The 2026 Lending Luminary Award Winners Are …

A luminary is defined as “a person who inspires or influences others.” And that type of person is exactly who PROGRESS in Lending is honoring. Right now, the market is filled with uncertainty, but these true Lending Luminaries are handling and navigating the constantly fluctuating market conditions. These mortgage bankers, lenders, servicers, technology executives, consultants, etc. are helping their companies and this industry thrive. These executives deserve to be recognized for their industry vision and leadership. The 8th Annual 2026 Lending Luminary Award Winners are:

Jeremy Boyd

CIO

DocMagic

As Chief Information Officer of DocMagic, Jeremy Boyd has played a pivotal role in ensuring the technology foundation behind some of the mortgage industry’s most critical digital lending processes is secure, reliable, scalable, and continually evolving. Jeremy Boyd has spent 27 years building the technology backbone behind DocMagic’s digital mortgage platform. As Chief Information Officer, he owns the infrastructure that runs eClosings, eNotes, eVault services, and digital asset management for lenders nationwide. Over the past year, he has led a significant multi-phase effort involving more than 100 MySQL database instances that support both internal and customer-facing systems. This large-scale initiative strengthens performance, reliability, security, and long-term supportability while ensuring seamless service delivery for lenders that depend on DocMagic’s technology every day. He also directed the deployment of a next-generation enterprise logging and analytics platform capable of managing approximately 10 terabytes of searchable operational data. This system enhances visibility across the organization’s technology ecosystem, enabling teams to more quickly diagnose issues, improve operational performance, and maintain the high levels of service expected by mortgage lenders nationwide. In addition, Jeremy continues to lead ongoing enhancements to DocMagic’s disaster recovery and business continuity capabilities. Through a fully operational secondary data center environment, DocMagic maintains a resilient infrastructure designed to protect critical mortgage operations and ensure uninterrupted service availability. While many industry leaders are recognized for products and customer-facing innovation, Jeremy’s impact is equally significant because he provides the technological backbone that makes innovation possible. His leadership ensures that DocMagic’s digital mortgage solutions remain available, secure, and capable of supporting the mortgage industry’s continued transition toward more digital, automated, and efficient lending processes. Through operational excellence, technical expertise, and a commitment to continuous improvement, Jeremy has helped position both DocMagic and its lender clients for ongoing success in an increasingly digital marketplace.

Kyle Kehoe

EVP of Sales

ACES Quality Management

As mortgage origination volumes remained low for much of the past year, quality control became an increasingly direct driver of lenders’ profitability. With fewer new loans coming in, lenders had less room to absorb repurchase requests or hold defective loans they couldn’t sell or service. That discipline tends to erode fastest when margins are this thin. Kyle spent the year pushing lenders to keep investing in quality control instead of cutting back, and his sales team closed new business during this period with the 11th-largest bank in the U.S., the second-largest bank in Canada, the second-largest bank in Arkansas, the largest and second-largest credit unions in Florida and the largest credit union in Oregon. Comparing the same four quarters year over year, sales doubled. Kyle built the sales, sales engineering and inside sales functions responsible for that growth at ACES from scratch. Quality control’s impact extends well beyond ACES’s own client roster. Defects caught before close keep borrowers out of loans that are more likely to fail, and errors in servicing, loss mitigation and default disproportionately affect the most vulnerable borrowers. Repurchase risk is also priced into rates, so lower industry-wide defect rates reduce the cost of credit for borrowers, not just lenders’ margins. Kyle plans to apply the same targeted strategy in market segments where ACES has established a foothold but has not yet achieved the leadership position it holds elsewhere. ACES serves more than 70% of the top 20 independent mortgage lenders, 8 of the top 10 loan servicers, 14 of the top 30 banks, and 7 of the top 15 credit unions, as well as multiple state housing finance agencies, mortgage insurers, and a government-sponsored enterprise. His team will continue to use a consultative, thought-leadership-based sales approach to help lenders manage risk and improve quality. It will also guide lenders in using ACES AI tools to increase productivity, analyze data, and strengthen regulatory compliance. In addition, the team will promote ACES Population Testing, which evaluates a lender’s mortgage origination pipelines and servicing portfolios against its defined policies and identifies the records that warrant a reviewer’s attention. Together, the broad view of ACES Population Testing and the detailed view of ACES Quality Control will help lenders navigate the changing lending landscape. He will also continue investing in the sales, sales engineering and inside sales teams he built at ACES that supported this year’s growth.

