[New] Stanley

C. Middleman President and CEO

Freedom Mortgage

Stanley Middleman says his best mentors were his first customers. He recalled, “I started doing one loan at a time and helped consumers become homeowners. At the same time, I helped existing homeowners consolidate debt. This happened at a time of tremendous change in our country when interest rates were really high. With others, I found opportunities to help existing homeowners with high-interest rates refinance … and decrease their monthly payments.”

Those homeowners taught him a lot. “I was able to serve a large number of diverse people from all different economic backgrounds. They taught me much about the needs of the people in this country and how I could help them in a wide variety of ways.”

He has a long history of respecting his customers. “Around the time of the 2006 housing crisis, there were opportunities to offer consumers loans that were less valuable for them and more valuable for my company. We opted to do the right thing and put our customers first, offering loans that benefited them. This was probably the hardest test we have ever faced and I’m proud we passed. At Freedom Mortgage, we always have and will continue to put our customers first.”

Ben Miller CEO

SIMPLENEXUS, AN NCINO COMPANY

From failure comes success.

Ben Miller tells the tale. “While building a company in a business incubator, I was introduced to SimpleNexus Founder Matt Hansen. After the company I worked on failed, I had a few meetings with Matt and learned about the technology he was working on. We decided to partner together. At the time, we were selling a simple mobile app to brokers. Each month we got bigger. The rest is history.”

While Miller values tenacity and grit as a means to success, he also embraces empathy for the customer.

“I remember a circumstance that occurred late on a Friday afternoon. We had a support case come in from a client.

One of our core values is empathy for the customer and each other.

Even though we wanted to go home, we could see how our lender customer needed help right then. Several engineers and support staff decided to stay late and help. We wanted to be there with our engineering and support staff as they worked on a resolution. The team was able to fix the issue after a couple of hours. I was proud of how we lived up to our value of being empathetic.

Gibran Nicholas CEO

Momentifi

In his 22 years in the business, Gibran Nicholas has experienced career growth and challenges.

He recalled, “I started as a mortgage broker at the age of 20. I struggled for a bit and then built a niche working with financial advisors. When I was 22, I began teaching continuing education classes to financial planners, and when I was 23, I became the youngest (and only mortgage broker) to serve on my local Financial Planning Association board. I grew my business to the point where I was originating 15-20 loans monthly, almost exclusively from financial advisor referrals. In 2005, I started a training business to teach other loan officers how to work with advisors. Over the years, I’ve trained and coached over 10,000 loan originators.”

Nicholas is open about the challenges he has faced. “Many times in my career I struggled with self-doubt and depression. Those two nasty creatures generally antagonize me after a huge failure or before a huge victory.

The way I’ve dealt with them is to imagine them as actual characters, as villains in the story of my life. I then imagine myself as a Great Warrior going to battle against them. I can’t let them win.”

Laird Nossuli CEO

Iemergent

Laird Nossuli was brought into the business by her father Dennis Hedlund but that doesn’t mean things have been easy.

“As a small, bootstrapped company that invests heavily in the development of innovative data offerings, we have had our share of revenue struggles,” Nossuli said. “One thing that is important to my value system is to stay focused on what I can give rather than on what I can get. I have often shared my knowledge and time at no cost when our financial position might have been better served by billable projects. There have also been times when clients have offered to ‘overpay’ me, and I have never taken advantage of that.”

Nossouli has advice for these times. “In this changing market, I would encourage clients to be innovative in how they think about today’s challenges and opportunities.

Try to gather and unify insights of all kinds to figure out what your path forward should be. My dad used to say, ‘Go to the future you want to see and look backward from it to see what you need to do to get there.’ That’s what I am trying to do with iEmergent’s work to close the homeownership gap.”

James Polinori Chief Marketing Officer

Geneva Financial

Influences are varied in the mortgage industry as James Polinori proves.

“The music industry has … had a profound influence on me as a marketer. Specifically, Madonna. I recognize now that I inherently understood marketing even as a child. A natural knack. Growing up during Madonna’s now historic rise, I distinctly understood what she was doing and why she was doing it. I always knew it was her marketing brain behind it, not a manufactured pop product. As the world gasped at her antics, I smiled and knew exactly what she was up to. She is probably the greatest marketer that’s ever lived. And I took notes.”

Polinori says focusing on sticky factors in post-close marketing will build deeper relationships. “We’ve created an HGTV style ecosystem for our borrowers — DIY, design, recipes, home management — all things homeowners want to engage with. The industry standard open rate for email is 14% — our weekly Home By Geneva newsletter is 45%. We are fostering real relationships with our borrowers. They buy our BE A GOOD HUMAN t-shirts and they send us photos of their DIY projects. Long-game: they remember who did their mortgage and are less apt to work with anyone else.

