Va. Lender Hires Execs In Post-Deal Rebuilding Of Its Top Management

Charter One Mortgage Corp., the newly acquired Richmond, Va., unit of Charter One Financial, Cleveland, continues to add to the ranks of its senior managers.

The mortgage company has hired Pamela F. Dunn, 32, from Associates National Mortgage Corp. to head its nascent telemarketing division.

Dwayne L. Cook, 30, was hired as chief financial officer. Mr. Cook was formerly a senior manager at KPMG Peat Marwick and got to know the mortgage bank well as head of the Peat Marwick team that audited it for many years.

With these hirings, "some of the critical holes have been plugged," said Richard D. Powers, president and chief executive officer of Charter One Mortgage, in an interview last week.

Mr. Powers has systematically rebuilt top management at Charter One Mortgage in the eight months since the Cleveland thrift bought it. Formerly known as American Home Funding, it was a subsidiary of Rochester Community Savings Bank, which was sold to Charter One last October.

In February, Mr. Powers, who also supervises mortgage lending at the thrift parent, hired Joel T. VanRyckeghen from HomeSide Lending Inc. to be chief operating officer of Charter One Mortgage.

Mr. Powers said Ms. Dunn's role is to develop telemarketing into a major source of originations.

"It's a channel that has not gotten a lot of resources in the past," Mr. Powers said, but "it's one that I expect to grow in a significant way." Charter One Mortgage aims to originate a couple of hundred million dollars of loans through the channel by yearend and boost telemarketing originations to $1 billion in three years.

Ms. Dunn, who supervises 12 loan processors, said her first concern is that the processes in place support a quick rise in loan volume.

She said the group will first try to sell refinancing and purchase loans to customers whose mortgages Charter One already services. The group also aims to cross-sell to customers who have Charter One checking accounts and other loans and to pull in new customers through affinity accounts and corporate relocation contracts.

As vice president of production at Associates National Mortgage Corp., Irving, Tex., Ms. Dunn ran the company's prime mortgage business, made up largely of loans to relocating government and corporate employees.

Mr. Cook will be "the point person in managing our costs and revenues," Mr. Powers said.

As a company rethinks its business methods, it is important to know how the changes affect the bottom line, Mr. Cook said. "A lot of the time companies don't have all the financial information to make those decisions."

The first step is to understand the profitability of different products and how much time it takes to do things such as process loans and "what that means in dollars and cents," he said. "I want to codify that information and make sure it is communicated daily" to managers.

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