Janet Newton

SVP, Division Operations

First American

Janet brings more than 25 years of mortgage experience to a role spanning Centralized Title and Settlement, Valuations and Appraisal, Foreclosure Services, and Quality Control. She leads these business lines with a clear understanding of how title policies, settlement services, valuation solutions, and post-closing quality control audits work together to support lenders nationwide. Janet’s leadership is distinguished by her ability to connect strategy with execution. She understands the complexity of the mortgage lifecycle, identifies where processes can work better, and builds practical, scalable solutions that improve both performance and the customer experience. She is especially effective at tailoring strategies to the specific needs of each lender. That combination of operational knowledge and customer focus allows her teams to deliver consistency without losing sight of the individual requirements, service expectations, and compliance obligations of their clients. One of the clearest examples is Janet’s leadership in centralizing the Valuations division. By creating a more unified operating model, she improved order acceptance rates by 20% and reduced turnaround times by 34%, or two business days. The value of that work goes beyond the metrics. Her centralization initiatives strengthened consistency, supported compliance, improved visibility, and created a more reliable experience for lenders and their customers. Janet’s influence is equally evident in the way she leads people. She creates a culture grounded in collaboration, accountability, inclusion, and continuous improvement. She encourages employees to take ownership, bring forward new ideas, and treat challenges as opportunities to learn. She now gives that investment back as a mentor and instructor in Women in Leadership and as a mentor to other women at First American through the SPARK development program. She has also helped extend Women in Leadership programming to India, bringing her passion for sparking confidence to colleagues beyond her immediate organization. Janet’s own strong work either inspires others to always maintain high standards and be generous with your time and expertise.

Derek Staley

VP of Account Management

LoanPASS

Over the past 12 months, Derek Staley has played a critical role in LoanPASS’s success by ensuring that rapid product innovation and customer growth are matched by an exceptional customer experience. As VP of Account Management, Derek leads with a hands-on approach to onboarding, implementation and ongoing support, helping lenders translate complex pricing, eligibility and workflow requirements into solutions their teams can confidently use and manage. His focus on accessibility, responsiveness and partnership has helped differentiate LoanPASS in a market where technology implementations can often be lengthy and difficult, contributing to the company being recognized by lenders with The Mortgage Collaborative’s Lenders’ Choice Award for Best Onboarding Process. Derek’s approach extends well beyond implementation; he and his team maintain close relationships with customers, proactively identify challenges, provide ongoing training and bring customer feedback back into the organization to help shape the product. By treating customer success as a long-term partnership rather than a support function, Derek has helped make service and onboarding a competitive advantage for LoanPASS and established a higher standard for how mortgage technology providers should support their customers. Derek Staley believes navigating the rapid changes taking place in mortgage lending requires more than introducing new technology; it requires ensuring lenders can successfully adopt, understand and continuously evolve with it. As LoanPASS expands its product suite with the highly anticipated LoanPASS AUS capabilities across pricing, eligibility and automated underwriting, Derek is focused on maintaining the high-touch customer experience that has become a key differentiator for the company. His approach is to work closely with customers from implementation forward, understand how their products and processes are changing, provide ongoing education and training, and ensure their feedback has a direct path back into LoanPASS’s product strategy. As lending becomes more complex across Non-QM, DSCR, business-purpose and other specialty products, and as AI and automation become more prevalent, Derek sees customer success as the bridge between innovation and actual business results. 

Kimberly Warnica

VP, Chief Marketing Officer

Sagent

In her time at Sagent — especially in the last 12 months — Kim Warnica has made an out-sized contribution to the company’s momentum as they modernize the servicing sector. As the firm’s first VP of Strategic Product Marketing, Kim made it her mission to work closely and collaborate with Product and Sales teams to develop Sagent’s technology messaging, ensuring to communicate value and resonate with the company’s current and prospective customers. Leveraging Sagent’s award-winning Marketing team, Kim led collaborative content-production efforts with a defining key result: Sagent’s technology is easier to understand and access for the people who need it the most. She brought clarity to Dara’s position, and it’s fueling broad adoption of the platform: Dara is one platform powering the entire servicing lifecycle, driving down costs, improving efficiency, and making the homeowner experience better nationwide. Kim understands that asking a servicer to replace the platform running its entire servicing operation begins with trust – so she leads with trust. She builds lasting relationships through transparency, reliability, and follow-through, investing in personal relationships with clients, partners, and her team. As Sagent’s Chief Marketing Officer, Kim’s example is reflected in the trust and confidence that define Sagent’s reputation in the industry. Beyond building Team Sagent’s presentation and expression, she executes Sagent’s stand-out moments: The creative, cohesive industry events for which Sagent is known, most importantly, the company’s annual customer summit, Ignite. Attendance has continually grown, and under Kim’s leadership, reached a record high in 2026. Sessions at the recent event — which Kim produced — unveiled Dara’s newest AI capabilities and placed Sagent leaders on a panel alongside Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, putting Sagent in front of more of their closest customers at a time than ever before. And it’s worth noting that Sagent’s customers serve one in every four mortgage dollars and nearly one in every five mortgage loans in America. Kim’s impact this past year has deepened beyond product messaging and event execution. She crafts the story, cultivates relationships, and builds the trust needed for an industry to shift from legacy technology onto a platform designed to be reliable and relevant for servicing demands of the future.