New Cheval Holdings acquires Surge, appoints Jimmy Gillespie as CEO

Surge, a partner intelligence platform for wholesale mortgage lenders, has been acquired by New Cheval Holdings as the wholesale channel faces tighter scrutiny on broker oversight and market share pressure from retail and direct-to-consumer lenders.

The transaction brings dedicated ownership and institutional backing to a platform used by wholesale lenders that are regularly ranked among the top 25 in the country, according to the company’s announcement.

As part of the deal, Jimmy Gillespie has been named CEO of Surge. Gillespie has a background in private equity and management consulting, and he’s joining Surge with a mandate to deepen customer relationships and accelerate growth. He replaces founder-led management as the company formalizes its next phase of expansion.

“Surge has a strong platform, a talented team, and customers who depend on it every day,” Gillespie said in a statement. “I’m focused on making sure we continue to earn that trust as we grow.”

Surge serves wholesale lenders through two integrated products, Partner 360 Alliance and Partner 360 Sales.

Alliance manages broker and correspondent counterparty risk and onboarding for licensed and nonlicensed partners, from application and e-signing through renewals, continuous licensing monitoring and audit-ready reporting.

Partner 360 Sales is designed for sales and account management teams, providing a live view of a lender’s wholesale network with Nationwide Multistate Licensing System (NMLS)-based market intelligence, loan officer-level production data, job change alerts, territory management tools and competitor visibility across the market.

Surge said the platform supports more than 10,000 active broker relationships and has not failed a compliance audit to date.

“Surge has helped us go from entering data to actually using it,” Pavle Lozevski, senior sales force technical lead at V.I.P. Mortgage said in a statement.

Surge co-founder Matt Hawkins said the company was launched to address practical pain points in wholesale lender-broker relationships, including fragmented broker onboarding processes and limited line of sight into broker production and movement.

“Surge was built to solve a real problem for wholesale lenders and the team delivered a platform that does exactly that,” Hawkins said. “I’m proud of what we built and confident it’s in the right hands.”

David Casti, who has led product and customer operations at Surge since 2022, will remain as chief operating officer, providing continuity for existing clients.

Wholesale lenders have faced heightened expectations from regulators and investors around broker due diligence, ongoing monitoring and fair lending oversight since the pandemic-era refi boom ended and volumes declined. At the same time, many lenders are trying to grow or defend market share in the third-party origination channel without adding large headcount to operations or sales management.

Tools that centralize broker compliance, onboarding and production visibility are increasingly viewed as core infrastructure rather than “nice to have” software. Consolidation in this niche signals that institutional investors see durable demand for technology that can support counterparty risk management and give account executives a clearer picture of where to deploy their time and pricing levers.

For lenders already running on Salesforce or modern customer relationship management stacks, platforms like Surge’s Partner 360 Alliance and Partner 360 Sales may offer a way to standardize broker data, reduce manual spreadsheet work and create audit-ready trails for warehouse lenders, investors and regulators.