Mike Detwiler, Chief Executive Officer, Mortgage Cadence, Inc. – Greenwood Village, Colorado

Words that describe him: driven, leader, bridge-builder, disciplined, approachable

Mike Detwiler was a manufacturer first and a mortgage banking technology supplier second. So it's not surprising that his contributions to mortgage banking technology have arisen out of a desire to carve costs out of the process and automate as much of the mortgage process as possible.
"The more times people touch a product, the more costs, risks and chances for error you have, " he says. "The mortgage business is like the manufacturing business – you're manufacturing mortgages."

As chief executive of Mortgage Cadence, Detwiler built one of the new breed of LOS companies that is trying to usher enterprise lending solutions into the mortgage business.

An evangelizer about the need to automate the mortgage process, he's overcome more than his share of resistance.

"People are creatures of habit, and do things a certain way because they've
always been done that way," Detwiler says. "They love to touch paper, to have this confirmation form and the form that shows a fax is sent. It's hard to trust an application and a system, and that's a barrier to change." Yet his ability to draw relationships between manufacturing hard goods and manufacturing mortgages has expanded the way that some folks in the industry think.

Detwiler's a modest guy who attributes his success to finding and recruiting the best talent in the business. "It's really not about me. It's about everyone around me. We have, bar none, the best executive team in our space," he says.

When he's not automating workflow, Detwiler is a big outdoorsman. "We have 54 mountain peaks higher than 14,000 feet in Colorado," he says. "I've climbed 15 and have a goal to climb all of them before I go on to the next world."

When he's not climbing, he's usually riding his Harley FLHX Street Glide, fly fishing or hanging out with his wife, Christine, and their two teenage children.