The 2026 Most Powerful Women In FinTech Award Winners Are …
In today’s hyper-connected world, organizations must constantly evolve to offer quick, convenient, and reliable service. The financial services industry is no exception. The rise of Innovative FinTech is a perfect example of how this new reality is reshaping the way we think. And women are playing a pivotal role. These women are not just influencers, they are leading the way. As such for the 8th year, PROGRESS in Lending is honoring The Most Powerful Women in FinTech today. Here are the top women that are reshaping Financial Services FinTech today listed in alphabetical order:
Jamaica Delmer
Vice President of Operations
First American
Jamaica Delmer is a transformative force within the FinTech ecosystem thanks to more than 20 years of deep, hands-on experience across lending, title, and mortgage servicing. As Vice President of Operations for Docutech, part of First American Mortgage Solutions and First American’s Lender Division, Jamaica plays a critical leadership role in advancing the technology-driven strategy. In this capacity, she is instrumental in managing and strengthening client and investor relationships, ensuring that innovative solutions are not only delivered, but fully realized in practice.
Throughout her career, Jamaica has consistently led large-scale operational transformations that bridge the gap between traditional mortgage processes and modern digital solutions. She has been a driving force behind initiatives that improve workflow efficiency, standardize processes, and elevate the overall customer experience. Her ability to translate complex operational challenges into streamlined, technology-enabled solutions has made her a trusted leader among clients, partners, and internal stakeholders alike. Jamaica’s leadership is defined by her commitment to consistency, scalability, and performance. She has successfully guided teams through periods of significant change, implementing process improvements that enhance both productivity and service delivery. At the same time, she has cultivated strong, enduring partnerships across the industry, ensuring that innovation is aligned with real-world needs. Her career reflects not only longevity in FinTech, but sustained impact, as she continues to shape how technology is integrated into the mortgage lifecycle.
Kayla Eames
Product Manager/Business Architect
Tavant
Kayla is a passionate leader who empowers others to reach their full potential. She has nearly 30 years of experience in the mortgage industry, having worked in different capacities for several mortgage companies including Service First Mortgage, Affiliated Mortgage Company and Supreme Lending. Her responsibilities ranged from managing the accounting department to loan training to developing specialized professional programs to educate individuals in mortgage lending to gain the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in the industry. For the past year and a half Kayla has been a Product Manager/Business Architect at Tavant which enables her to draw on her mortgage industry experience to drive innovation, create impact, and transform mortgage technology with its AI-powered TOUCHLESS Lending. One meaningful project was developing a Mortgage University program designed to help recruit and train individuals for specific roles within a mortgage company. Organizations were able to get new talent trained specifically for their internal policies, procedures, and risk appetite which helped to eliminate the retraining needed for those individuals to “unlearn” behaviors, policies, and procedures from other organizations. To ensure success of Mortgage University, there was an intricate recruiting process at multiple colleges/universities where Kayla identified and interviewed prospective candidates. It also included an 8-week training program for on all facets of the mortgage industry. At the end of the training program, trainees entered 2 weeks of on-the-job training in their respective departments before graduating and beginning their career.
Kayle shared, “This experience enabled me to grow professionally and develop the curriculum, timelines, and testing needed to ensure success. I now realize I was developing technology that could truly aid in the growth and development of individuals new to the banking or mortgage industry.” Another career highlight was creating a mortgage servicing department with a fellow peer for their organization. Neither of them had any direct experience in mortgage servicing, but after months of strategic planning, they successfully implemented an entirely new department and revenue stream to the organization. Kayla developed policies, procedures, as well as recruited, trained, and lead the Servicing Department team members. Additionally, she did all the GSE reporting as well as customer reporting and communication.
Amy Giacci
Housing Finance Agency (HFA) Relationship Manager
Down Payment Resource
Amy Giacci brings more than 25 years of mortgage and housing finance experience to her role at Down Payment Resource (DPR), with deep expertise spanning origination, underwriting, appraisal review, compliance, credit reporting and affordable lending programs. This full-lifecycle perspective allows her to meaningfully influence FinTech solutions that work in real-world lending environments.
