Faith Schwartz
Vice-Chancellor
Founder & CEO, Housing Finance Strategies
Recognized and accomplished industry leader, Faith Schwartz founded Housing Finance Strategies in 2016 to leverage her decades of industry leadership and mortgage experience to modernize the housing finance system. Faith’s work and passion for building out the future of mortgage finance includes advisory services, board memberships and strategy roles in growing organizations. Housing Finance Strategies clients include publicly traded financial services firms, trade associations, Fintechs and start-ups.
In times of crisis, Faith has been sought out to create nonpartisan solutions for challenging issues. Faith spearheaded the development and roll-out of the NOT OK? THAT’s OK COVID-19 mortgage forbearance borrower awareness campaign. This initiative included more than 60 mortgage servicers and over 120 non-profit housing counselors. Similarly in 2008, government, industry and trade associations rallied around Faith’s HOPE NOW alliance that saved millions of American families from losing their homes to foreclosure. Throughout her leadership of HOPE NOW, Schwartz testified before Congress, the Federal Reserve and was a frequent spokesperson on TV, Radio and in print media.
Thematic centerpieces of Faith’s current work include entreating private capital tools and strategies for the mortgage process of tomorrow while fostering diverse and inclusive business practices that advance industry objectives such as eradicating bias from the appraisal process. Schwartz shares her vision on these topics with numerous industry audiences, including HousingWire’s annual conference.
Through service on the Consumer Advisory Board of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Faith offers strategic insight on leading asset, income and employment verification services that leverage authentic source data to transform and streamline mortgage origination as well as focus areas in the important domain of climate risk. Similarly on the board of Class Valuation, Faith is working with federal agencies, government insurers, rating agencies and private mortgage insurers on appraisal innovation though authentic source data collected via 3D Scanning.
Concurrently, and in a complementary effort to promote and mentor women executives in housing policy and mortgage, Schwartz manages the delivery of the HousingDC conference franchise on an annual basis. This year, Faith managed all aspects of #HousingDC22 on September 27-28, 2022 in a virtual setting featuring Washington, DC regulators, legislators, trade associations, rating agencies, mortgage companies, innovative technology firms, political analysts and authors who shared insight on the Biden Administration’s actions to-date and 2023 plans for housing policy. Importantly, the #HousingDC franchise has benefited the Washington, DC based Women in Housing & Finance Foundation.
Earlier in her career, Faith held leadership roles at TMC mortgage, CoreLogic, Freddie Mac, H&R Block and Option One. She started her career at Dominion Bancshares Mortgage Company as Vice President of Capital Markets and Wholesale Lending.
Today, Schwartz sits on the following Boards: CFPB Consumer Advisory Board, Redwood Trust, QC Ally, Gateway First Bank, RiskSpan, Inc., Class Valuation and Operation Homefront. Notably, Faith received the Housing Wire Vanguard award and was recognized as one of Mortgage Banking’s most powerful women from National Mortgage Magazine. Other awards include HousingWire’s Women of Influence, a leadership star award from the Financial Services Roundtable for leading HOPE NOW and a lifetime achievement award from the Five Star Institute.
Faith holds a BSBA in Accounting from Shippensburg State College and an MBA with a Finance concentration from the University of Pittsburgh. She lives in Austin, TX and Washington, DC with her husband and three children.