Phil Rasori Chief Operating Officer MCT

One of the things that makes Phil Rasori a Titan is his development of the groundbreaking mortgage pipeline hedging algorithms that form the foundation of MCT’s HALO Program today. He has also pioneered several metrics that have become standard industry parlance, including “beta pullthrough” factors. In addition to banking clients, Rasori has consulted with GSE agencies and the US Government on hedging best practices for community banks.

Rasori is a recognized thought leader in capital markets operations within the mortgage banking community. His areas of expertise include complex financial modeling, computational dynamics, and linear programming for operational optimization.

Rasori also reaches out beyond the mortgage industry. He recently joined the Forbes

Finance Council so that he could provide thought leadership for a broader audience than just clients and colleagues. His insights in the articles he has published for Forbes have shown a dedication to expanding knowledge and awareness of the secondary mortgage market.

Like many in the industry, Rasori faced challenges in the early days of the COVID-19 shutdown. “My values were put to the test during the pandemic in 2020. Luckily we were able to come together to support our clients and help them through the struggles,” he said.

Tammy Richards CEO

LENDARCH LLC

Tammy Richards’ roots in the mortgage industry reach back to 1984 when she started as a loan secretary for RNG Mortgage Company. “I loved it from the start. It was fun helping people buy their dream homes,” she recalled.

Since then, she has been instrumental in creating the first-ever loan origination system in the mortgage industry. She has been part of a massive maturity transition that this industry has seen, from handwritten notes, printed papers, rolodexes, calculators to machine learning-led algorithms.

In her illustrious career that spans across four decades of diverse experience from a hands-on operator to a hands-on leader of many lenders, Richards has spearheaded changes in operations fulfillment along with the evolution of changes in the technology and regulatory landscape.

Richards is also known for her support of women in the industry. She has been an advocate for women in finance and continues to mentor and train the next generation of leaders. She has been a vocal icon for women’s leadership in the mortgage industry, from a time where positions for women were scarce to today’s date. She has established high-level corporate leadership for gender equality as well as promoted education, training, and professional development for women.

Dave Savage Chief Innovation Officer

Sales Boomerang And Mortgage

COACH

In Dave Savage’s nomination, his nominator wrote Savage “is a household name in the mortgage industry with a reputation as a passionate advocate for connecting borrowers with mortgage strategies that help them achieve their … homeownership dreams.”

Employees are also important to him.

“Throughout the financial crisis of 2008, seeing colleagues and those that I managed struggle put my values as a leader to the test. During these years, instead of retreating, I initiated frequent team meetings and check-ins with employees to offer the guidance and support they needed to keep going. What I learned is that the most important thing you can do during challenging times is to show up and bring leadership, especially when others are not,” he recalled.

His first mentor played a key role in Savage’s career. “Mel Samick was my first and most influential mentor. In addition to introducing me to the mortgage industry, he introduced me to resources that helped me thrive on a personal level. By teaching me to be disciplined in prospecting and providing me with the guidance that the ‘riches are in the niches,’ I found my stride as a top producer that catered to financial advisors and financial planners,” Savage said.

Matt Seu Partner

Actualize Consulting

Matt Seu has spent over 33 years in the mortgage industry. He’s worked at large (Freddie Mac) and smaller (Actualize) - and his values make him much happier at Actualize.

“As an executive at Freddie Mac, I had a chance to see how the big-time execs treated each other and how you had to sell your soul to get to the top. It made me realize that big corporate wasn’t for me. That’s what made me look for other horizons, and that led me to Actualize.” Seu has been there for 16 years.

“My first job was at Freddie Mac. I needed a job, so I took an offer to work in the document vault. I never had a clue that it would be the beginning of a 33-year run. From there, I worked in Freddie Mac’s mortgagebacked securities area, where I brought automation to ARM securities and REMICs. I was in charge of delivering significant portions of Freddie Mac’s mortgage purchase infrastructure and was the chief data officer.

“From there, I started the Mortgage and Fixed Income practice at Actualize and 16 years later, I’m still helping our clients optimize their business.

William J. Tessar President

Civic Financial Services

William Tessar’s mortgage career commenced because of a violent act.

In his own words, “Being hit by a drunk driver at 16 was the beginning of my journey into mortgage. As a result of my injuries, I ended up getting a settlement that I used to buy my first home at the age of 18.

“I remember … going through my first goodfaith estimate like it was yesterday. There I was, a freshman in college, sitting at a table, going line item by line-item over each expense with the loan originator.

“We ended at the loan origination fee. This, by far, was the largest of all expenses — and as I dug in to better understand why that expense was so big, what occurred to me was that I, the borrower, was providing all of the documentation, and all of these other vendors were providing services to facilitate the closing … yet the originator … was earning the biggest fee.

“At that point, I asked, ‘How do I do what YOU do?’ Shortly thereafter, I got my NMLS license. An accident that almost ended my life ended up being the beginning of a life in lending with eternal appreciation and love for the industry.”