Since joining DPR in 2021, Amy has played a hands-on role in the ongoing development and refinement of DPR’s technology platform. As a Down Payment Assistance (DPA) Program Specialist, she served as a subject matter expert on HFA and local program data, contributing to product strategy discussions, user acceptance testing, and workflow design to ensure new features aligned with lender operations, compliance requirements, and end-user needs. Her day-to-day work in the system enabled her to identify gaps, inefficiencies, and opportunities for improvement, directly informing platform enhancements.
Kathy Hancock
Co-Founder & CEO
Forta Solutions
Kathy Hancock is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Forta Solutions, a technology company focused on modernizing warehouse lending through its cloud-native platform, Agility. With deep expertise in mortgage finance and financial technology, Kathy has built her career at the intersection of lending operations, product innovation, and enterprise software delivery. At Forta, Kathy has led the vision, development, and rapid scaling of the Agility platform, a purpose-built solution designed to bring efficiency, transparency, and control to warehouse lenders and their originator partners. Under her leadership, the platform has successfully onboarded multiple financial institutions, facilitated billions in loan fundings, and become a trusted system for banks seeking to replace legacy infrastructure.
Kathy is known for her hands-on leadership style and ability to bridge the gap between complex financial workflows and scalable technology solutions. She works closely with clients, product teams, and engineering to ensure that Agility evolves in direct response to market needs—balancing innovation with the operational rigor required in highly regulated banking environments. Her experience spans platform design, large-scale implementations, client onboarding, and strategic partnerships. She has been instrumental in guiding financial institutions through transitions from legacy systems, while also shaping new product offerings such as collateral management and margin lending capabilities. Kathy’s leadership is grounded in a commitment to execution, accountability, and long-term partnership. She is focused on building Forta Solutions into a market leader in warehouse lending technology, with a vision to redefine how financial institutions operate through modern, secure, and scalable software.
Lorie Helms
COO
LauraMac
Lorie Helms has more than 25 years of experience leading technology innovation and digital transformation within the financial services and mortgage technology sectors. Throughout her career, she has held senior technology and operational leadership roles at organizations including LauraMac, Cherry Creek Mortgage, Covius, Allonhill, and Goldman Sachs, where she has consistently driven the development and modernization of critical lending and capital markets technology platforms. Currently serving as Chief Operating Officer at LauraMac, a SaaS provider supporting large institutional participants in the secondary mortgage market, Lorie oversees enterprise operations, product strategy, and platform implementations. In this role, she strengthened organizational structure and established a data-driven culture, earning recognition as a trusted resource among colleagues.
Under Lorie’s leadership, the company launched a successful enterprise solution for a leading GSE and implemented initiatives that enhanced productivity across the organization. She leads by example, inspiring teams to perform at their best while fostering a culture of accountability and continuous improvement. Known for her steady leadership, she effectively navigates client escalations, ensuring concerns are resolved and relationships remain strong. Her leadership has not only driven operational excellence but also strengthened cross-functional alignment and positioned the organization for sustained growth. As Chief Information Officer at Covius, Lorie led a large enterprise technology organization supporting seven divisions across servicing, origination fulfillment, title, due diligence, and document generation. During her tenure, she successfully supported multiple acquisitions and platform integrations while overseeing more than $40 million in technology spending and leading the modernization of key operational and client-facing systems. Earlier in her career, Lorie held technology leadership roles at Allonhill and Goldman Sachs, where she spearheaded the development of integrated mortgage and due diligence platforms and led large-scale migrations from legacy systems to modern technology architectures.
