Following Nesto Group’s recent strategic equity investment through its CMLS subsidiary — a deal CMT reported last month — Maple Financial is looking to bring prime-lender discipline to the alternative space.
Founded by industry icon John Webster, who stepped out of retirement in 2023 to resurrect the brand he sold to Scotiabank in 2006, the company spent the last two years working with brokers and funding partners coast-to-coast to better understand their pain points.
“The consistent theme that we heard back from his broker partners that he’d worked with, in many cases for up to 30 years, was that they struggled most with the alternative lending piece,” says John’s son and Maple Financial president, Daniel Webster.
“We spent the better part of 18 months working with potential funding partners to try to deliver what we felt was a unique product shelf and bring our underwriting philosophy and model into this space,” he added.
Behind the deal: how Maple and CMLS aligned
It was during that process that Webster says he began speaking with CMLS Senior Vice President of Residential Andrew Gilmour about a partnership that would allow Maple to tap into CMLS’s institutional backbone and digital infrastructure.
“It accelerates the velocity for both organizations,” Gilmour says. “It takes a lot of time and investment to set up the technology and institutional relationships, so allowing Maple to bolt in is great, and we’ve acquired the expertise and experience and relationships that Maple provides.”
The deal, which closed on October 18, gives CMLS a minority interest in Maple Financial. While the two brands will continue to operate independently, Gilmour and Webster say the partnership will bring new products and services to market “in short order.”
“Andrew and I are working on several very exciting product enhancements behind the scenes that we expect to flow through over the next few months,” Webster says. “By Q1, we will have two to three new products on our shelf that expand the non-B-20 segment,” adds Gilmour.
The strategic investment is ultimately designed to solve the pain points the Websters identified in the alternative lending space, and an attempt to make the experience more akin to dealing with a traditional financial institution.
“The Tetris pieces just fit together,” adds Gilmour. “There are unique things that each of the two groups are bringing in, and it’s a case of one plus one equals five.”
Addressing broker pain points in the alternative space
In speaking with brokers, Webster says many complained that clients in the alternative space face inconsistent terms, hidden fees and tedious application requirements, often due to unreliable funding on the backend.
“It’s not as predictable for a broker as the prime segment is, where the rules are much more clearly defined in a credit box,” he says. “CMLS is a rated servicer and an NHA-approved lender, and that was a really unique point of differentiation, because these are institutionally funded alternative mortgages.”
That also means a Mortgage Agent Level 1 in Ontario, for example, can deal with institutionally-funded alternative mortgage programs without going through the traditional principal-broker oversight model.
Following this strategic investment deal, Webster says Maple can now offer a broader product suite to a broader array of alternative loan customer profiles.
“As soon as you step out of prime, we have a product offering and a swim lane for each borrower,” he says. “With us, you have a single submission; we’re going to adjudicate it starting stream, and if it can’t fit in our upstream programs, we shift it downstream into the product the best fit for that borrower.”
An alternative to traditional alternatives
In contrast to many MICs and private lenders that emphasize the underlying asset, Webster says Maple remains more focused on the borrower’s capacity and exit strategy, not just the property securing the loan.
“Even when we’re in our downstream programs at the end of the waterfall, that would be classified as more of a private offering, we’re still reviewing income on a detailed basis,” he says. “We are always interested in understanding the borrower’s capacity and their ability to repay, because we want to know if they’re going to have an exit strategy to graduate down the road, and I think that’s a big difference in approach in that space.”
Webster adds that the select group of high-producing brokers Maple has onboarded thus far appreciate having a one-stop shop for alternative loans, reducing the number of applications they need to submit for each client.
“CMLS brings all of that servicing expertise and that best-in-class approach to those partnerships, and in marriage with Nesto — which has an unbelievable tech stack — improves the efficiencies for our underwriters going forward,” Webster says. “That that institutional rigor is a big win for the alternative space.”
CMLS, for its part, will now be able to expand its presence in the broker channel and provide brokers with more product options.
“From a philosophical perspective, Maple and Seamless see this market the same way,” Gilmour says. “Providing that institutional rigor is about having a fair and equitable product that brokers can understand and stand behind with, with full knowledge of what they’re putting their client into.”
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Last modified: November 2, 2025