Lori Brewer, Founder and president, LBA Ware

Lori Brewer of LBA Ware is part of this year's Mortgage Professional America Hot 100

Lori Brewer, Founder and president, LBA Ware
http://lbaware.com/
Founder and president
LBA Ware

Lori Brewer founded LBA Ware in 2008 to transform mortgage back-office operations through solutions that leverage automation and system integration. LBA Ware’s flagship product is CompenSafe, the industry’s first cloud-based software for automated LO commission and bonus compensation calculations, designed to help lenders maintain compliance while increasing productivity and profitability. 

Brewer set out to build CompenSafe at a time when most lenders were still using spreadsheets to manage the complicated calculus involved in LO compensation. Relying on her 10 years of experience in mortgage and IT operations, along with feedback from branch managers, regional VPs, high producers, and HR and payroll administrators, Brewer designed an intuitive platform that enables managers to tie compensation and bonuses directly to specific loan production and performance activity.

Under Brewer’s leadership, CompenSafe increased its client base by more than 300% between 2014 and 2016; as of October 2017, CompenSafe had nearly doubled the previous year’s output, clocking more than $686 million in compensation for 320,000 loans totaling more than $73 billion. Nearly 8,500 unique compensation plans were created and managed within the system last year; in total, CompenSafe has calculated more than $1 billion in compensation.

“Lori Brewer exemplifies what it means to be an entrepreneur and an innovator,” a colleague says. “She founded LBA Ware ... in the middle of an economic downturn, not to mention the mortgage crisis, and was able to do so without any outside funding.” 

Recognizing her leadership and the potential of her company to disrupt the mortgage industry, Georgia’s tech incubator, the Advanced Technology Development Center, has accepted LBA Ware into its signature portfolio. Not content to rest on her laurels, Brewer is constantly looking for ways to improve CompenSafe. Her next project is to add benchmarking data to the platform in order to enable lenders to aggregate their production and compensation data to determine profitability at a branch and staff level.