Powered by MOZAIQ’s Loan Assist platform, TLS scaled to more than $2 billion in monthly originations and became a top-five U.S. wholesale lender. TUCSON, Arizona, June 11, 2026 – MOZAIQ, a leader in delivering agentic mortgage AI solutions, today announced that its customer, The Loan Store (TLS), has been recognized by Celent as a winner of the 2026 Model Bank Award for Lending Innovation. Celent is a global research and advisory firm for the financial services industry. What the Celent Model Bank Award Recognizes Celent’s annual Model Bank Awards recognize best practices in the use of technology across areas critical to success in banking. Nominations are submitted by financial institutions and undergo a rigorous evaluation by Celent analysts. Submissions are judged on three core criteria: (1) demonstrable business benefits of live initiatives; (2) degree of innovation relative to the industry; and (3) technology and implementation excellence. “The Model Bank Awards recognize how mortgage lenders and banks are leveraging technology—and artificial intelligence in particular—to gain a competitive advantage in a tight market and position themselves to win at scale,” said Craig Focardi, CMB, Principal Analyst for Banking at Celent. “These financial institutions serve as examples of how to implement innovative AI solutions that have a strong, direct impact on business results. The entry from TLS demonstrated exactly that.” How The Loan Store scaled ~200x with agentic mortgage AI TLS earned the recognition for its incremental deployment of MOZAIQ’s Loan Assist platform, which applies agentic AI to automate loan setup and drive its income, credit, title, appraisal, and asset analyzers—autonomously extracting and validating data across loan documents and the LOS against configurable business rules. From $10M to $2B+ in monthly originations Over the past two years, this AI-driven automation–MOZAIQ’s Loan Assist platform–has helped TLS scale from roughly $10 million to more than $2 billion in monthly originations, reduce its cost per loan by up to 40%, and climb into the top five U.S. wholesale lenders. “We’re thrilled to have won the Celent Model Bank Award for Lending Innovation,” said Phil Shoemaker, CEO, TLS. “This award validates our strategy of investing in AI-driven innovation to focus on customer service, deliver superior efficiencies, and be the low-cost provider of mortgages in a competitive market. We’d also like to thank our partner MOZAIQ, which has been instrumental in enabling this transformation and setting us on the road to success.” “Congratulations to the entire team at The Loan Store,” said Francesco Paola, Chief Growth Officer, MOZAIQ. “TLS demonstrates what is possible with agentic mortgage AI—intelligent automation that delivers real business benefits. MOZAIQ is proud to have played a role in what TLS has achieved.” About The Loan Store, Inc. (TLS) TLS is a wholesale mortgage lender serving Wholesale Brokers and Non Delegated Correspondent partners exclusively. As a business to business lender, TLS is not consumer facing and originates solely through its loan originator partner network. Licensed in all 50 states, TLS offers a wide range of products from Agency to Non QM. Now ranked among the top five wholesale lenders in the U.S., TLS pairs deep wholesale channel experience with a commitment to efficiency, service, and being the low cost provider in a competitive market. Learn more at www.tlstpo.com. NMLS #1121650. About MOZAIQ MOZAIQ is the leader in Agentic Mortgage AI, automating end-to-end loan fulfillment for enterprise mortgage lenders. Founded in 2019 and headquartered in Tucson, Arizona, MOZAIQ blends deep mortgage industry experience with production-grade AI solutions. From loan setup through investor loan delivery, MOZAIQ covers the full lifecycle on one platform: one data layer, one orchestration engine, one integration with the LOS, one partner—a model that aligns its success with its clients’ and delivers business results for the nation’s largest lenders. Learn more at mozaiq.ai. Media Contacts MOZAIQ Francesco PaolaChief Growth Officer The Loan StoreBrenda PhillipsDirector of Marketing & Communications
Francesco Paola Named 2026 HousingWire Marketing Leader
MOZAIQ is pleased to announce that Francesco Paola, MOZAIQ’s Chief Growth Officer, has been selected as a 2026 Marketing Leader by HousingWire. He is one of 70 marketing professionals selected from a competitive field recognized for driving growth, strengthening brands, and shaping the future of housing. Francesco brings singular insight and knowledge to MOZAIQ. Over more than 25 years he has helped financial services enterprises adopt every wave of industry-disrupting technology—from client/server, to e-commerce, business process outsourcing, cloud computing, and now Agentic Mortgage AI. He understands the realities of enterprise technology adoption from the inside, and he channels that point of view into the simple narratives MOZAIQ shares with prospects and partners. Francesco has been a leader in cutting through the AI hype in mortgage and creating valuable real-world narratives that are helping lenders adopt agentic mortgage AI and achieve real business benefits. He has simplified the narrative by creating and launching the Agentic Mortgage AI category, authoring blog posts and a seminal white paper—The Guide to Adopting Agentic Mortgage AI—that educate the industry on adoption and benefits, and showing how lenders like The Loan Store, a MOZAIQ customer, are benefiting from it today. His insights drove the redesign and relaunch of the MOZAIQ website, which has been critical to growing the brand. We at MOZAIQ congratulate Francesco on this important recognition and look forward to the continued impact of his work in defining the Agentic Mortgage AI category. Ready to see what MOZAIQ can do for your operation? Schedule a conversation with our team. About MOZAIQ MOZAIQ is the leader in Agentic Mortgage AI, automating the loan fulfillment lifecycle for enterprise mortgage lenders through its Loan Assist platform.
