CMBs in Cairo: Friendship, Finance, and Cultural Exchange

Hello and welcome to CMB Connect, the podcast that takes you behind the designation. I'm your host, Val Buresch.

In this episode, we have a fascinating international story. We are rewinding to 2005, when three seasoned CMBs took on an unusual challenge: helping to establish a modern mortgage system in Egypt. To get the inside story, I sat down with Susheila Dhillon, Alan Fowler, and Brian Handal. They share their memories and insights, and I can't wait for you to hear them. Let's jump in.

Val: Welcome, everyone. I want to transport the listeners back in time. It is 2005 and our industry — the U.S. mortgage industry — is coming along, and the idea of going to Egypt is not on anyone's mind. I'd love for each of you to paint a picture: where were you in 2005, what city, what role, what were you doing, what were you thinking? Alan, let's start with you.

Alan: First, Val, thanks for having us. This is something the three of us love to talk about, so we appreciate the opportunity. In 2005, I was running my family's full-service mortgage company in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and my extracurricular activity was teaching the School of Mortgage Banking. I'd been a CMB for about 10 years and was doing a lot of teaching around the country. We were doing a lot of refinances in 2005 — that's where we were when the call came.

Val: So you were in Albuquerque, doing the family business, a world away from Cairo. What happened?

Alan: Jonathan Kemper from MBA called — he was the head of MBA at the time. We weren't close, so I wasn't expecting to hear from him. He said, "Would you do a special school for us?" I said, "Sure." He said, "In Cairo." I said, "The one in Egypt or Illinois?" He said, "No, the one in Egypt."

Val: Great story. Susheila, where were you in your career, and what was your gut reaction when this Egypt opportunity came across your desk?

Susheila: Thank you for asking that, Val, because it doesn't get asked much — it's always what did you do and how did you find it. But I was very excited. Jennifer Writings reached out to me. I had a consulting company, and Brian and I were working in D.C. for a company that was under receivership — we got them out of sanctions, which was good. Then I was asked to go to Egypt.

Here's the personal connection: in the mid-'80s, my dad had gone on a major USAID mission to Egypt to work on their public water systems. A couple years later, my brother — an engineer working for Westinghouse, now Northrop Grumman — was asked to help stand up mission systems as part of the peace accord between Egypt and Israel. So when they said, "Do you want to go to Egypt?" the first two calls I made were to my dad and my brother, and they were so excited. I was really looking forward to it.

Val: You were working in the American market but already had that connection to Egypt. Brian, complete the picture for us — what's your 2005 story?

Brian: Not nearly as exciting. I was running a mortgage company for a bank in San Diego — Silvergate Bank. I lived in Virginia; we had offices in Richmond and San Diego. Like Alan, I was also teaching a lot at the School of Mortgage Banking, and we were extremely busy in 2005 with refinances.

Alan and I knew each other a little from the school — we'd have a beer when one of us was coming through town — but that was about it. I didn't know Susheila at all.

Susheila: Neither did I. And if he had known me, he might have said no!

Alan: It's funny — I didn't know Alan until the day we showed up at MBA. Brian and I shared a best friend, Stephen Valladeras, but we weren't close. Twenty years later, though, we're best of friends. We're traveling together. We do a lot of our socializing with the three of us and our families.

Val: Beautiful. Let's get to the heart of the conversation — the why behind the Egypt project. Brian, can you give us the 30,000-foot view?

Brian: The MBA was enlisted by USAID to bring mortgage professionals to Egypt to talk about secondary markets and capital markets, because Egypt didn't have one. We were bringing our knowledge and expertise on U.S. capital markets to Egypt. This was 2005 — the go-go years for mortgage in the U.S., which of course changed pretty quickly in 2007 and 2008. The core question was: how do capital markets put money to work for investors and for the benefit of consumers and potential homeowners?

Alan: And to step back even further — in 2005, Egypt had just passed a law allowing mortgages for the first time. They had no experience with it. The reason they passed the law was that they were trying to build a middle class. They looked around the world to see who had succeeded, and every country that had succeeded had a vibrant housing market and a way to finance homes. They had no idea what to do, how to use the money, how to raise it — that was the impetus.

Val: If you were an Egyptian citizen at that time, what was your journey as a potential homebuyer?

Alan: Either you had the money to buy a house, or you didn't. People would delay their marriages — become engaged and wait years until they had saved enough to buy a home. Developers found a workaround: they'd allow you to pay over time, but they wouldn't start building until all the money was collected. So you'd pay for years, the developer would accumulate the funds, then start construction. It was a years-long process for anyone without family money.

Susheila: There was also a lot of owner financing. Banks could make loans sometimes, but typically the borrower had to hand over a full set of post-dated checks. And very frequently, at the end of the term, the seller would say, "I want more money — I'm not selling at the original price." Standardization was one of the things they were trying to achieve so that loans could be securitized and accessible to different classes.

Val: So the problem you were solving was: no active capital markets, no people with the skills to build that market, and no delivery system?

Alan/Brian: Exactly. They had a law that said, "Yes, you can do it," and really no idea where to go from there.

Val: So you fly to Cairo — how long were you there the first time?

Alan: The first trip was two weeks. I hadn't done a lot of international travel, so landing at the Cairo airport was definitely a cultural experience.

Brian: The MBA did a lot of work setting up the framework and logistics. They cautioned us on what to expect. But the one thing we found right away was that the people we'd be in class with could not have been nicer or more welcoming. That made the rest of the trip so much more relaxing.

