Jason Ellis doesn’t have any retirement plans, but the outgoing President and CEO of First National Financial has never put much effort into planning his career, so why start now?
“As little kids, some people dream of being firefighters, some people dream of being CEOs, but it was never anything I had ever contemplated or imagined doing,” he says. “It was more of a random path.”
After 22 years at First National — including three years as COO and four as CEO — that path will now take him in a new, as-yet-unknown direction following the announcement of Ellis’s retirement. He will step away from Canada’s largest non-bank mortgage finance company after a successor is named later this year.
The announcement comes just months after First National closed a $2.9 billion privatization agreement with Birch Hill Equity Partners and Brookfield Asset Management.
“It’s almost like a natural off-ramp,” Ellis tells Canadian Mortgage Trends from his office at First National’s Toronto headquarters. “There is a tremendous opportunity to grow First National from here, but for me it feels like an opportunity to step back.”
When Ellis joined First National in 2004 as director of capital markets, the company had just surpassed $10 billion in mortgages under administration. First National went public via an IPO two years later, in 2006, a move that was reversed in last year’s go‑private transaction.
Today, First National has over $165 billion in mortgages under administration, including a mix of single-family residential and commercial products. First National also provides outsourced mortgage underwriting services for several major banks.
A “random path“ to the mortgage industry
The Toronto native said he had no idea what he wanted to do as a kid, but had a cousin who was “in business” and seemed successful.
That inspired Ellis to pursue a Bachelor of Arts in business administration and management at Western University, followed immediately by an MBA at McMaster, one of the few programs that didn’t require prior work experience due to its co-op placement program.
“I must have written 100 letters to every bank, trust company, credit union and investment dealer you can think of seeing if I could get in there for a job for that last co-op session,” Ellis says. “I got one response, and it came from RBC Dominion Securities.”
During his co-op placement at the bank’s repo desk, Ellis says he made a name for himself as the “summer boy” who knew how to leverage Lotus 1-2-3, an early spreadsheet software that predated Microsoft Excel. “They mistakenly thought that I was some kind of prodigy, and offered me a full-time job,” Ellis says.
After graduating with an MBA in 1994, Ellis joined RBC Dominion Securities as a Fixed Income Trader in 1995, first in Toronto and then in New York City. After two years over the border, Ellis says he and his wife were looking to return to Canada with their newborn son, when one of his clients, Manulife Financial, offered him a job in asset liability management.
Ellis spent three years with Manulife before receiving a cold call from a recruiter in 2004. “He described this entrepreneurial private company with two primary shareholders, one of them was sort of the charismatic sales guy, which would have been Moray [Tawse], the other one’s the securitization and capital markets engineer, and that, of course, was Stephen Smith,” Ellis says, referring to the eventual First National co-founder.
At the time, Smith was looking for help managing First National’s capital markets business. “We knew some of the same people in the capital markets world, and we hit it off,” Ellis says of his first meeting with Smith.
“For my second interview, he suggested that we take it across the street to a bar called the Whistling Oyster,” he continued. “We had a couple of Coronas, and I signed my employment contract on the bar, thinking to myself, ‘this is going to be an okay place to work.’”
The off-handed comment that led to a promotion
One day, 14 years later, Ellis says Smith popped into his office to inform him that the leadership team had engaged a recruiter to start looking for the company’s first chief operating officer.
“In the moment, I don’t know what possessed me, but I just said to Stephen, ‘Oh, am I a candidate?’ He said, ‘oh, you want to be?’ and I said ‘sure,’” Ellis says. “I don’t know that he or Moray had even considered the possibility of promoting from within.”
Ellis suspects that there was a preferred external candidate who was unable to accept the role due to a contract entanglement with their former employer. Given that he was the only internal candidate, Ellis says he benefited from the support of his colleagues and the senior leadership team.
Ellis was elevated to the COO position in 2018 and added “president” to his title a year later, just before the onset of the pandemic.
“It was a very intense time for all of us, not just at First National, but everywhere, reimagining how we work with our stakeholders, our customers, our brokers and borrowers,” he says. “It was a really raw introduction to the role.”
Just as the chaos of the early pandemic subsided, however, First National faced new obstacles as interest rates dropped and mortgage volumes hit record highs, requiring the business to scale rapidly to meet demand.
“Thinking back on what I’m most proud of, it’s the resilience of the organization, the resilience of the business and the resilience of our customers, our borrowers, to weather extraordinary events,” Ellis says.
The next unwritten chapter
Now, Ellis says the industry is entering a new phase, one defined by AI and automation, which he believes has the potential to increase growth and expand margins without compromising service quality.
“We’re at this tipping point as it relates to AI and automation, and residential mortgage underwriting in particular really lends itself to these tools,” he says. “It’s very high-volume, it’s quite structured, aspects of it are very rules-based, and as a result, I think it really lends itself to benefiting from some of this evolving automation.”
Ellis is also bullish on the future of the broker channel as a greater share of customers — and especially first-time buyers — look for more personalized assistance while navigating a more complex and regulated market. “I think that the future for mortgage brokers is bright, with lots of room to continue growing in their share,” he says.
Ellis, however, believes the business would be better served by having a new leader at the helm through this next phase of growth.
“At this point, I have no explicit plans, but I also have no doubt that I will find lots of ways to stay busy,” he says of his retirement. “It has been a privilege and an honour to do this, but this isn’t something that I would want to do again in terms of the (CEO) role.”
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Last modified: March 19, 2026