Matthew VanFossen is the CEO of the Absolute Home Mortgage Corporation, a mid-size Independent Mortgage Banker located in Fairfield, NJ, and Mortgage Automation Technologies, a financial technology provider specializing in consumer mortgage technology. Matthew has been a driving force in the mortgage industry and is a respected figure in the community. Additionally, he serves as the president of the New Jersey Mortgage Bankers Association.
Matthew commands an extensive knowledge of the broader housing industry, with over a decade of experience in residential mortgage lending and overseeing over $10 billion in retail originations as CEO of Absolute Home Mortgage. Throughout his career, he has taken on an executive role at several successful mortgage companies and has worked as a consultant for various fintech start-ups and mortgage lenders nationwide.
VanFossen’s passion for innovation and the industry is evidenced by his numerous industry achievements. He has been named a “Top Mortgage Professional Under 40” by National Mortgage News and has been featured in various publications, including Forbes, Scotsman Guide, and HousingWire. In 2023, he was awarded the ICE Mortgage Technology Innovators Award for Best Use of Next-Generation Mortgage Technology by Encompass.
Under VanFossen’s leadership, Both Absolute Home Mortgage & Mortgage Automation Technologies has become a major player in the financial technology space, offering the web-based BIG Point of Sale to some of the largest companies in the mortgage industry. He coined the “Farm to Table” Loan Officer to Programmer rapid design and testing methodology. VanFossen’s technology enables efficient and speedy consumer mortgage transactions, eliminating consumer communication complaints and reducing costs for lenders.
Matthew is also the youngest individual to ever serve as the President of the Mortgage Bankers of NJ and the only 4-year term president. Currently Matthew Co-Chairs the Mortgage Bankers of America State and Local Regulatory Committee and is a past board member of Community Home Lenders of America.
Mike Hogan is the Senior Managing Director and Chief Information Officer at Pennymac, and is responsible for the overall vision and leadership for technology initiatives across the company. Hogan has demonstrated consistent success in delivering database and application software solutions within the financial services industry.
In his current role at Pennymac, Hogan is leading a number of AI initiatives. He headed the rollout of Google Gemini at the enterprise level, as well as the launch of several AI productivity tools. He is also leading GenAI workstreams to foster innovation within the company, while carefully monitoring safety and compliance of GenAI tools before implementation. Hogan serves as vice chairman on the MISMO board, which represents a wide range of expertise in residential and commercial real estate finance, where members collaborate on critical issues within the mortgage industry.
Previously, Hogan was the Managing Director of Capital Markets Technology at Pennymac. He is currently a member of the Executive Committee at Pennymac and has served on the company’s management team since 2020.
Prior to joining Pennymac, Hogan led technology teams at Bank of America and Countrywide Financial in the Secondary Marketing, Data Management, Corporate Accounting and Mortgage Servicing areas. He has spearheaded the development of custom-built software solutions to support all facets of the mortgage business, and during his time as a Senior Consultant for Microsoft he helped clients develop and implement new applications.
Hogan earned a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Rice University.
A 2024 and 2025 𝗛𝗼𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴𝗪𝗶𝗿𝗲 Vanguard winner, Greg Sher has called IMB leaders to be more vocal in rallying the industry around its many headwinds. He created the hashtag #𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗼𝗳𝘂𝘀 in early 2024, in an effort to extinguish negative discourse created by the “𝘽𝙍𝙊𝙆𝙀𝙍𝙎 𝘼𝙍𝙀 𝘽𝙀𝙏𝙏𝙀𝙍” slogan, which he publicly urged AIME to retire on the HousingWire stage on April 23, 2024. 153 days later, AIME’s Chairman/CEO went on Sher’s podcast “One on One” and shared that the “Brokers are Better” slogan could be put to bed. He hosts a live podcast on LinkedIN every Monday at 1PM EST featuring industry newsmakers. He is among the most followed mortgage executives on the LinkedIN platform with over 40,000 followers – his content eclipses 5M impressions annually. Additionally, Sher is Managing Director at NFM Lending, a Top 15 retail-only IMB based in Baltimore. His main responsibilities there are centered around growth, business development, branding and marketing.
Athan Zhang is the CEO and Founder of Copperlane, where he leads product and engineering at the intersection of artificial intelligence and financial services. He focuses on building systems that apply advances in AI to complex, real-world workflows, with particular emphasis on AI safety, performance, and thoughtful integration into existing operational environments.
Prior to Copperlane, he was a quantitative developer at Five Rings, a proprietary trading firm, where he worked on high-performance systems in fast-moving financial markets. He was also an early founding engineer at two startups, including one that was acquired and another that raised millions in venture funding. Athan studied computer science at Princeton.
With family roots in the mortgage industry, he developed an early appreciation for the challenges and complexity of the loan process. Athan is also a licensed mortgage loan officer. His work at Copperlane focuses on applying modern AI techniques to legacy financial systems, with the goal of improving efficiency while maintaining the rigor required in highly regulated environments.
Brianna Lin is the COO and Founder of Copperlane, where she leads operations, go-to-market strategy, and partnerships at the intersection of AI and financial services. She focuses on bringing new technologies into complex, highly regulated environments, working closely with customers to translate technical capabilities into practical workflows.
