The acquisition of UMortgage by NEXA Lending did more than combine two large broker organizations. It turned two of the channel’s most visible former rivals into equal partners.
In a podcast episode, hosted by MaxClass's Jeana Lanktree, UMortgage CEO Anthony Casa, NEXA CEO Mike Kortas, and NEXA National Director of Sales Todd Bitter explained how years of public friction gave way to a strategic partnership built around loan officer choice, transparency and technology.
“The fact that we built this partnership should be the biggest sign [that] people can evolve and people can change,'” Casa said.
From Rivals To Partners
Bitter began playing intermediary between Casa and Kortas in 2022, when both men were his friends but were not getting along. He urged them to end the public fighting and later raised the possibility of bringing their companies together after moving from UMortgage to NEXA.
Neither leader initially believed a partnership was realistic.
“I thought he was insane,” Casa said. “But once I got through my initial reaction, I just kind of quizzed Todd on like, all right, well, tell me where Mike’s head’s at.”
"I had this feeling that he was probably in the same space as me," Kortas said. "I just, I didn't want to hear about it anymore. I didn't want to fight about things anymore."
Casa compared his evolving relationship with Kortas to the rivalry between NBA legends Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, whose mutual respect eventually outlasted their competition.
“They hated each other,” Casa said. “They were competitive animals, and they became best friends for the rest of their lives. I think Mike and I have a lot of that situation … Once we start to look at each other’s souls, we’re like, ‘Man, you know what? We got a lot in common, man.’ We actually want to do big things and we’re competitive, so let’s try to do this together.”
Personal Change Preceded The Deal
The acquisition moved from an unlikely suggestion to a serious plan during Kortas and Casa’s first one-on-one conversation in years. When Bitter initially proposed bringing UMortgage into NEXA, Kortas told him he had “lost his mind,” while Casa viewed anything beyond ending their feud as “not even in the realm of possibility.” Once they spoke directly, however, they discovered an immediate rapport and shared competitive drive. Casa said it felt as though they had been “best friends for 20 years.”
That alignment quickly turned reconciliation into a business combination. Consistent with their shared instinct to “do it and do it now,” Kortas and Casa moved rapidly to put the deal together, introducing it internally within roughly a week.
Casa said sobriety has been a major part of his transformation, and said the experience allowed him to focus on his children, personal relationships, and repairing old conflicts.
He also acknowledged that his own public persona contributed to the hostility surrounding him, particularly during his time leading BRAWL and the Association of Independent Mortgage Experts.
“When I started BRAWL and AIME, I was a character. I took on a character role, and I had to be pretty tenacious and brash,” Casa said. “Wrangling 30,000 brokers is not fun. You got to keep people in line, and just getting their attention was hard, but that’s not an excuse. I would never do those things again.”
Casa argued that his past behavior should not obscure the changes both men have made. “What I think is missed by a lot of people is the open-mindedness to the evolution because Mike and I have changed,” he said.
Kortas described going through his own period of humbling and reflection. “I made a conscious decision to stop these public fightings and to think about what you’re going to say before you say it, both in person and online,” he said.
Those changes helped the leaders move past their rivalry, but employees who had spent years viewing the other company as an adversary still had to be persuaded.
“You have to surrender the ego,” Casa said. “You have to surrender your opposite view of why this isn’t going to work or why we can’t bring this together.”
Despite the history between the companies, Casa and Kortas said their cultures were aligned around accountability, the broker channel, and support for individual loan officers.
Kortas Gives Up CEO Title
Kortas said he plans to give up the CEO title and serve as an executive partner alongside Casa, placing both men in roles with the same title. He described executive partner as NEXA’s highest-ranking title and said the group advises the C-suite, determines who serves on the executive panel, and directs initiatives that corporate executives are responsible for carrying out.
“The executive partners are the biggest title that you can have at NEXA,” Kortas said. “The executive partners are the ones who advise the executive staff, the C-suite folks to do what they do. Now they have to go in and execute it for us.”
Kortas framed the leadership change as a decision affecting the combined organization’s loan officers and their families. He also presented the structure as a possible model for future broker combinations.
“This is so much bigger than us,” Kortas said. “We now, between us, we now have over 4,100 loan officers and their families who depend on Anthony and I to do the right thing for them moving forward. That doesn’t include our egos.”
A Platform Built Around Choice
Casa described the combined model as "a platform of optionality" rather than a retail operation. He and Kortas said loan officers can choose their loan origination system and place loans through either the wholesale broker or non-delegated correspondent channel.
"Loan officers choose everything here," Kortas said. "We simply give them the options of what to choose."
Kortas said the platform offers access to 311 investors without requiring originators to direct loans to a particular company. "Pick whichever one you want," he said. "You will never see me ask you to send that loan over there."
Casa said on-demand processing is intended to help originators compare lenders based on the borrower's needs rather than defaulting to the easiest operational option. Kortas also cited NEXA 100, purchase advice transparency, and revenue sharing as compensation options available through the platform.
Incoming brokerages can retain their brands through DBAs, he said, including UMortgage branches that want to continue using the UMortgage name. "Nothing changes in the UMortgage model," Kortas said. "They want to use UMortgage, they use it."
That optionality extends to the company's finances, Kortas said, which he described as debt-free and evaluated for profitability at the individual originator level rather than the corporate level. "Because our model simply works," Kortas said. "It runs lean. We have no debt. We do everything in cash format."
"Well, we have two rules at NEXA, but it's on the individual LO level: Be legal and then be profitable," he continued. "So we can help with the profitability at loan officer level. The profitability of a company doesn't matter to us because they're going to come into our system."
Under that approach, Kortas said, an incoming brokerage does not have to be profitable before joining NEXA. Its loan officers would move onto NEXA's operating model, although Kortas said the company would consider adopting another organization's model if it proved better.
