level collapse, and a generation that can do the math on who built the game. The argument: business leaders must offer workers real structural power now, on negotiable terms, or face having it mandated later on worse ones. A seat at the table is a negotiation. Losing the table is not.

Read Essay (PDF) →
inLinkedIn · Essay

AI Won't Make You Dumber. It'll Do Something Worse.

AI severs the link between output and understanding — you can now produce the artifact without doing the thinking. This piece names that gap, traces why organizations won't see it coming, draws on aviation's automation-dependency research as a model, and ends with a hard rule: don't present what you can't defend cold.

Read Essay (PDF) →
MSMISMO · Industry Feedback

Feedback on MISMO FRAME v.01: What Works, What Is Missing, and What Needs to Happen Next

Practitioner feedback submitted as a formal FRAME reviewer, identifying six structural gaps in v.1.0 — from vendor-side disclosure obligations to GenAI foundation model change risk and servicing AI annex gaps the current artifacts do not address.

Download Paper (PDF) →
BHBarinhall · Whitepaper

Regulatory Intelligence at Scale: How Barinhall Built an AI-Powered Compliance Monitoring System

Technical whitepaper documenting the Regulatory Change Impact Scorer — a production NLP pipeline ingesting filings from 10+ federal agencies, scoring each across 8 impact categories, and surfacing prioritized action items to compliance teams in near real time.

Download Whitepaper (PDF) →
HWHousingWire · Author Archive

All HousingWire Contributions

Ongoing trade-press commentary on AI governance, third-party risk, and vendor accountability in mortgage servicing.

View Author Archive →
inLinkedIn

Industry Commentary & Professional Updates

Regular posts on AI governance in financial services, regulatory intelligence, mortgage technology trends, and platform product strategy.

View Profile →
Project

BarinhallShelved

2024–2026

Barinhall was a personal AI project Frank built in 2024 to test whether regulatory complexity in financial services could be systematized into automated, buildable tools. It combined orchestration platforms, LLM APIs, and structured data layers with human-in-the-loop governance to produce repeatable regulatory intelligence and content systems. The project is now shelved, but the systems and lessons behind it continue to inform Frank’s product and AI governance work today.

Regulatory Intelligence Pipeline

A multi-agent system ingesting updates from 10+ federal and industry regulatory sources, scoring impact across eight dimensions using Claude, and auto-publishing structured intelligence reports.

Compliance Intelligence Portal

A web portal surfacing structured regulatory intelligence and compliance insights from the pipeline.

Workflow & Content Automation

Orchestrated publishing and content-intelligence pipelines connecting RSS ingestion, LLM-based analysis, and automated distribution.

Get in Touch

Contact

Open to Director-track product and platform leadership opportunities in mortgage technology, financial services, and regulated environments.

EmailFrank.Barilone.Jr@outlook.com
LinkedInlinkedin.com/in/frankbarilonejr
GitHubgithub.com/frank-builds
Download Resume (PDF)