Your Insider Guide to MBA Annual ‘26

Hello, hello! I’m in an overpriced Loop hotel lobby dodging runners & trying to get this special edition out to you. (Though it could be worse — eLend’s Rob Pieklo is paying $1,140 a night for a shoebox w/ a bed lol.)

On a personal note, this past week has been one of the craziest in recent memory: My wife & I closed on our new home on Thursday, moved & unpacked Friday & Saturday, & now I’m here. Unfortunately, the hot water heater isn’t working at the new home, & the movers forgot my hats & shoes, which means I’m rocking some orthotics New Balance sneakers.

Anyway, I’m really excited to see everyone — if you see me around, please say hi. There’s nothing I love more than chatting w/ folks. 

Below is my analysis of the attendee list, the schedule of parties (including links), & a thoughtful piece on mPower from Karen Postiglioni. 

Re the conference: Virtually all of my 10 commandments of MBA Annual from Vegas apply this year. I’ll be sharing exclusive dispatches for Mortgage Scoop Insiders throughout the week, so upgrade your sub, check back & follow me on LinkedIn.

Jerry Seinfeld is doing a set in the Hyatt Regency ballroom, Freedom booked Halsey at Navy Pier & Lenders One rented out Howl at the Moon. The party lineup for MBA Annual in Chicago is fuckin’ stacked. But the guest list is… a little thinner.

I got my hands on the attendee lists for the last three MBA Annuals & ran them against each other. Who's coming, who isn't, who's wearing a new badge, etc.

The headline for me is the churn. More than 4 in 10 people registered for Chicago weren't at either of the last two shows, & some of the companies that flooded the floor last year have all but disappeared from the registration list.

The Chicago list has 2,539 names, down from 2,600 in '25 and 2,606 in '24. That looks flat, but it’s not quite. The MBA's own staff swings the totals around —> 73 of them were on the '24 list, 5 in '25 & 56 this year. Strip them out and industry attendance went from 2,533 to 2,595, & now to 2,483. That's a 4.3% drop year over year.

The number of companies, though, actually ticked up, to 657 from 646. The industry is still showing up, it's just sending slightly fewer people per badge.

And the faces keep changing. Only 809 people are on all three lists. Of the 2,600 who registered for '25, 1,344 aren't on the Chicago list. Of this year's 2,539, 1,064 are first-timers.

A caveat before anyone angrily emails me: a registration list counts badges, not budgets/interest. Plenty of companies skip the full conference pass & do their business off-site at a suite, a steakhouse, a rooftop down the street, etc. So a smaller delegation doesn't automatically mean less interest or less spend. And I’m sure there are some late registrants as well not captured in the data. 

But from the sheet I have, Optimal Blue represents the biggest swing in the data. It went from 10 people in '24 to 47 in '25 & back down to 13 for Chicago. OB is hosting a happy hour at Morton's (& always throws good parties). 

Bayview's family of companies (Lakeview, Bayview Loans, Community Loan Servicing) did the same round trip: 12 in '24, 38 in '25, 8 this year. Maren Kasper, a Bayview managing director last year, is now registered as Lakeview's CEO.

The weirder ones: TransUnion went from 19 to 1. Cotality went from 18 to 1, & is still throwing a party at the St. Regis. U.S. Bank Home Mortgage, Accenture & Ginnie Mae had 14, 12 & 16 people in '25, respectively. None of them are on the Chicago list. ServiceLink dropped from 14 to 1, National MI from 24 to 10.

ICE keeps shrinking its presence too. Counting the old Black Knight & ICE Mortgage Technology badges together, it sent 129 people in '24, 82 in '25 and 65 now. Still the biggest delegation from a single vendor, but it's a third smaller than two years ago.

And consolidation shows up where you'd expect. For example, Mr. Cooper is gone from the list entirely. Rocket is down to 10, from 25 in '24. POS vendor nCino (SimpleNexus) went from 29 to 15 over the same stretch.

JPMorgan Chase is going big at home. 43 people in '24, 52 in '25, 69 for Chicago, which represents the largest delegation on the list outside the MBA itself, plus a reception on the 57th floor of Chase Tower.

