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Point: Strategic Hiring
Point hired Samuel Bjelac as head of wholesale to lead new third-party origination channel launch for home equity investment product
Source: HousingWire
The leadership read
Point's TPO launch is a distribution architecture decision, not simply a sales hire. Running direct origination and a broker channel simultaneously requires separate pricing logic, compliance documentation, and operational workflows—broker relationships carry disclosure obligations, compensation rules, and channel-conflict risks that direct lending does not. By standing up a wholesale desk, Point has committed to maintaining two parallel origination infrastructures and managing the legal and operational seams between them. This is one of 12 strategic-hiring signals we have tracked over the last 90 days across financial services channel expansion, though the related-signals set here is diffuse. The directly comparable move is GO Mortgage's TPO channel debut, which launched within days of Point's announcement on a new wholesale platform—two non-agency or alternative-product lenders opening broker distribution in the same week is a pattern worth noting. HEI and non-QM products share a common distribution challenge: broker education load is high because the product is non-standard, so channel-opening requires sustained field enablement, not just a rate sheet. Companies reaching this stage of channel expansion in alternative home-equity and non-agency lending consistently face rising demand for wholesale operations leadership, compliance and licensing management across broker-approval workflows, and commercial leaders who can run product training at scale for broker networks—skills distinct from the direct-to-consumer acquisition competencies that characterize most HEI incumbents.
Market context: Against a Talent Market Index of 100.3 (Neutral) (down 1 month-on-month), Americas is at easing (-1.8pts) on signal share.
Point: 0 signals in the last 90 days.
From the MitchelLake archive
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Where this lands in our work
- Executive Search →
Hiring at this level is the visible half of a search that started a quarter earlier.
- Executive Search — Americas →
Our Americas practice runs the searches behind signals like this one.
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