How UWM Built a Smarter Incident Response with PagerDuty

United Wholesale Mortgage (UWM) is consistently ranked among the nation’s top mortgage lenders. By partnering with brokers across the country, UWM helps people secure financing for, arguably, one of the biggest purchases of their lives.

“Avoiding downtime is important for us because we’re working with our customers’ hopes and dreams,” says Jim Wallace, Operations Administrator at UWM, adding, “We don’t want to limit their lifetime experiences.”

An Alerting System Built for a Different Era

Before PagerDuty, UWM’s incident response process relied on a platform that hadn’t scaled with the team. When something went wrong with the company’s broker-facing systems, brokers had to report it manually to the help desk. The help desk would alert a few key people via email or text, who then had to contact the rest of the IT floor manually.

“If you’ve worked in IT at all, you know that’s just not a viable solution,” Wallace says.

By the time the right people were involved, critical time had already been lost. And for a mortgage lender processing loans around the clock, slow incident response meant real delays for real borrowers.

Building a Connected Operations Stack

Six years after UWM switched to PagerDuty, what started as an alerting tool has grown into something much larger. “PagerDuty is now our main incident management and communication hub,” Wallace says.

The foundation was connecting PagerDuty to ServiceNow, the platform UWM uses to log and track IT incidents. By integrating the two, UWM eliminated the manual handoff between systems. When an incident is created in ServiceNow, PagerDuty automatically routes it to the right subject-matter expert through escalation policies. Updates flow bidirectionally, so everyone joining an incident already has the full picture before the conversation starts.

Another key integration was Microsoft Teams. Rather than one person bearing responsibility for an incident, the whole team can see what’s happening, acknowledge alerts directly from Teams, and jump in without navigating to a separate system.

“This creates a dynamic response and allows us to solve issues faster and keep those loans moving,” Wallace says.

Together, the integrations transformed how UWM handles major incidents.

“The business impact was immediate and only gets better as the day goes on,” explains Wallace.

Operational Clarity, Top to Bottom

For UWM, the benefits of a connected incident response system extend well beyond the IT floor.

Because status updates flow automatically between PagerDuty and ServiceNow, everyone from the engineers on the floor to senior leadership has full context as incidents unfold. No one has to chase down updates or wait to be briefed.

“Our senior leadership has a real-time view into what we’re doing on the floor as incidents are happening,” Wallace says, “This allows them to focus on the things they need to focus on.”

That visibility only works because PagerDuty adoption has been fast and widespread.

“We are able to take this tool, show it to a team that’s never used it, and within 15 to 20 minutes explain: Here’s what you have, here’s the tools that you need, let us help make your life better,” Wallace says.

Closing Loans at Unheard-Of Speeds

The results show up in UWM’s core business metrics.

“We have an average close time of about fourteen days,” Wallace says, “which is unheard of.” According to ICE Mortgage Technology’s recent Mortgage Monitor, the industry average is 38 days.

Looking ahead, UWM is focused on shifting from reactive incident response to predictive detection, and Wallace is leaning on PagerDuty to get there.

“PagerDuty is revolutionizing communication across IT,” he says. “I look forward to watching it grow and continuing to see those different AI and other insights that are coming from PagerDuty to make us and everybody stronger.”