Banco Popular de Puerto Rico

A twenty-five year veteran of the industry, Michael spent most of his career at Chevy Chase Bank, including ten years as director of its secondary marketing operation. His more recent experience was with HECM lending, as co-founder of a bank-owned firm that originated reverse mortgages through a network of community banks and credit unions. He just recently joined Ginnie Mae, where he is responsible for the management of its relationships with its issuers.

Kite joins Wingspan from Fannie Mae, where he spent three years as the MIS director, building out the Credit Performance Management reporting infrastructure. He began his career with Freddie Mac in 1984, where he spent 20 years in multiple technology roles, providing key resources for the GSEs’ tremendous growth in portfolio size and technological sophistication. Kite left Freddie Mac in 2005 to work for Resurgent Capital Services, a subsidiary of Sherman Financial, where he served as a senior director and led operations and analytic teams. Steve Horne, Wingspan Portfolio Advisors’ CEO, who was working for Resurgent at the time, was responsible for hiring E.J. Kite. “Five years later, we were successful in bringing E.J. to Wingspan,” says Horne, who founded the company in 2008. “We are experiencing exponential growth in the current environment of high defaults and the great interest in enhanced servicing solutions resulting from ‘Foreclosure-Gate’ and Dodd-Frank,” he notes. “The precision of the workflows we require means that information needs to be available to our people quickly and with great accuracy. That’s where E.J.’s talents and experience come into play,” Horne says. “We’ve been very technology focused since the start, and adding E.J. to our team will take us to even higher levels of technology sophistication.” Wingspan was named “Servicer of the Year” by Mortgage Technology magazine for 2009-2010 for its success with technology.Kite is highly experienced in creating infrastructure to manage large volumes of complex mortgage information and delivering it in highly useful form for finely directed applications, employing a methodology he calls the “Results-Oriented Approach.” Designed to achieve impressive results by integrating teams and aligning information and users with great precision, Kite feels his methodology is perfect for Wingspan’s very successful high-touch approach to extremely challenging borrower situations. “Wingspan Portfolio Advisors performs one of the most difficult tasks in the lending industry,” Kite says, “bringing borrowers back from the brink of foreclosure and restoring value to loans that were considered hopeless. I am excited about the challenge and committed to bringing everything I’ve learned in my 26 years of experience to this dynamic company.”

Jay Brinkmann retired as the chief economist of the Mortgage Bankers Association in 2014 and now resides in New Orleans.

Ms. Farwig joined the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) Division of Supervision and Consumer Protection in 1988 as a bank examiner in the Kansas City Region. She was subsequently promoted to Case Manager in the New York Regional Office in 1996. In 1999, Ms. Farwig was promoted to Assistant Regional Director for the Kansas City Region. On October 15, 2006, Ms. Farwig was appointed Associate Director for the Franchise and Asset Marketing Branch for the Division of Resolutions and Receiverships, Dallas, Texas. On December 31, 2010, Ms. Farwig was appointed Deputy Director for the Franchise and Asset Marketing for the Division of Resolutions and Receiverships in Washington, DC. The Deputy Director is responsible for overseeing the resolution of failing banks and the management and marketing of failed bank and thrift assets nationwide.Ms. Farwig participated in the 1997 Women's Executive Leadership Program and 2007 Federal Executive Institute’s Leadership for a Democratic Society program. She is a graduate of the Graduate School of Banking, Madison, Wisconsin, and holds business administration degrees in accounting and management from Rockhurst University, Kansas City, Missouri. Ms. Farwig obtained the Certified Regulatory Compliance Manager designation in 2006.

Armand brings over 22 years of venture capital, private equity and operational experience to Breakwater. Armand began his career with Berkshire Partners, a $6.5 billion leveraged buyout fund in Boston which specializes in later stage buyouts and recapitalizations. He then worked for Boston Capital Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm. That late and early stage finance experience subsequently led to various operational roles both as an entrepreneur running his own firm, and then as an executive helping to run various portfolio companies of the aforementioned investment firms with which he was affiliated. Subsequent to the successful sale of those companies, Armand, along with two additional partners, founded Hatch Ventures in 2005. As Managing Partner of Hatch, he made numerous investments into various early-stage, consumer facing technology companies. Armand graduated from Harvard with a BA in Modern European History in 1987.