HousingWire—a leading housing industry media publication—today announced its 2023 Insiders Award winners. Dave Higgins, UMortgage’s VP of Business Innovation, was selected as one of the 75 exclusive winners of this award for his excellence in leading a plethora of initiatives and projects that have helped UMortgage grow at scale and enable its team members to succeed in their roles. The HousingWire Insiders Award honors operational leaders in housing who are working behind the scenes to drive their companies and clients forward. According to HousingWire’s press release, “Winners were carefully selected by HousingWire’s selection committee based on their vital and dynamic contributions to their companies and the industry as a whole.” Higgins’ contributions to UMortgage since joining in 2021 have been invaluable to the mortgage platform’s exponential, 300% year-over-year growth. In his role as VP of Business Innovation, Dave is the mastermind behind UMortgage’s approach to any updated process, new initiative, departmental restructure, or ideated solutions to individual and collective pain points. He brings structure, accountability, communication, and user adoption to life all while ensuring the platform maintains its industry-best Net Promoter Score (NPS) and operations turn times. UMortgage sat down with Dave to discuss what it means to win this award and his approach to leadership within the organization. Q: Dave, congratulations on being selected as one of HousingWire’s 2023 Insiders Award winners! What does it mean to be recognized as one of the leading figures of innovation within the housing industry? DH: “It’s an incredible honor! The thing that I really appreciate about this award is that these are the people who don’t get a lot of time to be in the spotlight. I’m glad that this is an opportunity for people who like to be the workhorses of their industry or company to shine and be recognized. Kudos to HousingWire for coming up with an award that really shines a light on those folks who can be easily overlooked in some cases. I love this award for all the hard-working individuals leading these groundbreaking projects throughout our industry. All my fellow nominees and award winners should be proud of the work they do, and it’s incredibly rewarding to see and receive this kind of recognition.” Q: You’ve received this award for working on a lot of the groundbreaking projects at UMortgage that are helping us blaze a trail in the mortgage industry. When reflecting on all the projects you’ve worked on previously, what are some of the things that guide your leadership as new initiatives arise and new projects are started? DH: “The industry evolves incredibly quickly. We have to adjust to things that come by the day and sometimes even by the hour. One of the biggest things that I’ve tried to instill in the teams that I work with is to document everything—that way if you need to refer to anything, you have something concrete right there and available to you. The other thing is to always build in measures of accountability for the individuals leading specific parts of these new projects and processes so we can get a measuring stick for success and ensure that we’re always on the right track. I think there are always opportunities to partner with your business unit in a better way and new methods to get buy-in from the team members and the individuals who are in the trenches. As leaders, we should constantly seek out new methods to engage them and get them excited about what you’re doing, and that’s bringing them into the project and making them part of the decision-making process.” Q: What advice would you give to other leaders or individuals aspiring to innovate in their respective industries? DH: “The biggest advice that I can give is to go outside of your industry to find things that have worked. We can adapt things from manufacturing plants, food service, and really any industry out there. There are very few novel problems in the world. Somebody somewhere else out there has found a way to solve the problem that you have – you just have to find it. Go outside of the industry. Call leaders in other industries and ask them how they would tackle that kind of problem. Nine times out of 10, somebody else has tackled that issue and has a creative solution that you can use.” Dave is the third current UMortgage Executive Leader to earn one of HousingWire’s industry leader awards this year. Gil Arbitsman, CFO, was named one of the publication’s 2023 Finance Leaders while Corie Meredith, VP of Marketing, earned the honor as one of their 2023 Marketing Leaders. UMortgage has carefully curated an award-winning leadership team to champion its vision to create life-changing opportunities through homeownership. Through the guidance of UMortgage’s executive leaders, the platform serves as a trailblazer within the mortgage industry and ensures the success of all its team members and Loan Originators. If you’re interested in learning more about the ways that UMortgage’s leadership team is blazing a trail towards a better mortgage industry, follow this link to hear from some of the platform’s leading minds and top producers.

Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), is committed to partnering with mortgage lenders to drive their technology transformation with modern solutions that are already in practice and serving many of the top mortgage lenders in the country. As part of its efforts to drive the mortgage industry forward through the adoption of these technologies, Salesforce selected UMortgage’s leadership to establish the precedent of utilizing them to their fullest potential. UMortgage was identified to take part in this campaign because of its utilization of Salesforce’s mortgage interface to facilitate better client experiences. Through the use of customized task management systems and automation within Salesforce, UMortgage has been able to offer LOs and their borrowers consistency and certainty throughout the mortgage process. The use of an innovative tech stack has directly correlated to business success with UMortgage achieving 300% year-over-year growth and a near-perfect 95 net promoter score (NPS)—an indicator of a best-in-class client experience. On Wednesday, August 16th, Salesforce hosted a webinar—Imperatives in Today’s Mortgage Landscape—led by Geoff Green, Salesforce Global Head of Mortgage Lending, and Anthony Casa, President & CEO of UMortgage. “In order to compete and succeed in today’s economy and beyond, mortgage lenders have to embrace digital transformation,” stated Green. “Anthony (Casa) and the initiatives set at UMortgage are an excellent example of the ways that Salesforce can be used to simplify the borrower experience, improve operational efficiency to close deals faster, and offer data-driven solutions to common industry pain points.” During the webinar, Casa and Green outlined the increased focus on the value of servicing, how to meet evolving client expectations, the importance of ease-of-use to drive certainty with a custom tech stack, and why technological advancements like AI and automation are taking center stage with most business development initiatives. “It’s important that we share the blueprint for our success with hopes that other mortgage leaders and technology leaders within this industry can use what we’ve done here to plan their own technology transformation strategy,” said Casa. “We ultimately want to make sure that everyone in this industry is doing everything that they can do to best serve consumers, make a positive impact on Loan Originators, and persevere through this challenging market to set our Loan Originators and team members up for success.” To learn more about the technological systems in place on the UMortgage platform, join its leadership team every Thursday at 2pm ET for an overview of the Sales, Marketing, and Business Support technology that has driven growth for so many Loan Originators.

At the halfway point of 2023, UMortgage is delighted to achieve a massive financial milestone—$1 billion in funded loan volume so far this calendar year. The platform signaled intent to continue to scale after a record-breaking year of growth in 2022, and the investments put in place previously have laid the foundation that enabled UMortgage to surpass its 2022 funded volume just 21 weeks into the new year. Ian Twaddle, a UMortgage loan originator, and his team originated the loan that officially brought UMortgage above $1 billion funded for the year. The Pennsylvania-based LO has been with the platform since October 2022 and has seen their production increase while relationships improve since making the move to UMortgage. “We throw around the phrase ‘all in’ a lot, but Anthony [Casa] has truly gone ‘all in’ over and over—especially with Operations,” said Ian. “At UMortgage, we’re never settling. Rather, we’re constantly improving our Operations processes and standards until they’re the best in the business. That’s what makes it possible for me and the team to do the business we have been doing.” UMortgage was able to accomplish this milestone before the halfway point of the year because of multiple investments into its infrastructure in 2022 with a long-term vision for sustainable success in mind. Prioritizations were made to spur continued exponential growth, starting at the top with its Executive Leadership team, then making their way throughout the organization with revitalizations for recruiting, onboarding, training, and coaching. These tenants laid the groundwork for UMortgage to continue to attract top talent and scale at an increasing rate throughout 2023 and beyond. In the last 12 months, UMortgage has been carefully curating an award-winning Executive Leadership team that ensured alignment across all departments and led short-term projects that paved the path towards making its long-term vision attainable. Gil Arbitsman, CFO and 2023 HousingWire Finance Leader, was brought on board to set financial structures in place that allowed UMortgage to acquire top talent and continue to scale. Kayla Lopez, SVP of Strategy and 2023 HousingWire Rising Star, helped develop internal strategies to help team members acclimate as the platform grew exponentially. And finally, Corie Meredith, VP of Marketing & 2023 HousingWire Marketing Leader, led UMortgage’s marketing strategies to attract new LOs to the platform and enable those LOs to grow & strengthen referral partner relationships. Once the UMortgage’s leadership was aligned, the platform underwent an overhaul of its recruiting, onboarding, training, and coaching strategies to ensure consistent standards were set across the entire organization. This uniform understanding of roles and responsibilities enabled UMortgage to seamlessly scale and welcome new Loan Originators to the platform without disrupting their preexisting pipelines. “We’re thrilled to have hit $1 billion in funded loans so early in the year,” said Rob Pieklo, UMortgage’s VP of Revenue. “We laid the groundwork to make this kind of production growth possible, but it was achieved thanks to the buy-in from everyone across the organization. $1 billion isn’t the final goal, though. We’ll be continuing to fine-tune our processes and develop team members in-house to continue to scale throughout the rest of the year and beyond.” After acquiring Dallas-based NXT Mortgage, Hodgson—the former NXT President & Co-Founder—earned the position as UMortgage’s Vice President of Growth to help identify areas for expansion and strategies to attract top talent in those regions. Most recently, those areas include the Midwest—specifically the Ohio Valley area—and the Southeast. This year, UMortgage has welcomed Ravi Patel’s Ohio Valley Mortgage Group and Patrick Stoy’s MC Mortgage Group, located in Northern Kentucky and Wilmington, North Carolina, respectively. UMortgage’s growth doesn’t end here, however. The platform is currently fine-tuning its Operations processes with a platform-wide initiative called “Operations 1.62”. It is also rolling out a robust coaching platform that connects Loan Originators throughout the organization with experts across the mortgage industry and beyond. UMortgage plans to double its production in the second half of the year; follow this link for a transparent look at the platform’s plans to grow and the ways that it is helping Loan Originators grow their business in any market.