Abhi s he k Jo s hi
Abhishek Joshi
Gender never determines an individual’s leadership
abilities. Instead, organizations must assess leadership potential by evaluating individual strengths and personality traits. Regardless of the type of business, you're running, or even the industry that you're operating in, to say that strong female leaders are important is something of an understatement. In truth, they're essential - not only for providing a much-needed perspective on the direction that a business is taking but also in terms of the types of qualities that they bring to the table that you're unlikely to find anywhere else.
One of the most invaluable traits that leaders bring to the table is their sense of awareness. They typically try to look at the bigger picture first, but then break a situation down into the finer details to see what is really going on underneath. They tend to attempt to understand a situation as organically as possible by asking the right questions at the right time, rather than bending a situation to their own will.
To be a great leader, you must not limit yourself to becoming an expert in your own industry only. Good leaders have the ability to see what bigger role they have to play. They take the time to look at the bigger picture and figure out how they can be relevant. Women always look ahead and ways to get opportunities for themselves and others.
Women have a vision, which allows them to stay ahead and be an inspiration to other people. And so, it isn’t surprising that when it comes to making illustrious career moves, you can always count on women to know what they are doing and what they want to achieve.
These resilient leaders have been immensely contributing to enabling transformations in the modern industrial sector;
the mortgage industry is no exception. The segment has seen a definitive rise in the number of influential leaders making huge strides in the field.
Indulging in the innovations of these resolute leaders, Insights Success, through its latest edition, “ The Most Influential Leader in Mortgage Industry- 2023 ,” highlights the charismas who are symbolizing excellence and transforming the facets of the mortgage sector.
Flip through the pages and have a Wonderful Read!
Featured Person
Amy Slotnick Regional SVP Mortgage Advisor
Hemanthkumar Jambulingam Senior Product Manager
Jack Little Area Manager
MichelleWilde
Divisional Vice PresidentCompany Name
Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation
Tavant tavant.com
Gateway Mortgage Group gatewayfirst.com
Orion Lending orionlending.com
Amy has a deep understanding of both the creative and business of making and selling films.
Hemanth Kumar manages products across Tavant VELOX lending suite of platforms and he is responsible for product innovation, go-to-market strategy and overall product life cycle management.
Jack takes great pride in helping first-time homebuyers navigate to the right mortgage to meet their specific needs.
Michelle’s thirty years of industry experience led to a position as a Divisional Vice President of Orion Lending.
Hemanthkumar Jambulingam Director of Product Management Tavant
I created the disruption in the Loan manufacturing process; instead of following the year-old traditional process of underwriting the loan to a specific investor, why don’t we upfront check if the loan can qualify for multiple investors.
Artificial Intelligence has reached the shores of antiquated industries like mortgage lending. It is bringing about a digital transformation of the sector. One of the individuals disrupting the industry with innovative products is Hemanthkumar Jambulingam.
Hemanthkumar is the Director of Product Management at Tavant . Tavant is a digital products and platform company that provides impactful results to its customers across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. It is creating an AIpowered intelligent lending enterprise by reimagining customer experiences, driving operations efficiencies, and improving collaboration.
Hemanthkumar is spearheading the development of Tavant’s Touchless Lending® suite of products and has focused on building enhanced and next-gen AI-powered digital transformation platforms for Loan Origination and Loan Servicing business areas specific to customer acquisition, customer conversion, customer management, and customer retention.
In an exclusive interview with Insights Success , Hemantkumar Jambulingam shares how he is disrupting years-old mortgage processes by building next-gen products and platforms.
Below are the highlights of the interview:
Briefly describe your professional journey up until now.
I am the Director of Product Management and oversee a large part of the product development for Tavant’s Touchless Lending® platform. I am responsible for giving life to most of the prominent of Tavant’s products, including Touchless Experience and Touchless Automation products, which have been deployed by the consumer, retail, and wholesale channels for not one but two of the largest independent Mortgage Bankers in the US.
My portfolio also includes the Decision Analysis product, which allows lenders to achieve fungibility across Government Sponsored Entities and Non-QM Investors. With Smart Processor and Smart Conditions, I am disrupting the whole conditions management lifecycle that plagues lenders today as one of the most inefficient manual processes that underwriters and processors on a loan juggle trying to converge on a loan’s fulfillment.
