Former Benchmark retail president Marty Preston has joined Rate’s profit and loss platform after evaluating more than 20 lenders, the company announced on Tuesday.
Preston moves to Rate from Benchmark, where he most recently served as president of retail and division president. At Benchmark, he grew his production team from about $200 million to more than $900 million in annual volume in roughly three years, according to the announcement.
His decision to join Rate follows what he described as a rigorous, methodical review process that weighed competitive pricing, underwriting consistency, technology infrastructure, relationship quality, scalable local marketing support and the ability to close loans. Rate ranked first across all criteria, Preston said.
“Profit and loss operators are looking for a partner that allows them to grow without giving up control and ownership,” Preston said in the company’s announcement. “At Rate, I found a platform that supports that model in a real way. You no longer have to choose between independence and scale. In fact, no other company came close to matching Rate’s technology, scale and closing power.”
Rate, a fintech-focused mortgage lender and one of the country’s top retail lenders by volume, has been positioning its profit and loss (P&L) platform as a destination for entrepreneurial branch and market leaders. The platform is designed to give operators autonomy over their P&L while leveraging Rate’s capital, technology and operations.
Preston has built and led a multi-branch P&L business that supports loan officers across diverse U.S. markets, the company said. His move underscores a broader migration of high-producing teams and regional leaders toward P&L operating models that blend independence with scaled infrastructure, a trend that has accelerated amid tighter margins and higher execution risk across the mortgage cycle.
According to the announcement, Preston concluded that Rate’s platform drove measurable improvements across the full origination cycle and could better support complex, multi-market lending scenarios than other lenders he evaluated. The company said what ultimately distinguished Rate was its emphasis on helping “entrepreneur-minded” leaders build durable, scalable businesses.
“Some companies simply don’t support strong, entrepreneurial leaders like they should. We, on the other hand, are entrepreneurs and therefore invest in other entrepreneurs to build their best, biggest and most profitable business possible,” Victor Ciardelli, CEO of Rate, said in the release. “Our platform is built to support operators who think and act like CEOs, and Marty is exactly that.”
“Marty embodies the entrepreneurial grit and leadership that has built Rate Companies to be one of the top retail lenders in the country,” Shant Banosian, president of Rate, said. “His prowess and mindset are the future of mortgage and is why we have invested in building an industry-leading platform and value proposition that gives profit and loss operators the competitive edge to win.”
This article was generated using HousingWire Automation and reviewed by a HousingWire editor before publication. The system helps convert company announcements and industry data into HousingWire-style news coverage.
