Steve Thomas, the mortgage industry veteran behind Futurewave Finance, a minority-owned correspondent lender, found his career path in the capital markets included taking on a lot of roles around diversity, equity and inclusion.
After serving for nine years as senior managing director of mortgage capital markets at the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago, but for some time, “I really started to feel like I want to do more.
“The first half of my career is about success. I want the second half to be about significance,” Thomas said in a recent interview.
His 29 years in the business started at Hyperion Capital Management, then he joined Countrywide and besides multiple stints at the FHLBank, he also worked at Fannie Mae.
Hand-out/FutureWave Finance
Thomas is also co-chair of the National Housing Conference’s National Advisory Council with Pam Patenaude, a former board member of Loandepot and former deputy secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He is also vice chair of Quontic Bank’s Community Development Financial Institution Advisory Board.
While a lot of the industry talk is about affordable housing and diversity, with his capital markets background Thomas noted an “obvious void” exists regarding private market investors for those products.
“There aren’t many minority- or women-owned businesses in the mortgage supply chain that are national or credible as an originator, servicer or an investor,” said Thomas.
Noticing that the channel was not very differentiated in terms of meeting product needs, Thomas created Futurewave Finance, a correspondent aggregator, which receives both infrastructure as well as business support from a sponsor and minority investor.
Futurewave has a full-service product menu, because to be successful in mainstream correspondent lending, “you also need to be in the game” in order to attract whole loan sellers’ attention, he said.
The company operates in three buckets, Thomas explained. The first is agency products. Futurewave is offering Freddie Mac and government-guaranteed products.
Next is specialty products, consisting of non-conforming offerings like jumbo mortgages, non-qualified mortgages and debt service coverage ratio loans.
But its future will be the third bucket — growth products — where the company best wants to support the industry.
This includes loans with credit scores under 700, originations for borrowers eligible for Freddie Mac’s Home Possible and Refi Possible products; mortgages that qualify for loan level price adjustment waivers; and Ginnie Mae Community Reinvestment Act securitization eligible offerings, with more to come.
“We want to add a lot of products to that bucket, to that third category,” he said. “That third bucket is where I think we could make some inroads, and it’s going to take a lot of work” to get other investors in the secondary market involved, Thomas said.
Right now Futurewave is still in its early stages, but hopefully by early 2024 it will be producing volume on a daily basis.
“We’re just getting the boat in the water, making sure there’s no holes and getting the right people on the boat,” said Thomas, a former Naval officer.
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