Are you a leader in the mortgage industry?

March 18, 2024 3:00 AM

At age 20, Christy Soukhamneut was "dropped in the deep end of the pool" and found herself a mortgage president and CEO in her first job out of college.

Since those early days cutting her teeth as the leader of Marble Mortgage in Montgomery, Alabama, Soukhamneut has carved out a career that led her to several of the industry's top lending firms, including Countrywide Home Loans, Certainty Home Lending, Flagstar and Texas Capital. She has also served as a director on multiple company boards.

In 2023, her experience in mortgage led her to the role of chief lending officer at University Federal Credit Union in Austin, Texas, or UFCU, where she now is responsible for a full array of transactions beyond mortgage, including auto, commercial and small-business loans.

Soukhamneut recently spoke with National Mortgage News on several topics, including her entry into home lending and how it paved a path toward leadership on the national stage, technology's place in the industry's future and women's growing roles in financial services.

The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

How did you get your start in the industry?

My dad was building my mother her dream house. This was back in the early 90s, so at a period of time when interest rates had been very high; they were getting lower. He had been building this house. He had a commitment from a lender, and they lost his loan file. It was kind of in the midst of that crazy refi boom, so he had trouble getting his loan closed.

So my dad, being an entrepreneur, decided he would open a mortgage company. And I happened to be graduating from college that year, and he goes — 'You need a job. I want to open a mortgage company.'

So he called the investor that he had met, and she said, 'Well, I told you to call me back in a year.' And my dad said, 'Yep, it's been a year. My daughter graduated from college; I'm ready to open a mortgage company.'

And she goes 'Great! Did you get some experience?'

He goes, 'Well, no, you didn't say anything about experience.'

He convinced her that we should open a mortgage company, and she should come and train me on how to make mortgages. And so my first job in the business was as president and CEO of a mortgage company.

How has the industry changed since then?

The regulations have changed. We didn't have licensing back then. Auditing looked completely different, and so did fraud.

When you think about it, in '94 — if you wanted to apply for a loan — you would walk into my office after you made an appointment, we would take an application, I would thank you for coming and tell you I'd let you know in 60 days what your loan looked like because we had to mail off for credit reports.

My sister was cleaning out her house the other day, and she found an ad that I ran in 1994. I took a picture of it just to show my staff what it was like in terms of guidelines. If you look at a mortgage ad today, there's all that tiny fine print underneath. The only thing we had to put was 'Rates are subject to change. Equal housing lender.'

The mortgage industry is still fairly male centered, at least in the higher ranks. How can the industry encourage more women to join and more importantly maybe help them develop their careers like you did?

I think the industry has recognized that. I can remember when I first really started playing at the national level. I went to an MBA event, and it really felt like there were 10,000 people. and there were 9,997 men and three women. It was not uncommon to be the only woman in the room, the only woman at the table.

A couple of years later — Marcia Davies at MBA [Mortgage Bankers Association] got every woman at the event together, and we fit in the back room of a restaurant. Not that long ago.

From that, it's grown significantly, and she created Mpower, whereby they're inviting a lot of younger women. They're doing Mpact, which is the young person's way to get into the industry, because most of us didn't go to college to decide we were going to be in the mortgage industry.

Almost everybody has a story like I do of how you fell into this industry, and you stay here because you love it. You stay here because you get to help people create generational wealth and change their lives for forever. There's nothing like the stability of living in a home versus an apartment.

My advice to women would be to explore your interests and find mentors, and mentors don't have to be people you talk to on a regular basis. They can be people that you connect with that you ask advice from. They can be people that you follow on Linkedin that put out great content that you can learn from. They can be from books that you read.

There's so many industry organizations — if you think about MBA, The Mortgage Collaborative, Lenders One, CHLA [Community Home Lenders of America]. They all have opportunities to be mentored, and they also have opportunities to join different working groups. One of the best ways that you can grow is to raise your hand and volunteer at one of these associations on projects that interest you and spark your passion.

Do you think the same sort of situation applies to other financial services? Do they have the same issues in attracting women and minorities and elevating them in their careers?

They do, and I sit on the board of two tech companies. It's an interesting space. So in both of those boards, I'm the only woman. One is publicly traded, and one is venture-capital backed. And on one board, there are no other minorities of any type. And on the other board, there is one other minority male.

To create opportunities like that, look at the New York Stock Exchange, they have a program to elevate women and create some board readiness, and then create a group.

I think for a lot of your readers, it's — 'How do I get to that step where I'm eligible for something like that? Because I've got to pass this barrier.' And the data suggests that mentorship is the best way.

How did you find your way onto your first board? You‘ve talked about mentors. Is that the road for other young women?

That is the road. I currently serve on the board of Voxtur which is a publicly traded company. And then I serve on the boards of Halcyon and Trained, which are both venture backed.

