Lester Dominick audited the predecessor to ICE’s MSP in the ’80s. Now his Jacksonville shop is betting that a life-of-loan platform on a single tech stack can compete with the big boys in LOS, servicing & beyond.
Editor’s Note: For this edition of Vendor Wars, I sat down w/ Lester Dominick & John McCrea of MortgageFlex Systems, a Jacksonville software shop that’s been at this since 1980 & just rebuilt its single-stack, life-of-loan platform from the ground up — its fourth full rewrite. MortgageFlex is the rare vendor that’s older than many of its competitors’ founders, & it’s betting on out-innovating larger rivals.
My goal w/ this series is to give readers fresh insight into the strategies vendors are using to claw market share. Want in on a future Vendor Wars? Email me.
Most people who run mortgage tech companies come up through sales. Lester Dominick came up through audit.
Dominick started at the CPA firm that’s now Ernst & Young (back when it was Arthur Young) where one of his first big clients was Computer Power Inc. (CPI), the servicing platform that, after seven or eight ownership changes, is now the ICE/Black Knight engine that dominates the industry. He was auditing the guts of the incumbent he now spends his days trying to beat back in the 1980s. “Became an expert accidentally, I guess,” he told me.
Dominick planned on law school after his CPA. Instead he got an MBA at USC, swore off big firms, & started his own mortgage consultancy. Betting the future was the PC, not the mainframe, he & his team built origination systems part-time until it became a full-time software business, shipping one of the first microcomputer-based LOSs back in 1984.
“Most of the people that run these tech companies come from a sales environment,” Dominick said. “I’m coming more from accounting, finance, audit, controls. Compliance has always been baked into everything I’ve ever done, & that reflects itself in the systems.”
Read more:
https://www.themortgagescoop.com/p/vendor-wars-mortgageflex#mortgage-flex