PROGRESS in Lending has recognized Stacy Mestayer, Voxtur’s Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel, as one of its 2023 most powerful women in fintech. Stacy and her fellow honorees are celebrated as forces in the Financial Services Fintech, having made considerable strides in reshaping the industry. These women are playing a pivotal role, not just influencers; they are leading the way.
Stacy Mestayer is a boss when it comes to navigating the nuances of mortgage technology. While she currently wears many hats as Chief Legal Officer of a publicly traded company, Mestayer is particularly passionate about using technology to solve the inefficiencies that plague mortgage lending processes and empowering the industry to become better for the benefit of the consumer.
As a founding executive at Voxtur who has led multiple business units, Mestayer has a deep understanding of the mortgage industry and the businesses that support it. Her particular combination of legal and business acumen has helped her successfully guide Voxtur through the complexities of the industry, enabling her to identify pain points that inspire innovation and effectuate change. For Mestayer, technology must be leveraged thoughtfully to achieve business efficiencies and consumer cost savings simultaneously. And that is the crux of what drives Mestayer – the desire to use technology to meaningfully impact the affordability of homeownership for consumers.
Most recently, Mestayer proved herself to be an influencer in the mortgage technology space by leading the charge for the development – and subsequent adoption by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the VA – of Attorney Opinion Letters (AOL) as an alternative to title insurance. The development of Voxtur AOL was a years-long passion project for Mestayer, culminating in a coordinated effort with the agencies to launch a full-coverage alternative product that is changing the mortgage landscape. Voxtur’s AOL program uses a patent-pending process that combines VoxturVerified data and technology with attorney work product and standalone insurance coverage. The Voxtur AOL platform allows lenders to place orders with ease and users to leverage sophisticated analytics and a streamlined workflow to create attorney opinion letters with accuracy and scale. A Voxtur AOL can immediately reduce closing costs for the consumer by 20-70%. That exemplifies exactly what Mestayer has set out to do in her career in real estate technology.
Technology has come a long way in the past several years, but according to Mestayer, the mortgage industry has been slow to adapt. Manual processes still drive many functions in the mortgage lending lifecycle. Of course, there are many reasons that people resist change, Mestayer says, but none of those reasons outweigh the need to create a better, more affordable experience for the consumer. Homeownership is the key to building wealth for many Americans and Mestayer believes we have the ability to make that a reality for more people, as long as we’re open to creating the change necessary to do it. Incorporating more targeted data analytics to drive automation and digitization creates efficiencies that directly reduce costs. As an industry, Mestayer believes we have to commit to passing those savings on to the consumer. To her, this is the first step to creating truly transformative change, and it is how technology will forever alter the financial services industry.