Lionel Urban.

Lionel is responsible for guiding NavPros’ strategic vision as well as the development and scalability of its nationwide lending platform. He has more than 30 years of mortgage banking experience and is a highly regarded expert in loan origination, mortgage operations, secondary marketing, and compliance within banks, credit unions, and independent mortgage bankers.

Lionel previously served as vice president of product management at FISERV — one of the largest financial technology providers in the industry, where the work involved building software products that thousands of financial institutions rely on day-to-day. The experience shaped how he thinks about scale: technology that works for one lender well doesn’t automatically work for hundreds of lenders, and the gap between those two states is where most fintech companies fail.

He is the founder of PCLender, one of the industry’s top-five loan origination system (LOS) providers. Building a top-five LOS in an industry with very high switching costs and very long sales cycles requires both the technical chops to make the software work and the operational understanding to make it fit how mortgages actually get originated. Lionel’s career has been spent at exactly that intersection.

At LHFS, that experience now powers NavPros — the financial institutions division that provides white-label LOS technology and back-office services to banks, credit unions, and other mortgage lenders nationwide. The business is structurally different from the retail business Tony Wicke runs, with different customers, different sales cycles, and different operational rhythms. But it’s built on the same foundational LHFS principle: technology should serve the relationship, not replace it.