PEOPLE
CAREER PATH
CHANGING COURSE Despite his singular focus, Dong Lee never hesitated to alter his path when he needed to
Born in South Korea to a family who had experienced the privations of war, Lee was brought to Canada as a toddler. His family landed with $2,000 to their name; his parents studied English and worked menial jobs before ultimately opening a variety store “We were raised with an awareness of how lucky we were. A COMES TO lot of values were instilled in me from stories I had heard [of my CANADA parents’ suffering]”
1975
1996
REPLIES TO A FATEFUL REJECTION LETTER
The urge to thank a recruiter at TD Bank for her rejection letter led to a summer intern management trainee position, Lee’s first job at TD. That summer, he put together a proposal for Korean community banking that resonated with the expat community – and the bank “I was [Korean immigrants’] first banker when they landed; it built a lot of trust. When I officially graduated, I worked especially on that project”
2005
JOINS A STARTUP The relationships Lee forged while travelling for Scotia were pivotal in his decision to join a fledgling company in the broker space “I met and maintained good relationships with a lot of brokers; one started a brokerage [Mortgagebrokers.com] and invited me to join him. It was exciting and also very scary. In entrepreneurism the highs are high and the lows are low – we had a lot of highs and some moments where we almost went out of business”
1992
STUMBLES INTO BUSINESS Lee chose to study business at university at the urging of his older brother, rather than pursuing his initial choice of an education degree “My brother said I wouldn’t make money as a teacher and pushed me toward business. My grades were good enough to qualify for Queen’s – that’s how I stumbled across business. I went into the Queen’s Business School pretty naïvely”
1998
MOVES INTO MORTGAGES A move to CMHC marked a change in focus for Lee, who turned his attention to the broker channel. That was followed by a leap to Scotiabank, where he grew third-party mortgage origination business by more than $400 million “Three years in, I realized I had had enough of the sales side and moved into Scotia Mortgage Corp., delivering sales and marketing strategies for the alternate delivery channels. I developed the first version of the Scotia mortgage broker portal”
2010
ACQUIRES MORTGAGE ARCHITECTS
2016
ASCENDS TO THE TOP JOB When Albert Collu stepped down earlier this year, Lee took over as president of Mortgage Architects “I’ve never had an ego to think that I should be number one, but when the opportunity was offered to me, I made the decision that now is the time. I served as second in command for 11 years and worked with so many different presidents; now I think I’m in a position to lead this brokerage forward”
When Mortgagebrokers.com acquired Mortgage Architects, a brokerage almost three times its size, Lee made the decision to amalgamate the two into one, even though it meant dissolving the brand he had a hand in creating. At the time, it was the largest single brand transition in the industry
“We took in 250 brokers and did a rebrand. It was David swallowing Goliath. Three years later we did it again, amalgamating 500 Argentum brokers into the Mortgage Architects brand” www.mortgagebrokernews.ca
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