About the
Membership Chair.

I have spent more than 30 years in mortgage banking, beginning my career as a loan originator before founding Henger Rast Mortgage Corporation in 2004, an independent mortgage banker serving the Southeast. The company successfully navigated the financial crisis and was sold to FirstBank (Nashville) in 2011.

Following the acquisition, I spent approximately twelve years leading FirstBank's mortgage division. At the time of the acquisition, FirstBank's mortgage operation employed fewer than twenty people, and Henger Rast added approximately sixty mortgage professionals. Over the following decade, we built the organization into one of the nation's largest community bank-owned mortgage platforms, employing more than 700 mortgage professionals and originating approximately $8 billion annually across retail, consumer direct, wholesale, correspondent, reverse mortgage, and servicing channels.

Those years exposed me to virtually every challenge associated with operating mortgage banking inside a community bank — multiple market cycles, rapid growth and contraction, FDIC and regulatory examinations, fair lending reviews, audits, technology transformations, capital allocation, staffing, and balancing mortgage objectives with the broader bank.

After accepting an early retirement package from FirstBank in 2023, I joined Local Bank to build its mortgage banking division from the ground up. Starting with two trusted former colleagues, we developed a full-service mortgage banking platform with complete loan manufacturing capabilities, including capital markets hedging and mandatory trade execution. In less than two years, the mortgage department had grown to approximately 35 employees, was consistently originating approximately 50 loans per month, and had achieved sustainable profitability.

Having built mortgage organizations inside both large and small community banks, I decided to step away from production and challenge myself in a different way. Today, I serve as Principal, Industry Strategy for Vesta, a next-generation loan origination platform focused on workflow automation and artificial intelligence.