NEXA Mortgage rebrands to NEXA Lending, but it’s not a pivot to retail

Mike Kortas wanted to be clear as he announced the company’s rebrand from the stage at NEXA Fest 2025: the company is not going into retail. The name change — from NEXA Mortgage to NEXA Lending — could seem like the prelude to lending in a new channel, but Kortas said it was actually a sign that NEXA was growing up.

“NEXA was born in the days of BRAWL and nobody was more of a pit bull than me, saying ‘brokers are better.’” Kortas said. “But today, those words are divisive and that draws a line in the sand where retail will not ever listen to you.”

Instead, Kortas hopes to lure large retail producers to the wholesale side by emphasizing the biggest advantage for both consumers and the loan officers: wholesale pricing.

“We are a non-delegated correspondent lender, funding 60% with our own warehouse lines. We have the same mission as retail LOs — to serve borrowers — but we can serve them with wholesale rates,” Kortas said. “Retail or wholesale, it’s the same FHA loan… it’s just a matter of who’s making more money on the margin in between.”

NEXA Lending can offer LOs 100% commission because of the way the company is structured, Kortas said, noting that NEXA has “no middle management and no debt.” And as a non-delegated correspondent lender, NEXA Lending avoids the risk associated with making loan decisions, while benefiting from choosing the underwriters it wants to work with.

“I get to choose which underwriting to group to work with because we can take it to someone else and we don’t have to wait TRID days. So I would argue we have more control because we’re not defined by one underwriter,” Kortas said. “We use the same underwriters retail LOs do, but we don’t have to take the risk. The workflow is ours, the funding is ours. We have choice plus price.”

As part of the rebrand, the NEXA Lending logo and other assets will be in black and white, symbolizing the company’s transparency, Kortas said. “Transparency is a key factor in everything I have ever done.”

The future is wholesale, Kortas said, and bringing in more retail LOs to grow the channel means communicating in a different way.

“Stop with divisive conversations — it doesn’t help us anymore. We already got all the people to wholesale that liked that, now we need to get those that don’t like it, the very large producers. This is NEXA growing up a little bit — me included.”