What was interesting is you never know where opportunities are going to come from. Create a diverse network of contacts in all levels of organizations — my opportunity to get on my first board was Voxtur, which was the publicly traded board. A partner of mine at a fintech found out about this opportunity, and they really wanted to either have a minority or a woman. They wanted somebody in banking and called me and said, 'Hey, I'd love to nominate you for this. Would you consider doing it?'

And then you go through a lengthy interview and background check process, but it was a call that was, 'Hey, we've been talking, and we've been working together. I'm very impressed with what you do. Somebody asked me about this. I'd like to share this opportunity with you.'

I think you can't underestimate the power of your connections to surface those types of opportunities for you.

[Former MBA president] Kristy Fercho called me when she was leaving Fannie [Mae], going to Flagstar and said, 'I'm going to need a chief of staff. Come help me run the org.' Tremendous opportunity.

That's the other thing — talk to your boss about what your goals and aspirations are. Ask for introductions. Ask for support in the things that you do. I pay for my own coach. I join mentorship groups, because I know that doing those things will make me better and give me perspective.

About your board memberships, how important have they been for your career growth?

It's really an interesting prospect because board level is very different than running the business day to day.

Look at the high level, look at the strategy, look at the risks and give some direction to senior leadership. But then it's up to senior leadership to actually execute, and they may or may not do what you recommend. That, then, becomes a different conversation. But you also have a different responsibility to the organization.

When you think about leading from a senior leadership role, you are responsible for delivering those results, not just guiding the organization.

Now that you’re a chief lending officer, you are overseeing more products than you used to. How complicated are they compared to mortgages?

Mortgage is a pretty complicated beast. And even though most people understand a portion of the mortgage industry, very few look at the whole end to end, when you start to look at securitizations and selling to the cash window and what it looks like to do reinsurance and CRTs [credit risk transfers]. From that perspective, the other lines of business are slightly less complicated.They have different nuances.

When you think about business lending, there's significant additional risks. You're not really sharing that risk with anyone. You're not selling it off to the cash window. You're not securitizing it, and so your underwriting process has to be a little bit more complex. And in addition to that, those loans are a lot larger.

There's a lot of similarities in lending across channels. Is it good credit? Is it good collateral? Are you going to get repaid?

Sometimes in life, you get an opportunity, and you have to stretch. You're not always 100% prepared for everything that you take on, and then it's your opportunity to educate yourself. Reach out to people.

I called a friend of mine who had been an executive at American Express and said, 'Alright, what don't I know about credit cards that I should know?' I called a friend who was a top commercial lender.

One of the things I learned from when I went to work for Kristy Fercho — she is one of the smartest people on the planet — literally picks up things so quickly, a hard worker. She would sit in meetings, and if she didn't understand something, she'd stop the meeting and ask the question.

When somebody like her is in a role like she is, and she's willing to ask a question. It really opens it up. So as leaders, one of the things we have to do is make it OK to ask questions and not seem like you always have to have the answer.

What have you learned from going through up-and-down cycles? Is there a philosophy you have to navigate through them?

I would say the first thing is — no matter what role you're in — remember to treat people kindly. These are harsh, harsh cycles in a lot of cases, particularly now. And kindness costs you nothing, but it means everything to the folks around you. And that's true for your clients, that's true for your co-workers or just even people in the industry that you're connected with.

In terms of getting through it, you've got to figure out how the market is moving and how you can adapt. You can't just sit back and wait and say the market will come back, so I just need to survive.

No, you need to figure out what you can change, how you can pivot. What is that little niche or opportunity that you can find and go execute against that?

Artificial intelligence has been the buzz over the last year or so. How might it change the industry, but maybe more importantly, how can a professional prepare for that and stay on top of technology to use it to their advantage rather than fear it?

I think when you think about the mortgage industry — the first thing is we are historically slow to change. When you look at Enotes and Eclosings, people think that those were magic things that happened during Covid. And yes, they were in terms of implementation, but we had been working on those things for 10 or 15 years and trying to drive adoption.

I joke that not much has changed where we can look back and say, 'Yes, since my start in the mortgage business to today, things look different. Credit reports don't come in 60 days, they come in 60 seconds.' But overall the process itself hasn't changed as much as you would have hoped or as much as you see in other industries.

I think one of the things is that the mortgage business runs in such deep cycles that we're either super busy, and we don't have the time to do the investments, or things are super slow, and we don't have the money to do the investments.

There's got to be some kind of a leveling out, and you're starting to see that in groups like The Mortgage Collaborative, where they have the tech fund, and you're looking at some of the stuff Lenders One is doing, and then you look at Flagstar with their fintech accelerator. The industry is trying to step up. We're taking baby steps. We're a little unsure of what is the next step, and we have regulatory pressure as well we have to think about.

As an individual, what can you do? To me it's recognizing that we're going to change. Technology is there to be an enabler. It may replace some jobs or some functions, but it's never going to take the human out of the entire process. And so, how do you use that to be more efficient, serve your members or your customers better and meet them at the point of where they are.