Kelli Himebaugh
EVP Sales & Strategy
LendingPad
Kelli Himebaugh is a distinguished leader in the FinTech and mortgage technology sectors, with over two decades of experience driving innovation and operational excellence. She began her career in the mortgage industry in 2003, following nearly 15 years in the factory-built homebuilding sector. In 2008, Kelli joined Mortgage Builder Software, where she played a pivotal role in the company’s rapid growth, focusing on sales, client development, and later serving as Corporate Vice President. Her leadership was instrumental during Mortgage Builder’s strategic acquisition in 2014, and she remained a key executive under new ownership. In 2016, Kelli joined VirPack as Director of National Sales and senior management team member, where she helped deliver advanced document management and workflow solutions to lenders nationwide. In 2020, after Mortgage Builder’s acquisition by Constellation Software, Kelli returned to lead the executive team, spearheading the company’s rebranding to Constellation Mortgage Solutions (CMS) and launching transformative initiatives, including the award-winning NOVA Loan Origination System (LOS).
Throughout her career, Kelli has consistently championed technology that enhances transparency, efficiency, and accessibility in the mortgage process. She has led teams in sales, marketing, professional services, and vendor relations, and is recognized as a multi-year recipient of the “Most Powerful Women in FinTech” award by Progress in Lending. Kelli’s leadership has been marked by her ability to build strong partnerships, foster innovation, and deliver solutions that empower lenders and improve the borrower experience. She is currently EVP Sales & Lending at LendingPad, continuing her legacy of advancing FinTech solutions for the industry.
Tina Kosur
Head of PMO
Blue Sage Solutions
With more than 25 years in mortgage lending and over two decades in IT project management, Tina Kosur brings a rare combination of deep domain expertise and technical execution to the FinTech space. Her career has been defined by leading complex, enterprise-scale technology initiatives that modernize lending operations and accelerate digital transformation. Since joining Blue Sage Solutions in 2020 as Head of PMO, Tina has led a fundamental reengineering of the company’s implementation model for its cloud-based loan origination system (LOS). Traditionally, enterprise LOS deployments take 12–18 months—often plagued by delays, cost overruns, and operational disruption. Tina challenged that paradigm. By introducing structured, repeatable implementation frameworks, tighter cross-functional alignment, and a disciplined yet flexible project governance model, she successfully reduced enterprise deployment timelines to just 6–9 months. She also helped pioneer an accelerated implementation approach that enables mid-market and growth-focused lenders to go live in as little as six months or less, dramatically improving time-to-value.
Over the past 18 months, Tina has overseen multiple large-scale deployments with minimal critical escalations, demonstrating not only operational excellence but also her ability to anticipate risks and proactively manage stakeholder expectations. Her work extends beyond delivery—she plays a strategic role in aligning product development, sales strategy, and client onboarding to ensure the platform evolves in lockstep with market demands. Earlier in her career, Tina built a foundation in mortgage operations and technology that informs her ability to bridge business and IT—a critical skill in FinTech. She understands both the complexity of lending workflows and the importance of scalable, modern infrastructure, making her uniquely effective in leading transformation initiatives that stick.
Melissa Kozicki
Director of Compliance
Mortgage Cadence
Melissa Kozicki brings deep and highly specialized FinTech experience rooted in the intersection of mortgage technology, regulatory compliance, and enterprise lending operations. Her career has been defined by working within the technology infrastructure that powers modern mortgage lending. Melissa plays a leadership role at Mortgage Cadence as Director of Compliance. In this capacity, she operates at the center of product, compliance, and client implementation, ensuring that complex regulatory requirements are translated into scalable, technology-enabled workflows for lenders across the country. Her work reflects a sophisticated understanding of how FinTech platforms must evolve alongside both regulation and innovation. She has been directly involved in guiding lenders through major technology-driven transitions, including the adoption of artificial intelligence in underwriting and operations, the integration of compliance monitoring tools, and the modernization of loan origination systems to handle increasing regulatory complexity.
Melissa’s FinTech expertise is particularly evident in her leadership around emerging risk areas tied to innovation. She has been at the forefront of helping organizations evaluate and implement AI responsibly within lending environments, addressing issues such as algorithmic bias, data privacy, and regulatory transparency. At the same time, she has helped shape internal and client-facing frameworks for managing compliance across rapidly expanding digital channels, including web-based consumer interactions, data tracking, and opt-out technologies. Beyond AI, her work spans critical industry initiatives tied to evolving credit models, appraisal modernization, and regulatory technology (“RegTech”) adoption. She has contributed to strategic discussions and operational planning around new credit scoring methodologies, appraisal data standardization efforts, and the integration of third-party compliance technologies, ensuring that lenders can adapt to change without disrupting production pipelines. Earlier in her career, Melissa gained hands-on experience working directly within lending environments before transitioning to the vendor side of the industry. This dual perspective allows her to bridge the gap between business needs and technical execution.
