Patty Arvielo and her husband, Rick, built the nation’s largest private, Latina-owned mortgage company, New American Funding. Arvielo has landed innumerable nods for her accomplishments in finance: Forbes’ “50 Over 50”; Ernst & Young’s “Entrepreneur of the Year”; a seat on the board of Century Communities, one of the country’s largest homebuilders; and a business school at Vanguard University that, when it was named in her honor in 2023, became the first in the country named after a Latina.
The founder and entrepreneur will bring her Thrive and Lead mentorship program to the Bellagio at AVANCE Global this September. Thrive and Lead convenes leaders focused on the future of Latino economic power. Being part of a conference is new ground for Arvielo.
“After decades in finance, I’ve learned to invest my energy on what lasts,” the CEO says. “I coined the word ‘fluencer’ for a reason. I’m not here to build a stage for people performing success. I’m here to build with women who have lived it and to teach each other what they wish they would have learned along the way. That’s what Thrive and Lead is.”
The program’s early momentum has already surprised her. Support for a second year arrived before the first convening. For Arvielo, the program is built on a women-centered agenda that draws on relationships formed over years of mentorship, entrepreneurship, and community leadership. She is co-hosting with Vanessa Santos, her former CEO at #WeAllGrow Latina.
The roster is composed, Arvielo stresses, of women they know personally, have mentored, or have followed closely, like journalist and television host Gaby Natale and sportscaster MJ Acosta-Ruiz. The high-profile names are nice, but Arvielo wants the program to be grounded in hard-earned experience, not an event for the Gram.
“In the land of influencers, I have coined the term ‘fluencer,’ meaning fake influencer,” she says. “We’re all getting a lot of narratives that simply aren’t grounded in reality.”
Thrive and Lead, she says, will offer real conversations with women whose stories include setbacks, difficult decisions, and evidence of sustained achievement. Some sessions will even be phone-free, a deliberate effort to create space for genuine connection, not content creation.
Arvielo’s own credentials give the premise weight. She began working in the mortgage industry at 16 and, in 2003, co-founded New American Funding with her husband, Rick. The company has grown into the country’s largest woman- and Latina-owned mortgage lender, with more than 300 locations and more than 5,000 employees nationwide. Its scale has made Arvielo one of the most influential Latina leaders in financial services.
The leader’s willingness to change — particularly amid AI’s disruption of mortgage technology — is central to the message she expects to share at AVANCE. When AI began to reshape the mortgage business, Arvielo responded with frank pragmatism.
Rather than defend old decisions and technical investments out of pride, Arvielo says, the company shelved some of them and moved to embrace an AI-driven mortgage-processing platform developed by a young designer.
Arvielo describes fear as a useful instinct, one that prompts leaders to protect what they have built and to abandon costly past investments when the market changes.
“I’m not bummed that fear motivates me,” the entrepreneur says. “Fear kind of drives me to protect either my family or the entity that we’ve built. You just have to learn to harness it.”
