On Aug. 5, Paige Taylor Hernandez shared a reel on Facebook. It showed the list of speakers for two upcoming broker events, Originator Connect & AIME FUSE. Nearly every speaker was a man.

“Just gonna leave this right here! Do you see the problem with events in MORTGAGE?!?!?!” Hernandez, an originator w/ Heritage Mortgage & the founder of NOTORIOUS Women in Mortgage, wrote to her 5K connections.

The post took off. It triggered heated discussions on female representation. Hernandez believes those squabbles w/ powerful female members at AIME ironically have resulted in FUSE canceling her upcoming appearance, & led to her being booted out of the trade group. 

AIME says that Hernandez’s removal stems from existing litigation & is not connected to her remarks. It notes that women make up 1/3 of the speaker lineup at FUSE, which kicks off in Nashville next Thursday.

There’s more to the dispute, but let’s focus today on this important question: Why are there relatively few women in the mortgage C-suite and headlining industry panels?

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“I would see these rooms with all men, and I would ask questions like, ‘Are women not invited?’ And they’d be like, ‘No, they just have to earn it,’” Hernandez said in an interview with The Scoop. “And I'm like, ‘See, that's the problem.’” 

Conversations of this nature tend to set people off. “One of the things that I have seen is people get really offended when we start to talk about [this],” said Hernandez. “It's really crazy too, because a lot of times it's the women who get offended by this conversation.”

One 20Y+ industry vet said that when she was coming up, she often felt that HR/Marketing were the only avenues in the C-suite for women. The situation was much better than at banks & other financial institutions, but still very much an ol’ boys club. Other high-performing women seemed to be pitted against one another, she said. 

Another mortgage exec said she won’t appear at women-specific events “because it’s always a side stage.”

“Whenever companies do it in a tokenized way, it doesn’t feel like it helps the problem,” she added.

So where does that leave us? MBA Annual is next week & the trade group has done important work in finding quality female speakers, several sources told The Scoop. And HousingWire (where I worked until July)’s recent IMB conference had over 40% women speakers, which deserves a kudos. 

The bigger issue, one exec said, is the pipeline.

“We have to do the ‘in fact’ work, which is to build up a pipeline of women talent & pour into them, just like we do with men, & have a seat at the main table for them as the best person speaking on the subject. Organic. Let's do the real thing instead of just talking over here about the thing.”

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One of the most painful things in mortgage is ripping out the old LOS. LOs famously hate change, it’s expensive to run parallel systems & timing the transition is difficult.

But Lyra Waggoner, who was recently promoted to COO at Movement Mortgage, was undaunted when she took on the task in ‘22. As The Scoop previously reported, Movement went live on Blue Sage on Thursday, the culmination of a 3-year transition from legacy tech to a more modern, integrated suite (including LOS, POS, CRM). The replatform is done in partnership w/ Blue Sage, DocuTech, Polly, Salesforce & others. 

Here’s The Scoop’s exclusive interview with Waggoner.

The Scoop: We’ve previously reported that Movement was on Fiserv’s Mortgage Director. How did you arrive at the decision to change LOSs? Most lenders don’t make such a big change.

LW: Our previous LOS served hundreds of thousands of borrowers well over the years. It did allow us early on to be process innovators. We came out with an underwrite first & 671 speed to delivery process before that was a cool thing to be doing. It put us on the map as a retail lender & let us aggressively gain significant market share. It was no longer well positioned from a technical infrastructure & integration capabilities standpoint for us. 

How did you identify Blue Sage as the right LOS vendor? Surely you demo’d others. 

They're incredibly interested in having an open integration framework & allowing us to be the strategic drivers of those partnerships. We are big enough to have built proprietary, but given that's a portion of our tech stack that other partners do well, we felt it was important to pick a stable & well commercialized LOS solution that was proven in the market.

The 13 month timeline for the actual LOS replatforming is actually part of what has been exactly a 3 year complete overhaul. Think of it as like a remodel down to the studs of every single aspect of Movement’s tech stack. So the back-end of all data systems, infrastructure, accounting systems, CRM, marketing, all the marketing automation. And now the POS & LOS. It was 9 months to production pilot. It feels like this has to be unprecedented for a top 10 lender to go live that quick. 

What seems to trip up so many lenders?

The technical expertise is often not the problem for mortgage companies. Mortgage companies get tripped up when they aren't prepared from a data foundation & integration foundation to contemplate all the upstream & downstream uses that sit around the LOS. The speed to make decisions ends up adding a lot of overhead, & then it's such a difficult thing to do. I think there ends up being an entire storm of reasons that a lender might decide they're just gonna repaint the bedrooms & put in some new countertops instead of a complete remodel.

Our approach was to say, ‘How tight can we make the integration so that there's the ultimate efficiency in the way borrower data moves from application & through every part of the LO’s workflow?’

Does getting a new LOS/tech stack help you scale production/realize efficiencies to reduce cost per file? Why not wait a few years to see how AI will fully impact workflows?

There's a ton of just immediate gains on the back-office and post closing side, but the real focus is on adding efficiencies for loan officer teams. We were not willing to wait & risk missing this opportunity to replatform during a slower market. We think there's really good days ahead for the industry, & we want to be on a modern tech stack before that happens. 

We don't need to wait to see what happens with AI in order to have a data & integration strategy that manages and organizes that data in the most efficient way. That is the foundation of AI—you cannot glob AI on to the top of other poorly done integrations & poorly organized data & have any success.

LOs generally hate having to learn a new LOS.

Our LOs have seen 3 years of complete transformation from the bottom up, starting with every single back-end system, from IT ticketing. We've introduced a Salesforce-based CRM that has consolidated 6 or 7 different technology platforms into 1, which includes all of our marketing automation & also a marketplace that's internal for us that connects w/ other vendors. They've seen the vision of where we're going, & we have their buy in. With that said, change is hard.

Freedom Mortgage has a reputation. They’re known for being unapologetic about loving govie loans, not getting distracted by the shiny new object in mortgage & generally being aggressive as hell about refinancing anyone in their book. But that model can alienate partners too. 

One broker source said Freedom is on the verge of refi’ing a client who closed on the purchase mortgage in January, w/ first payment made on March 1. A few months later, Freedom reached out to the borrower w/ an offer to save them $185-$200 a month (75 bps) on an FHA streamline & it looks like the client is going to take it. That’s bad news for the managing broker & his LO — it’s going to create an EPO. 

Why would Freedom cause an EPO w/ a broker partner?

Freedom told the broker that normally they’d offer protection. As long as the broker shop is in the top 2 tiers, “we do not reach out to solicit the loans you closed unless the borrower reaches out to us or clicks for us to help via the website portal,” a rep said. But unfortunately, “this Q3 you dropped to the bottom tier.”

The broker said it was the first time he’d been told his shop’s “level” had dropped. “Not sure we will be sending Freedom any more loans moving forward,” he said.

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