Rich Gagliano and the art of an uneventful revolution

Rich Gagliano helped launch a company with a name borrowed from the universe’s invisible architecture. Then he offered its customers a rather earthbound ambition: an uneventful transition. In September 2023, as Black Knight Origination Technologies became Dark Matter Technologies under new ownership, the founding CEO promised continuity. For a business selling the machinery behind mortgage lending, boredom had considerable commercial appeal.

The new company arrived with more than 1,300 employees, existing customers and established software. It had a startup’s fresh stationery and a mature business’s obligations. Banks, credit unions and independent mortgage lenders were relying on its systems to keep working while ownership changed. A grand announcement could wait for applause. A loan file could not wait for the announcement to settle down.

That tension gives Gagliano’s career its shape. He has spent years arguing for substantial changes in how mortgages get made, usually by concentrating on work that attracts little affection: collecting information, examining documents, connecting systems and moving the next task to the right person. His public ambitions have often been expressed in minutes saved and steps removed. There is something pleasingly practical about a cosmic brand with a paperwork problem.

A banker’s education in software

Gagliano came to mortgage technology with experience inside financial institutions. Before Black Knight, he was senior vice president of direct lending and chief administrative officer at Aurora Bank. His wider career includes Bank of America, Nexstar Financial Corporation, Citi and Mercantile Bank. By 2024, his professional experience in financial services stretched beyond three decades.

His education followed a similarly business-minded route: a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Southeast Missouri State University and an MBA in finance from Saint Louis University. Those credentials sit comfortably beside the operating jobs. They help explain the terrain he worked in: businesses where technology, cost, customer relationships and the mechanics of lending meet on the same balance sheet.

At Black Knight, his remit extended across origination systems serving retail, wholesale, consumer-direct, home equity and correspondent lending. It also reached into digital closing, point-of-sale tools and other connections around the loan process. That breadth matters. A mortgage platform has to carry information across several desks, departments and outside businesses. Making one screen more attractive leaves plenty of work for the next screen.

Gagliano’s writing returned to the people doing that work. In an article about underwriting, he argued that automation could free experienced underwriters for more complex responsibilities. The question was how to use their expertise well. A professional hired to evaluate a difficult file has better uses for the afternoon than repeatedly transferring facts between documents.

The quiet work behind the AI label

The artificial intelligence work preceded Dark Matter’s launch. Development of the AIVA solutions began in 2018, during Gagliano’s leadership at the predecessor business. The early emphasis was on assisting lenders with repetitive work. This history is useful because the later company name and the current attention surrounding AI can make an established effort look newly invented.

Work with Amazon’s machine learning specialists illustrates the substance. The Black Knight team collaborated with the Amazon Machine Learning Solutions Lab on document extraction automation. Gagliano described the purpose in terms of reducing the effort involved in comparing documents and applying business rules. The attractive part was the operating result: information could move through the lending process with less manual handling.

In a separate AWS account published in 2021, he said the services could reduce manual document review by up to four hours for clients. That was a reported benefit with an upper limit, rather than a universal promise about every mortgage. Even so, hours are a revealing unit. They belong to somebody’s working day. They can be spent checking another file, answering a borrower or resolving something that actually needs judgment.

“We’re very focused on automation and getting the expense out.”

Rich Gagliano · January 2024

He also understood the awkward timing of a technology purchase. In a September 2022 essay, he described lenders’ recurring dilemma: in a busy market, attention goes to sales; in a slow market, spending becomes difficult to justify. The investment keeps waiting for a season in which nobody is distracted and everyone is comfortable. Such a season would be a splendid invention.

His response was to think about several tools working together. Data, automation and the coordination of tasks had to form a usable process. Buying a capability and putting it somewhere in the organization was only the beginning. The practical question was what happened to a loan after the capability had finished its part.

A new owner, a familiar responsibility

Dark Matter’s September 2023 launch followed the acquisition of the former Black Knight origination business into Constellation Software’s Perseus Operating Group. Gagliano became its founding CEO. Empower, the loan origination platform, and AIVA were central to the proposition. Existing relationships were central to the transition.