The credit score fight is walking the floor. VantageScore had zero people on the last two lists. It has 16 this year, including CEO Silvio Tavares. FICO is up to 22, from 15. Two of the FICO badges belong to former FormFree execs Eric Lapin & Christy Moss (though Moss was a casualty of last week’s FICO RIF). Meanwhile TransUnion, which is one of VantageScore's owners, is down to a single person. Make of that what you will.

Radian went from 1 to 18, w/ CEO Mike Weinbach on the list for the first time. First American went from 11 to 29. Advantage Partners Solutions, the combined credit reporting shop, shows up w/ 11.

Plaid had nobody registered the last two years. It has 9 now.

Match names across the lists & you get a decent map of who moved. After stripping out rebrands & mergers, about 70 people show up at a different company in Chicago than they did last time. A few that caught my eye:

Dark Matter is one I'd watch. Brad Vasto was Dark Matter's chief revenue officer on last year's list, a year after jumping over from Asurity. Now he's at Covered Insurance. Lynnette Nuese (now LendingPad) & Kate Schilling (now Friday Harbor) left too. Dark Matter's delegation went from 23 to 14. Now under Vikas Rao, there’s been some buzz about DMT of late…

Of the 1,064 first-timers, about 330 have C-suite, president or EVP-type titles. That's a lot of fresh decision-makers in one place.

Besides Tavares & Weinbach, first-time names include Andy Sandler (Asurity), Paul Doman (Accurate Group), Raman Muralidharan (Citizens), Jennifer Folk (Kind Lending), Kevin Comps (Northpointe) & Steve Irwin (NRMLA).

So what should you do with this? If you sell into this industry, your list from last year is maybe half right. More than half of last year's attendees aren't coming back, & a lot of the people who are back have different titles or different employers now. Check the badge before you pitch like a know-nothing.

Like I said, these are registration lists & the '26 list is a snapshot from before the show, so late registrations won't be on it. It also misses anyone who comes to town for off-site meetings & parties w/o buying a badge. I matched people by name & grouped companies under one name when they've rebranded/been M&A’d) (CoreLogic to Cotality, Black Knight into ICE, Chase Home Lending into JPMorgan Chase). A Bob in one year & a Robert in the next will slip through, so treat any single person-level number as close, not exact. I’m doing my best here, folks!

This is a great town, & every time I come here I make it a point to take the architecture 🛥 tours. Highly, highly recommend if you’re nerdy like me. I also really enjoy the 🐢 races. I asked a couple of folks w/ Chicago roots to share some recs:

“Love Big Joes & the turtle races,” said Liz Short. She also recommended Billy Goat downtown underneath Michigan at where a bunch of the Second City / Chicago writers to SNL used to meet. Maybe you’re up for taking a water taxi or checking out the Museum of Surgical Science?… “weirdest museum in Chicago,” Short said. 

Food-wise, a local foodie friend of mine said that when in River North, try the mochiko chicken at Da Local Boy, grab an Italian beef at Luke’s, or maybe a Steak Frites at Monadnock Bistro. I assume most people will be in the conference or at the parties, but the lakefront is always beautiful & Millennium Park is a great place for a walk. 

As promised, here’s the list of mortgage parties/performances happening over the next couple days. I don’t know who curated it, so thank you whoever you are. I owe you a beer!

By Karen Postiglioni

A woman in the mortgage industry said something to me recently that shocked me in its directness. She was told straight up that when sponsorship budgets tighten, women speakers, sessions led by women and women-focused sessions or events can be among the first to go because they’re expected to draw smaller crowds.

Wait, what? Do women actually draw smaller crowds, or have we decided they will?

Because once that assumption starts influencing who gets the room, time slot, marketing push or sponsor dollars, the math starts looking a little self-fulfilling.

Women’s basketball heard the same argument for years: not enough viewers, ticket sales or sponsor dollars. Then interest grew and the economics changed. WNBA attendance reached 3.1 million in 2025, up 33%.