Having spent 18 years in the mortgage industry, I am adept
at both the Loan Origination and the Loan Servicing side of the house and move from one domain to another effortlessly. I, therefore, find it easy to go and talk about market analysis, business trends, product overview to existing customers and prospective clients, taking them through a tour de force of business case, growth plan, ROI, features and functionality, highlighting the digital pathways of the mortgage borrower’s loan application journey in one product and then transitioning over seamlessly to the same borrower’s post-funding experience as they pay off the loan in a multitude of touchpoints.
What challenges did you face along the way?
The mortgage industry, and more specifically, loan origination is an archaic, traditional, decades-old, legacy process. Years have passed, but the process and procedures remain the same with operational staff still following the processing steps defined as legacy.
With Touchless Lending’s Decision Analysis product, we focused on a specific process area. We disrupted the end-toend Automated Underwriting System (AUS) ordering, handling, and post-processing activities for the government agencies. Decision Analysis is the first product in the market that brought awareness of how to utilize automation to the full extent and use data insights from the AUS findings to determine the best operational and pricing execution for the loan factoring in the complexity of the loan and the corresponding document requirements.
It might be said that a product that brings such levels of disruption to an entrenched historical process will never be fully adopted on its immediate launch, and therefore, it took a lot of effort and care to increase customer adoption so that they can truly appreciate the business lift they get at the end of the day, and consequently, we can create a success story for the product in the mortgage industry.
People, Process, and Product – all three must align to promote and make the product successful.
What significant impact have you brought to the Mortgage industry?
As a director product manager at Tavant, I have been fortunate to manage several products in Tavant’s Touchless Lending® platform. This AI-Powered Lending-as-a-Service platform provides straight-through mortgage processing and automated underwriting as part of the end-to-end mortgage manufacturing pipeline. Loan officers, processors, and
People, Process, and Product – all three must align to promote and make the product successful.
underwriters utilize Touchless Lending’s optimized workflows to engage with data and make decisions faster, instead of relying on physical documentation and manual data entry.
This one-of-a-kind automated mortgage software solution allows lenders to originate more mortgages faster while reducing costs and repurchase risks. Touchless Lending integrates effortlessly with existing systems, including CRMs, POSs, LOSs, and automates the loan production process. As part of my Product Management strategy, I always focus on studying the current process, understand its low-level nuances, and go deeper to tease out insights on transforming and eventually disrupting it digitally.
What methodologies do you implement that contribute to new growth opportunities?
I created the disruption in the Loan manufacturing process; instead of following the year-old traditional process of underwriting the loan to a specific investor, why don’t we upfront check if the loan can qualify for multiple investors so that it increases the salability and fungibility for the loan.
Decision Analysis service will automatically run the GSE /multi-investor rules, auto-resolve data errors, data discrepancies and analyze the multi-investor requirement and create the loan file fungible for all the investors. Decision Analysis also improves the loan data quality and enhances the overall loan origination experience; expanded product choices enable lenders to deliver a frictionless origination experience for Borrowers, Loan Officers, Underwriters, and Capital Market teams.
Decision Analysis service reduces the origination costs by comparing multi-investor responses, utilizing investors’ data and documentation requirements to enable speed to close (reducing loan cycle time by days and weeks).
Automated conditions will transform multi-investor-specific requirements and lender-specific requirements into conditions and then auto-classify the owner and the responsible party for each condition, define the complexity, acceptable documents, and auto-satisfy the requirement/condition.
Tell us about Tavant and its foundation pillar.
Tavant is a products and services company providing impactful results for customers-partners across a wide range of industries and verticals including Financial Services: Real Estate/Proptech, Banking, and Lending with comprehensive strength across depth and breadth of the Mortgage domain with additional expertise in Media and
Entertainment, Manufacturing, and Retail from a digital transformation perspective.
Locations include geographical areas of North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia-Pacific. Tavant specializes in providing engineering services to enable the highest orders of digital transformation. Founded in 2000 with headquarters in Silicon Valley and development and product support centers in Dallas and other global locations, Tavant is driven by 3000+ passionate professionals highly skilled in their respective domains. Tavant's domain-focused product managers and designers, product engineers, technical architects, software and quality assurance engineers, project and program managers, business analysts and subject matter experts all bring a wealth of hands-on expertise and experience to drive our customers’ vision and business outcomes.
Tavant follows a “Digital First” approach and strategy for developing services and products. “Digital First” implies a customer-first, mobile-first, data-first, AI-first, automationfirst, collaboration-first, API-first, transformative approach to design and development.
What is your take on technology’s importance, and how are you leveraging it?
