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MortgagePoint » Your Trusted Source for Mortgage Banking and Servicing News 56 October 2023 F E A T U R E S T O R Y CHALLENGING, INSPIRING, AND SUPPORTING MortgagePoint invites you to get to know this year's Five Star Lifetime Achievement Award recipient: Kim Yowell, EVP of Servicing for Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation. B y D E M E T R I A L E S T E R & DAV I D W H A R T O N T he Keys for Life Gala is a Five Star Conference tradition for several reasons, but one of the most anticipated is the annual presentation of Five Star's Lifetime Achievement (LTA) Award. As part of the Keys for Life Gala and this year's Five Star Conference & Expo, the 2023 LTA Award was presented to Kim Yowell, EVP of Ser- vicing at Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation, who was honored for her three decades of outstanding performance and contributions to the industry. Yowell has over 30 years of man- agement experience in the financial services industry. She started her career in the accounting and finance side of the mortgage business and has been focused on servicing and operations for the past 20 years. She has held key leadership positions at CTX Mortgage Company, First Horizon Home Loans, Metlife Bank, and BoK Financial. As the Five Star team prepared for the ceremony, we spoke with both Yowell and several of her industry colleagues about her career, the most important lessons she's learned along and way, and her experiences within the industry— both as a woman and in leadership. Yowell has also served on the Freddie Mac Advisory Board, the Mortgage Banker's Association (MBA) Loan Administration Committee, the Black Knight Servicer Advisory Board, and the Fiserv Servicing Advisory Board. She is a member of Five Star's National Mortgage Servicing Association and serves on the Texas Mortgage Bankers Association Board and the MortgagePoint Editorial Advisory Board. A Certified Public Accountant (CPA), she holds a BBA in accounting from Texas Christian University. David Wharton, Five Star Edi- tor-in-Chief, sat down with the 2023 Lifetime Achievement Award Winner for a Q&A to further discuss her career and her legacy in the aftermath of the award. Q: Describe your day-to-day responsibilities as EVP of Servicing at Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation. What does a typical day look like, if there is such a thing? My day-to-day responsibilities include managing a highly skilled team, delivering a compliant, quality-efficient interim servicing operation, minimizing risks, overseeing subservicer and vendor performance, and delighting our custom- ers and loan officers. Q: How have your past experiences enriched and informed your current role with Fairway? Interim servicers face unique demands and challenges that are largely unrecog- nized and unappreciated. I have benefited in this role by leveraging best practices, processes, vendor relationships, and strong talent stemming from my prior third-party servicing experience. Q: What would you consider your greatest career accomplishments to date? I'm proud to have been part of many large, complex, and challenging (some- times harrowing) initiatives—systems conversions, acquisitions, bulk loan sales, development projects, company mergers, department buildouts, etc. As boring as it may sound, I think my greatest accom- plishment has been achieving consistently high quality and integrity from the teams and operations I have been responsible for. I receive fulfillment and satisfaction with high scores, excellent ratings, satis- fied customers, and "no findings." Q: What are the biggest challenges you have faced during your career, and how did you work to overcome them? We all tend to think that nobody can do a task as well as we can ourselves. Starting out, I worked excessive hours as I tried to do it all or control it all myself. As you progress and advance in your career, and in the scope of your responsibilities, you learn that you cannot do everything, know everything, or be an expert at everything. In fact, you are humbled to learn that many people are much better than you at most things. Those are the people you want on your team. To survive, I learned to plan, to delegate, to manage, to listen, and to "trust but verify."