His launch message recognized that customers depended on the team’s accumulated knowledge as well as its products. The software came with people who understood how lenders used it. Moving a mature operation into a new corporate home meant carrying that knowledge along. The executive’s immediate test was whether customers could continue their ordinary business through an extraordinary corporate event.

In an interview just after the launch, Gagliano argued that efficiency mattered across market cycles. High volumes create pressure to handle more work; lower volumes create pressure to control cost. Different conditions could lead lenders to the same conversation about their systems. His argument gave the new company a reason to keep investing even when the market offered little encouragement.

Leave the judgment with the person

By January 2024, Gagliano was discussing a more open architecture for Empower. The aim was to make it easier for developers and vendors to connect their services and move data through the workflow. Every integration carried a basic test: would it help automate the work, or introduce another manual chore?

He drew a boundary around AI’s role in that discussion. His stated approach favored bringing information to a person and validating it, leaving the person to work with the borrower. The distinction shaped an operating philosophy: use the system to do the preparatory lifting, then put usable information in front of someone responsible for the next step.

That same month, a workflow developed with Informative Research offered a concrete example. It helped lenders identify applicants who might benefit from having positive rent payment history evaluated through Fannie Mae’s Desktop Underwriter. Where the findings indicated that rent data could help, Empower could suggest obtaining the relevant asset verification report and coordinate resubmission.

The example gives administrative efficiency a human consequence. Information about a borrower’s payment record could become easier to use at the appropriate point in an application. Gagliano described value for lenders and borrowers together. The product’s work was in the routing and coordination, where a useful possibility might otherwise remain another task on somebody’s list.

In his Fintech Fridays conversation with Brian Vieaux, he explored a future in which applying for a mortgage depended more on sharing information than gathering it again. The discussion included consumer participation in product testing and the balance between AI and human interaction. His attention kept returning to the experience at the other end of the software: what does the borrower actually have to do?

Connections are part of the product

Much of the work during his tenure involved joining things together. An expanded DocMagic integration brought document services to wholesale and home equity originations within Empower. For customers, the appeal included avoiding the need to build a custom connection themselves. The less glamorous part of a platform can be the part that spares another organization a project.

For CUSO Home Lending, Empower’s joint-venture capabilities allowed credit unions to keep their own branding, products and pricing while using shared services. The arrangement made room for distinct institutions inside a common operation. Gagliano’s enthusiasm for it was consistent with his wider argument: scale should take effort out of the process while leaving customers room to operate their businesses.

Client relationships received an explicit place in the leadership structure with Tony Fox’s appointment as chief of client engagement. Gagliano emphasized listening to what customers needed and delivering accordingly. Here, the vocabulary of automation met the rather older business of paying attention. A system can be carefully engineered around the wrong problem if nobody asks the people using it.

The company continues. So does the operator.

The public recognition followed. Gagliano received a HousingWire Vanguard award in 2020. In 2024, he was named among Key Executives’ top 25 Jacksonville CEOs and received Inman’s Best of Finance award. The honors accompanied a career increasingly identified with the leadership of mortgage technology and the formation of Dark Matter as a separate business.

In November 2024, the company announced that Sean Dugan would succeed him as CEO the following April, with Gagliano moving to executive chairman. Dugan had worked alongside him for roughly 14 years. The announcement presented continuity and more family time as features of the transition. By May 2025, Dugan was publicly describing the next phase as CEO.

Gagliano later offered his own account of leaving the CEO role. In a public LinkedIn post, he said he had disagreed with the organization’s strategic direction. As his non-compete period approached its end, he expressed interest in advisory, consulting, board and full-time leadership opportunities. He also invited former colleagues looking for their next role to reconnect.

That invitation leaves the story open at an appropriately practical point. The founding CEO who promised an uneventful transition was looking for another place to work on platforms and growth. His enduring question remains a useful one for anyone buying business software: when the machinery has done its job, how much easier is the day for the person using it?