I believe technology is the most critical savior for the mortgage industry’s woes. The industry is inundated with
Tavant follows a “Digital First” approach which implies a customer-first, mobile-first, data-first, AI-first, automationfirst, collaboration-first, API-first, transformative approach to design and development.
inefficient processes, with humans playing ping pong with loan files across months and with rivers of paper flowing through every mortgage loan application. The cost to originate one mortgage is north of $10,000 . We need a digital transformation wave to the hit the shores of this industry and hit it deep and wide.
At Tavant, given our experience in other industries that have truly reaped the benefits of digitization and technology (manufacturing, media, retail and healthcare), we are determined to bring the benefits of such digital creativity to the mortgage industry. We have successfully incorporated AI and Machine Learning models into our products for a judiciously chosen set of use cases. We have deployed Blockchain capabilities in our platforms for a fundamental shift in how data is selected and distributed to other players in the mortgage manufacturing ecosystem.
What will be the next significant change in the mortgage industry, and how are you preparing for it?
In the world of digital lending, the most challenging items lenders deal with is analyzing the borrower data and making the right credit decision based on it. With the traditional borrower evaluation approaches becoming outmoded, lenders need to consider fully digital and automated underwriting approaches to gauge risks quickly and accurately.
With the rise of big data, credit decisioning gets a lot more
granular and accurate. So, the lack of data for analysis is not the problem anymore. The daunting task is to seek a sophisticated solution to get all the needed insights from this data in a matter of seconds. Lenders need to focus more on gleaning insights from the humongous amount of data generated from digital channels and leverage it for differentiated experience design.
Lenders have always leveraged data points to help them make decisions. Still, next-gen technology now allows them an enterprise-wide, 360-degree view of borrowers as well as the lending operation while enabling them to make better decisions and seek advantage of previously unrealized opportunities.
What are your goals in the upcoming future?
The mortgage industry will undergo major changes in loan origination, servicing and secondary marketing and these changes will be fundamentally disruptive. Fintech companies will induce more data transparency & insights, digitalization of data and process automation with the use of AI and Machine Learning techniques. With the next generation of Fintech firms, funding the loan will not just be the loan application process but extend to enabling borrowers to manage and maintain home equity, connecting borrower financial data with digital payments and smart home technologies, etc.
I would like to lead such Fintech firms and eventually, enable affordable lending and create more homeowners, and in the process, build a stronger American economy.
What advice would you like to give the next generation of aspiring business leaders?
Every day in life, there is a learning waiting to be found, and we should make these learnings count – As business leaders, you should always pay attention to detail, understand the process, the market, the people, the culture, deeply and widely and know how they come together to make life work.
Always question the status quo, never be afraid of failures; learn from your own and other’s mistakes and always look for or create opportunity for yourself and others.
There is a saying that people buy into the leader
before they buy into the vision. If you want to affect change, it makes sense that people must trust you and the way you see the world. Building this foundation is a critical step in being an effective loan officer.
Thriving with resolute leadership traits and developing immense trust with clients, Amy Slotnick excels as one of the influential leaders in the dynamic mortgage industry.
Amy is committed to enabling continuous improvement. She is a source of innovation as she thrives to identify the processes that need re-engineering and implements the changes needed to bring about increased efficiency and accuracy. With this skill set, Amy is now working as Regional SVP and Mortgage Advisor at Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation .
In an exclusive interview with Insights Success, Amy shares her professional tenure and highlights her challenges along with significant achievements in the niche.
Below are the excerpts from the interview:
Briefly describe your professional journey up until now.
I started in the business in Operations. After 5 years, I became a loan officer. Over the course of my career, I have managed Operations teams, Sales Teams and owned my own business. I joined Fairway 16 years ago and found the perfect fit for my business goals.
What challenges did you face along the way?
I am fortunate that my career has been well supported by
my colleagues and family. Most challenges have been around balancing the 24/7 demand of the sales side of this profession and family.
What significant impact have you brought to the Mortgage industry?
For the majority of my career, my focus has been on education for clients, business partners and colleagues. With a background in underwriting, I am able to bring an understanding of the “why” we do things to my clients, which makes the process smoother for them. I also host frequent trainings for my real estate partners to help them better understand our industry and show them how working with a true partner can help them grow their businesses.
They know that if I tell them a loan will work, then it works. Additionally, I have spent many years teaching and coaching new loan officers on Loan Origination 101. I work with clients and my colleagues in a way that helps them best to achieve their goals.
What methodologies do you implement that contribute to new growth opportunities?