Rosa Mumm
SVP, Score Optimization
Xactus
Rosa Mumm leads Xactus’ Score Optimization organization as SVP, Score Optimization, where she is instrumental in building and operationalizing scoring tools aligned to the credit industry’s newest score models. She is the resident expert on how credit scores work today, across models, use cases, and regulatory constraints, and on how lenders can responsibly apply those scores to improve outcomes for both institutions and consumers. Rosa’s career has consistently focused on translating complex credit science into practical FinTech solutions, ensuring that innovation is both technically sound and operationally actionable.
Rosa Mumm sees FinTech as a critical bridge between advancing credit science and real-world financial decision-making. In her view, the future of financial services depends not just on new models or data, but on how effectively those innovations are implemented, accurately, transparently, and at scale, within lender operations. Rosa believes FinTech will continue to reshape financial services by enabling more precise risk assessment, expanding responsible access to credit, and modernizing how lenders adapt to evolving scoring models and regulatory expectations. She is particularly focused on ensuring that emerging credit technologies are explainable, operationally feasible, and aligned with consumer fairness. Through her leadership, Rosa emphasizes that true FinTech innovation is not about disruption for its own sake, but about building tools that lenders can trust, regulators can understand, and borrowers ultimately benefit from. Her work reflects a steady commitment to modernizing credit decisioning while maintaining accuracy, accountability, and integrity at the core of financial services.
Sarah Petteway-Dib
SVP, Product & Data Operations
Veros Real Estate Solutions (Veros)
Sarah Petteway-Dib brings 26+ years of transformative data leadership to FinTech. As SVP, Product and Data Operations at Veros, she created award-winning iVALUATION and leads cloud-native modernization as UAD 3.6 products roll out. At Black Knight, she drove the groundbreaking Data Hub project, integrating MSP, Empower, and public records, while pioneering innovations like Lien Alert. At Altisource, she built an enterprise data management cloud from scratch, increasing product velocity.
Sarah believes FinTech will reshape financial services by combining AI speed with human expertise. Virtual property inspections utilizing computer vision can replace lengthy manual processes with same-day turnarounds, potentially reducing loan closing cycles from weeks to days. This human-AI partnership uses AI for rapid data collection while preserving human judgment for problem-solving. Generative AI and MCP servers will synchronize workflows at scale, extracting insights quickly and delivering better outcomes.
Suzanne Powell
COO
LERETA
Suzanne Powell brings nearly three decades of hands-on FinTech experience across some of the most prominent organizations in financial services. Most recently, she serves as Chief Operating Officer at LERETA, having joined the company as its first-ever Chief Transformation Officer — a role created specifically to lead LERETA’s evolution into an AI-powered, data driven, and automation-first organization. In that capacity, she has focused on end-to-end process optimization, data transformation, and pursuing intelligent technologies including Generative AI, Agentic RPA, and Large Language Models to automate highly repeatable tasks and free human resources for more judgment-based work.
Prior to LERETA, Suzanne spent nearly seven years at Radian, where she chaired the Radian GenAI Steering Committee and held executive roles overseeing MI Operations and Loan Services, as well as Digital Client Experience. She led the build and adoption of Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR), Generative AI, Large Language Models (LLMs), and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to modernize mortgage underwriting, and default services. Prior to Radian, Suzanne served as Global Leader of Mortgage Services at Conduent, overseeing large-scale technology-enabled business process outsourcing within the mortgage sector. During her decade-plus tenure at IBM as a Partner in the Financial Services Sector and Business Transformation Executive, she advised major financial institutions on digital transformation, packaged software implementation, and process re-engineering — giving her broad exposure to enterprise FinTech solutions across the industry. Earlier in her career at First Union/Wachovia Corporation, she led mortgage operations teams through significant technology-driven process changes in Post-Closing and Mortgage Servicing functions. Across these roles, Suzanne has developed deep expertise in automation technologies, digital product design, compliance and risk systems, mobile and digital platforms, Big Data and analytics, GenAI, RPA, and blockchain.
