Better.com announced Thursday that it has hired Misti Snow as its new senior vice president of operations. Snow, who has more than 30 years of operations experience in the financial services industry, officially started her new role on Dec. 16.
In an exclusive interview with HousingWire, Snow said that her prior partnership and longstanding professional relationship with Better President Chad Smith was a draw for taking on the new role.
“He and I worked at LendingTree together, so the trust and working relationship that I have with Chad was the immediate draw to understand what the need was at Better, and that I could help and contribute,” she said.
In her new role, Snow will report directly to Smith and will have a team of direct reports under her. Snow said that she has watched Better grow over the years from a competitor’s perspective.
“So, prior to those conversations with Chad, I had watched Better as a competitor, and I learned about Tinman over that time period. And when Better reached $100 billion in loans originated through Tinman, I was confident that they were a really strong competitor in the marketplace,” she said.
“The biggest challenge in our industry is initial underwriting and review of files, and I believe that [Better] has really paved the way for innovation and true efficiency and just a superior customer experience in those areas,” she added. “And that was a big reason why I joined the team, is to be a part of that and help grow and improve that, and make Better better.”
Part of Snow’s new role will be helping to run Tinman, Better’s in-house loan platform.
“My scope will tie into everything responsible for the customer experience, and the majority of that does happen in the proprietary technology Tinman,” Snow explained. “And so my cross-functional operations team will work together to optimize the workflow in Tinman over time, to just ensure that we have continuous improvement and really start to scale that technology for growth in the future.”
Before joining Better, Snow founded the consultant agency GRITT. As a founding member of loanDepot, Snow was honored with the CEO’s Chairman Elite Award for demonstrating leadership excellence.
“I was tasked as employee No. 2 to start up and grow the business-to-business channel for loanDepot. And what that meant was we served wholesale and correspondent lenders through a business-to-business channel and were able to grow that channel significantly over a nine-year period,” Snow said.
Part of the change in jobs involves Snow packing up her things in San Diego and moving to New York, home of Better’s corporate headquarters.
“Meeting the executive team, especially out here in New York, was a big part of my decision to come here,” she said. “What I noticed in these conversations with executives, as we were deciding whether to bring me on, was the fact that we aligned on the mission of making homeownership simple.
“I always have had a tagline for my operations team: Keep it simple for the customer and keep it simple for us. And that mission is the same here at Better.”