I have built my business in becoming a lifelong trusted advisor for my clients. They know our relationship does not end when the current transaction closes, and they and their families can always come back to me with future questions.
We stay in touch through email, social media and yearly mortgage checkup appointments so that I am always top of mind. This has helped me to continue building repeat business and client referrals. I am fortunate that I am now helping many of the children and grandchildren of my past clients.
Tell us about Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation and its foundation pillar.
Fairway was founded on the principle of providing true service to our customers and doing it the Fair Way. The customer is both the loan officer who works for Fairway and the actual mortgage client. Our core values stress Speed to Respond and that is executed daily.
We are nationwide and have been voted the Best Place to Work for the most recent three consecutive years.
Fairway has two nonprofits. One is focused on providing support to Veterans and the other to our employees and their family/friends who are faced with life’s challenges –particularly around major illnesses.
What is your take on technology's importance, and how are you leveraging it?
I think that technology is important of course. There are so many tools available to loan officers. It is about defining which tools best fit the way you practice your business. I have been doing this job for 40 years.
I still believe in taking applications personally to build relationships with my clients; however, we now implement
technology to streamline the process for our clients in a way that is convenient, smooth and secure.
What will be the next significant change in the mortgage industry, and how are you preparing for it?
I wish I could predict that. While technology continues to adapt and grow, I do not believe that the loan officer will ever be fully replaced by it. The need to connect with people personally as they pursue home ownership is too important.
There is still a lot of grey in determining mortgage eligibility and, as such, I don’t think that technology can ever fully replace the human brain and the human touch.
What are your goals in the upcoming future?
I would say that my goals are to continue to support the growth and ambition of those who work with me. I would like to continue to originate loans while supporting my staff.
Eventually, I would like to stop originating and just work in our coaching platform while my partners carry on the legacy that I’ve built.
What advice would you like to give the next generation of aspiring business leaders?
There are bosses and there are leaders. Being a leader means listening first and speaking second (sometimes third). You need to lead by doing and showing, and not by telling and expecting. Technology is not a substitute for the human touch and the human heart. Leaders need to be compassionate and caring. Lead with patience, with calmness and with intent.
Fairway was founded on the principle of providing true service to our customers and doing it the Fair Way.
Michelle Wilde has established herself as one of the most influential leaders in the mortgage industry by drawing on underwriting, management and sales skills earned over three decades.
In 2016 Michelle became a Divisional Vice President at Orion Lending, helping the organization realize its goal of being one of the nation’s leading residential lenders.
Orion Lending is a Nationwide Mortgage Banker founded by proven industry leaders who bring a legacy of success and ambition to the Mortgage Banking industry. www.Orionlending.com
Orion Lending combines innovative technology with a wide array of products and competitive pricing. This enables a large network of brokers to grow through referral business and satisfied clientele.
We caught up with Michelle Wilde and discussed her professional journey and how she implements her experience at Orion.
Below are the highlights of the interview:
Briefly describe your professional journey up until now.
I entered the mortgage business in 1992 and worked at every level of the company throughout my first ten years in the mortgage industry. Before joining wholesale sales, I was an Underwriter and an Underwriting manager. I've watched the industry evolve through many cycles. In 1992 I wouldn't have imagined that I could be a Divisional Vice President of a nationwide wholesale company as you didn't see many women in leadership roles. I've been with Orion
Lending for six years, and I'm proud to say we have many women in leadership roles.
What challenges did you face along the way?
In the early years, I was pigeonholed into traditionally female roles. I had to work twice as hard as my male counterparts in the early years to earn respect and opportunities. In recent years, the challenges became learning how to grow and change as the industry changed.
What significant impact have you brought to the Mortgage industry?
Throughout my career and especially in management positions I’ve advocated advancing anyone willing to work hard and learn. There isn’t a day that passes that doesn’t provide opportunity to impart wisdom and secrets I’ve learned from countless mentors onto our next generation of mortgage professionals. I've taught the value of relationship building to everyone I mentor.
What methodologies do you implement that contribute to new growth opportunities?
We are always looking for the right partners. In this industry, there are clients who want mutual success and partners who are only looking out for their success. We push for clients that want everyone to succeed.
Tell us about Orion Lending and its foundation pillar.
Our founding Pillar is "We See It, We Own It, We Solve It." At Orion Lending, we approach every situation with the mindset of quickly addressing and resolving whatever
By combining innovative technology with a wide array of products and competitive pricing to assist its network of brokers in growing and developing its referral business and clientele, Orion Lending's primary goal is to satisfy its customers.
