housingwire-vanguard
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Steve Thompson
Steve Thompson is President and CEO of PrimeLending, the Dallas-based national mortgage lender that operates as a subsidiary of PlainsCapital Bank under Hilltop Holdings. He oversees roughly 1,300 loan originators nationwide along with the company's National Operations, Capital Markets, Joint Ventures and Marketing organizations. A UCLA economics graduate with an MBA from UC Irvine's Merage School, Thompson climbed from a regional sales manager who joined PrimeLending in 2011 to president in 2017 and to president and CEO in 2020, and he was named a 2023 HousingWire Vanguard for his leadership of the mortgage company.
Jeffrey Walker
Jeffrey Walker is the co-founder and CEO of CredEvolv, a fintech SaaS platform that turns declined loan applicants into mortgage-ready borrowers by connecting lenders, consumers, and HUD-certified nonprofit credit counselors in a single ecosystem. A four-decade mortgage-industry veteran who held senior roles at Fannie Mae, Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, CitiMortgage, and SunTrust, Walker left the corporate ladder to attack a problem that kept him up at night: hundreds of thousands of creditworthy Americans denied home loans every year. Under his leadership CredEvolv has served 36,000+ consumers, earned him a HousingWire Vanguard Award, and landed him on Inman's Best of Finance list four years running.
Jeremy Sicklick
Jeremy Sicklick is the co-founder and CEO of HouseCanary, a San Francisco proptech company that uses machine learning to value and forecast residential real estate across more than 136 million U.S. homes. A former partner and managing director at Boston Consulting Group, he started HouseCanary in 2013 after the 2008 housing collapse exposed how paper-bound and opaque the largest asset class in America really was. His pitch: replace a two-to-three week human appraisal with an instant, data-driven valuation, and bring stock-market-grade transparency to homes.