Zeenat Sidi Tapped to Lead loanDepot’s New mello Unit

loanDepot Founder and LDI Chairman and CEO Anthony Hsieh has unveiled a new company operating unit—mello—to be led by newly appointed President and COO Zeenat Sidi, a fintech veteran with significant P&L leadership, digital transformation, risk management, operations, and strategy experience. Sidi has more than 25 years in the industry, including senior leadership roles at firms such as SoFi, Capital One, and RBC.

The new mello operating unit will complement the company's existing loanDepot mortgage and servicing operations platform. With the formation of mello, loanDepot will shift specific proprietary, competitive-advantage assets into the mello division and under Sidi's leadership, including oversight of the company's customer contact center, mello DataMart and performance marketing engine, designed to cultivate, ingest, and distribute more than 10 million data-enriched leads annually.

Under Sidi's leadership, the mello business unit will develop digital-first secured and unsecured lending products leveraging loanDepot's customer engagement channels, marketing assets, and technology stack. The mello business unit will also house the company's mortgage adjacent businesses, such as mellohome Real Estate Services, melloinsurance, and mello title and escrow services.

"Customers want bundled options and appreciate complementary homeownership products and services being readily available from one source,” said Hsieh. “We created the mello operating unit because we believe developing new products and services is important for the marketplace. Home equity levels are at a record $25T right now, which provides many homeowners a unique opportunity to access that equity to invest in their homes as they consider remodeling or renovating, or to consolidate their debt and lower their monthly payments in a rising rate and inflationary environment.”

Prior to mello, Sidi joined SoFi in 2018 to build and lead the company's home loans business, before assuming the role of EVP and Group Business Head of Lending. She joined Galileo Financial Technologies (a company SoFi acquired in 2020) as Head of Enterprise Lending and Data to build the strategic assets to offer a suite of financial services products to Galileo's clients through a modern API-based payments platform. Previously, Sidi held significant leadership roles with Capital One, including GM of the digital Home Equity business, and with RBC in the U.S. and Canada.

"Zeenat is a high-caliber leader with a proven track record in financial services and digital transformation,” said Hsieh. “By moving some of our most important infrastructure elements under her leadership, notably our performance marketing engine which generates 10M top of funnel leads [annually], and our data-driven and scaled customer engagement center which contacts 1.6M customers daily, we can blend our proprietary assets and mortgage-adjacent businesses together in a powerful way.”