Sometimes demand changes the economics. Sometimes the structure helps create the demand. Very chicken-or-the-egg.

Women aren’t a niche part of mortgage. At the end of 2025, women were 55.5% of employment in real estate credit. Yet LaTasha Waddy, president of NFM Lending, recently noted that fewer than 3% of mortgage presidents and CEOs are women.

Conference visibility compounds. Organizers naturally gravitate toward presidents, CEOs, founders, top producers and people they already know can deliver onstage. Speak somewhere and do well, someone else sees you, another invitation follows and pretty soon you’re part of the conference circuit.

But somebody has to put you in the room first.

HousingWire did some of that at its recent Mortgage Banking Summit, reaching beyond the usual circuit and putting several people onstage who weren’t conference speaker regulars, yours truly included. The feedback afterward was strong, including that the conversations felt fresh and different.

Turns out different doesn’t automatically mean less valuable.

Which brings me to MBA Annual and mPowering You.

Before anyone comes for me, I’m not arguing against mPower. The opposite. Dedicated spaces for women to connect, develop and build relationships matter, and mPower has grown into a meaningful event. But it also shows why audience size isn’t the same thing as audience demand.

mPowering You is Saturday before Annual begins Sunday. Breakfast starts at 8 a.m., so most people flying in realistically arrive Friday. Someone who otherwise might arrive Sunday for Annual could be adding two hotel nights.

MBA’s cheapest published hotel block was $299 a night, or another $598 before taxes. My actual hotel cost for the trip averaged closer to $590 a night, but let’s be nice and use the cheapest published number.

mPower registration is $699 at the member rate, with a $100 discount on Annual. So attending both can add roughly $1,200 before extra meals, taxes and travel differences.

And yes, conferences separate out specialty events all the time. That isn’t my issue. My point is that turnout can reflect cost, timing and who gets funded to attend, not just whether people want to be there.

If you’re self-funding, do you choose the less expensive mPower event, go to Annual because that’s where the broader industry is gathering, or spend more and do both? If your company is paying, somebody is probably making that decision for you.

None of that means people don’t value mPower. It means turnout can be influenced by how much money and time it takes to attend.

Now let’s look at the sponsor side. MBA markets Annual as more than 3,700+ attendees from 600+ companies, compared with 350+ attendees from 160+ companies at mPower.

Looking only at eyeballs, the bigger event wins. Easy.

Except 43% of mPower attendees are VP level or above, and anyone who has ever participated in a major mortgage technology or vendor decision knows the CEO isn’t sitting alone somewhere picking the LOS, servicing platform or AI vendor. Operations, technology, finance and implementation leaders have plenty to say too.

A smaller audience isn’t necessarily a less valuable one.

And this is where the self-fulfilling prophecy starts to bother me. Expect a woman speaker or women’s session to draw fewer people, invest accordingly, then use the resulting crowd size as proof that the original assumption was right.

But did we measure demand, or did we partly design it?

There is another side to this too, and women don’t get a pass.

MBA accepts speaker proposals for Annual Convention. I had no idea until I started researching this piece.

That’s good news. Use it.

We can’t complain that the same people are always onstage while staying comfortably offstage ourselves. Submit the idea. Publish the opinion. Ask to attend the broader conference. Put yourself into rooms before you feel completely ready.

Trust me, plenty of other people have mastered that last one.

Organizers need to stop being lazy about defaulting to the same speaker list just because those names feel safer. The next great conversation about capital markets, AI, servicing, credit, margin or growth might come from someone who hasn’t already done six panels this year.

And while we’re at it, apply the same thinking to people of color, younger leaders, operators and anyone else who isn’t already part of the conference circuit.

I don’t want fewer women’s rooms. I want those rooms to create more pathways into every other room, and I don’t want an assumption about who will fill the seats determining whose ideas get heard.

Because if we expect the side room to draw the smaller crowd, fund it that way and then point to the smaller crowd as proof, that isn’t just economics. That’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

(🙏 If you like what you’re reading, tell a fellow mortgage junkie to sign up here.)