Prior to this, Brianna was a trader and developer on the equities floor at Jefferies, one of the largest investment banks. There, she gained experience in fast-moving markets, risk management, and client-facing problem-solving. She studied in the Jerome Fisher Program in Management & Technology at the University of Pennsylvania, pursuing a dual degree in Real Estate from the Wharton School and Computer Science from Penn Engineering.
Brianna comes from a family deeply involved in the mortgage industry, which has shaped her understanding of how operational complexity and borrower experience intersect across the loan process. She is also a licensed mortgage loan officer. Today, her work at Copperlane centers on applying cutting-edge AI technology to real-world systems in mortgage lending.
Jake Vermillion is Chief Marketing Officer at Mortgage Champions, where he helps lenders fix broken sales processes and align marketing with what actually drives results. Built on Dale Vermillion’s OthersFirst philosophy, the Mortgage Champions team has trained over a million loan officers and partnered with 600+ organizations to boost trust, conversions, and long-term customer retention.
Recognized as a 2025 HousingWire Rising Star, Mortgage Maverick, and Top Voice in Mortgage Marketing, Jake blends relational sales strategy with modern digital insight to move leaders beyond tactics toward sustainable impact.
Follow Jake’s insights with 10,000+ professionals on LinkedIn or reach him at jake@mortgagechampions.com.
Leah Sommerville is DocMagic’s Director of Sales, responsible for leading our sales team with nearly a decade of experience in the eMortgage industry. She is a thought leader and frequent speaker on managing digital mortgage transformation, sharing her passion about empowering the mortgage industry towards the future of lending.
Leah has been honored with numerous industry awards, including Mortgage Professional America’s 50 Elite Women in Mortgage, Mortgage Professional Association’s Elite Women Award, National Mortgage Professional’s 40 Under 40 Influential Mortgage Professionals, Progress in Lending Association’s NextGen Leader Award, Progress in Lending’s Trailblazer Award, and the HousingWire Rising Star Award.
Prior to DocMagic, she held sales executive and director of marketing positions in the mortgage technology industry. Leah holds a Bachelor of Business Administration from the University of Texas at Arlington.
Jonathan Kolodziej represents all types of consumer financial service providers in regulatory compliance, examination and enforcement matters. Through this work, he has assisted bank and non-bank mortgage servicers, mortgage originators, debt collectors, depository institutions, credit card issuers, small dollar lenders, reverse mortgage companies, investment firms, and various industry trade associations.
Jonathan’s regulatory compliance practice centers around helping clients ensure that their operations are in compliance with applicable federal and state consumer financial laws. In this role, he helps clients assess the impact of new rules and regulations and adapt to changes
in the regulatory environment. Jonathan is able to analyze and synthesize complex regulatory changes and then explain the legal and operational impact to business, compliance, and legal stakeholders. When assessing an entity’s compliance or beginning the implementation process for a regulatory change, he leads clients through gap analyses, risk assessments and targeted reviews. He routinely reviews and provides feedback on policy and procedure documents, form notices, and training modules. As necessary, Jonathan also helps develop and execute appropriately tailored remediation plans.
Jonathan understands and appreciates that, in a heightened regulatory environment, the ability to prove your compliance is often equally as important as actually being compliant. As such, when helping financial service providers structure their day-to-day operations, he makes
sure that policies, procedures, training and oversight functions are in place and structured so that an entity can quickly and definitively demonstrate their compliance to state and federal regulators. During examinations and other reviews, Jonathan regularly assists with managing and drafting responses to supplemental requests, developing successful exam strategies, rebutting preliminary findings, and responding to allegations of legal violations. He has helped clients with examinations initiated by various state regulatory bodies, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the Multistate Mortgage Company (MMC), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Because of his familiarity with clients’ operational structures and applicable law, Jonathan is also able to assist with responding to complaints and allegations of regulatory violations made by borrowers, state attorneys general and other regulatory bodies
As a result of his familiarity with various federal consumer financial laws and regulations, Jonathan has taught regulatory compliance issues at the Mortgage Bankers Association’s Schools of Mortgage Banking | and II. He is also a frequent speaker during webinars and trade
association presentations on regulatory compliance issues.
Since 2021, Jonathan has taught Real Property Security as an adjunct professor at the University of Alabama School of Law in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Andrew Martinez joined National Mortgage News in January 2022. He previously worked at Bisnow, covering commercial real estate news in the Boston region, and prior to that, covered the federal court for the Boston Herald. He began his career in 2015 as the sports editor of the Rio Grande Sun newspaper in Northern New Mexico. He studied journalism and political science at California State University, Northridge, where he was the editor-in-chief of the student newspaper.
Michael is a strategic insights and content development executive with a subject matter expertise in financial services and strategy consulting. Prior to his current role, Michael served as a senior analyst with Arizent’s PaymentsSource publication (now part of American Banker) where he published articles and research reports, conducted podcasts and led the brand’s social media strategy. Before joining Arizent, he held executive roles at Visa, Ondot (Fiserv), Synchrony, Capital One and McKinsey. His strengths include his ability to sift through data, understand its strategic and tactical implications and then relay that to executives in a succinct manner. In his spare time, Michael enjoys travel, hiking and volunteering at the Texas Food Bank. Michael holds an M.B.A. from Kellstadt Graduate School of Business at DePaul University and a B.B.A. from Ross School of Business at University of Michigan.