Crystal Raines
Chief Compliance Officer
NewDay USA
Crystal Raines has spent nearly two decades at the intersection of mortgage technology, regulatory compliance and operational leadership. She is currently Chief Compliance Officer of NewDay USA, a national mortgage lender serving the veteran community, which is changing the way the mortgage industry supports veterans and service members. Raines joined NewDay USA in 2007 and has held progressively senior roles across the company’s most technically demanding functions, including Chief Credit Officer. With more than 20 years of experience in underwriting-focused operations, she is an FHA DE underwriter and holds VA automatic underwriting authority, credentials that reflect deep technical command of the regulatory and credit frameworks that govern mortgage lending.
Her career has been defined by the work that makes fintech innovation possible in a highly regulated industry: building and scaling the compliance infrastructure, operational controls and quality assurance systems that allow technology to move fast without creating risk. Her team is responsible for fulfilling all federal, state and agency disclosure requirements and managing regulatory implementation across NewDay USA’s lending operations. In 2025, Raines played a central role in the modernization of NewDay USA’s proprietary origination system, a technology overhaul designed to streamline how the company originates, underwrites and closes VA purchase loans. That platform enhancement laid the groundwork for the launch of NewDay Home Advantage, a first-of-its-kind homebuying solution that allows qualified veterans and service members to finance closing costs with an unsecured personal loan. The product addresses one of the most persistent barriers to veteran homeownership: the upfront cash gap. While veterans have access to VA home loans with no down payment required, many can’t buy a home because they don’t have the savings to cover up front closing costs. In its first quarter on the market, NewDay Home Advantage accounted for 20% of purchase pre-qualifications, a clear sign of product-market fit driven by the proprietary technology Crystal helped build and govern. Raines’ fintech experience is rooted in the operational and regulatory expertise required to turn technology into compliant, scalable financial products that serve a specific and underserved population. She represents a side of fintech leadership that often goes unrecognized: the leaders who ensure innovation actually works within the rules and actually reaches the people it’s designed to help.
Lisa Schreiber
SVP, Correspondent Lending
eRESI
During her 30+ years in mortgage, Lisa has led transformational platform development at American Brokers Conduit (EVP), Sprout Mortgage (EVP), and NewRez (SVP of Non-QM). Currently, as SVP Correspondent Lending at eRESI, she is integral to providing insights and vetting technologies essential to delivering a seamless seller experience, including exploring AI efficiencies while maintaining the human touch. Lisa is featured on many industry panels, discussing innovation, technology, and competitive strategy.
Lisa sees FinTech democratizing access to sophisticated tools for lenders of all sizes while serving borrowers underserved by traditional lending. Through AI and integrated platforms, technology will eliminate barriers to market participation. Most critically, she champions technology that amplifies human expertise rather than replacing it — combining automation with expert judgment to serve more people effectively while maintaining the personal touch that makes lending accessible.
Heather Zeller
SVP, Marketing
Veros Real Estate Solutions (Veros)
A strategic leader with 25+ years in financial tech and services, Heather Zeller orchestrates data-informed growth in mortgage and valuation. As SVP, Marketing at Veros and Valligent, she led 15+ next-gen launches and drives marketing AI integration. At Clear Capital, she was a key architect of product marketing, launching tech-enabled data collection and hybrid appraisals. Her background spans financial hedge analysis to leadership in mortgage and PACE financing, setting the benchmark for excellence.
She believes that FinTech is shifting the financial services industry from retrospective reporting to a predictive framework. By integrating AI-driven insights with modern valuation standards, we are enabling real-time risk assessment. This transition eliminates the valuation gap in the customer journey and empowers finance professionals to make proactive, data-informed decisions throughout the mortgage lifecycle. FinTech serves as the catalyst for a frictionless, data-informed mortgage journey.
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