Brian Martin is the Chief Operating Officer of Pine Canada Financial, a direct-to-consumer, digital-first mortgage lender. Pine has built its own software and created a consumer-centric digital experience for Canadian borrowers to apply for a mortgage in minutes, anywhere, at any time. Brian oversees the daily operations of the company and is directly responsible for Mortgage Operations, Finance, and People Ops. Brian designs and implements Pine’s business strategy, plans, and procedures. Brian sets comprehensive goals for performance and growth while building and promoting the company’s culture.
Most recently, Brian was Head of Business Development, Partnerships, and Corporate Development and was part of the Executive Leadership Team at Blend. Blend is a Silicon Valley enterprise software company that built a white-labeled digital consumer banking platform that initially focused on residential mortgage origination and expanded to include settlement services and additional lending consumer credit products (auto, credit card, personal loans, deposit account opening). Brian led a team of professionals focused on creating innovative partnerships in the lending and technology ecosystems, building new products and revenue streams, and exploring merger and acquisition opportunities. During his tenure, Brian helped create a homeowners insurance agency, led a $500mm acquisition of a title agency (Title365), contributed to revenues growing from $2mm to over $300mm, and was a key part of Blend’s IPO on the NYSE (Ticker: BLND).
Prior to Blend, Brian was at Bloomberg L. P. as a Market Specialist focused on equity derivatives and quantitative strategies. He has managed different alternative investment strategies and has spent much of his career on Wall Street. He was a Managing Partner and Founder of an equity derivative hedge fund – Spartus Capital. Previously, he was a Director at Citi where he held several positions. He was a senior member of the Equity and Derivative Trading Strategy team; Head of Small Cap Equity Trading; and was Head of the US Capital Structure Arbitrage proprietary investment group. For many years Brian was a convertible bond arbitrage Portfolio Manager at two different multi-billion-dollar hedge funds – Satellite Asset Management, and Tribeca Investments.
Brian has a Bachelor of Commerce from Queen’s University, Canada. Brian was born and raised in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He and his family currently live in Brooklyn, New York.