Susheila: I'd actually been to Egypt before — my husband and I had visited when my dad and brother were stationed there. So I had some familiarity. Interestingly, before we arrived, Bob Anderman said, "Susheila's been there, she knows the language — let's have her do the introduction." And right before we got there, we were told: absolutely not. No woman could do that. So we flipped it to Alan or Brian.

I came prepared — I brought peanut butter and jelly, flour tortillas, and tuna because I was worried about getting sick. We stayed at a beautiful hotel on Zamalek, and it was our home away from home for two weeks.

Alan: One of my favorite early stories: Bob Anderman, who ran the Schools of Mortgage Banking for MBA, was a former school principal — very regimented, stopwatch in hand, everything starting and ending on time. The first day, we sent the class to lunch at noon and expected them back by 1:00. By 1:15, no one was in their seat. We went to find them — they still hadn't had their entrée. They were all having their communal lunch.

We quickly found out that being on time was not part of the culture — but relationships were. That lunch was the most important time of the day. To get them back on time, we started giving out quiz answers at the exact moment class was supposed to start. If you weren't there, you didn't get them. It worked remarkably well.

Val: How big was the class?

Alan: About a dozen people. The first week we taught that group, and then the second week we trained the trainers. They brought in another group, and our first students co-taught with us — they led, and we supported wherever needed.

Susheila: We had a translator who had to speak both Arabic and English — to translate for us so we could follow along, and to translate our additions for the students. We would get excited and talk fast, and she'd bang on the window: "Slow down! Slow down!" At one point I was so excited answering a question that I started walking — and the headphone cord yanked me backwards. That was a memorable moment.

Alan: The first group all spoke excellent English — that was actually a requirement for admission. And many of them had worked for American institutions like American Express and BFA, so they were familiar with U.S. business practices. That was a big help.

Val: It sounds like you really developed deep relationships — this was a life experience, not a 9-to-5 job.

Alan: Absolutely. We had Susheila, who has never met a stranger. She was building relationships with the hotel staff, with everyone. And we found out that was the key to our success. Most expats coming over were collecting their paycheck, seeing the pyramids, and getting out. We were different. We had families invite us into their homes. Our driver became a friend.

Susheila: There were two women who ended up running the largest mortgage companies in Egypt. They were missing from work for two days, and we asked where they were. Someone told us, "Oh, they're home preparing the meal for you on Friday." They'd been cooking for two days to host us for dinner.

Val: On the work front, did you ever hit a wall — a moment that felt really difficult?

Susheila: Two things stand out. Getting them back to class on time — either at 9:00 a.m. or after lunch — was a constant challenge. The other was Ramadan. We were there during Ramadan, and we probably shouldn't have been, but we'd been hired to come. They weren't allowed to eat while the sun was up. We'd quietly slip out to eat a little during the day, but the students were exhausted — they wouldn't start eating until sunset, and since it was summer, sunset wasn't until 10:00 p.m. Some of them were falling asleep in class. That was probably the most challenging part.

Val: How long did your involvement last overall?

Alan: Five years. And in 2010, the three of us spoke at a Euromoney conference that was televised in Cairo — a large audience, lots of translators. It was a great opportunity to showcase the work we'd done over five years.

Val: One thing I wanted to ask about — the content itself. U.S. mortgage is built on interest, principal, amortization. Did that resonate in Egypt, given Sharia law?

Brian: That's a great point. We learned pretty early on that we had to make some adjustments. We became PowerPoint experts on that trip — we had to constantly shift slides to be more culturally sensitive and to fit what they were trying to do. They couldn't charge interest under Sharia law, so they had to create a workaround.

Instead of a borrower going to a lender to finance a purchase, the seller would sell the house to the lender for, say, $100,000 — and the lender would sell it to the buyer for $200,000, with payments spread over 20 years. It worked out exactly the same as principal and interest, but they called it profit rather than interest. That's how they made it fit under Sharia law.

Susheila: We also used the phrase "best practices" a lot. We'd say: this is how it's done internationally. You'll need to figure out how to apply it here. And we successfully helped them create their first securitization while we were there — everything standardized enough to actually securitize. That was really exciting to be part of.

Brian: And we had to be very mindful of colloquialisms. Early on I was teaching about the secondary market and said, "If you don't do this right, you're going to lose your shirt." You could hear the air get sucked out of the room. We learned quickly to watch our idioms.

Val: Looking back from today — where do you see your lasting legacy in Egypt's housing finance system?

Brian: Honestly, shortly after we left, Mubarak resigned and was eventually jailed. The Arab Spring came in, and Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood took power. A lot of what we did was put on hold during that political transition.

Alan: One of the ironies is that because women had taken over the industry — our students, the two ladies who led the largest mortgage operations in the country — Morsi's government wasn't friendly to it. They didn't think it was proper for women to run the industry. A lot of the good work ended up on a shelf in a government agency that no longer exists. Their whole goal of building a middle class through home ownership was really derailed.

I hope and pray that someday they'll dust it off. I would love to be part of it if they ever revisit it. They have a tremendous opportunity.

Susheila: There's a story that captures where things stood. Our director, Manal, was showing us these placards on street signs all over the city — marketing that said, essentially, "Mortgage is available. Call us for information." But most of the people they were marketing to couldn't read. They were trying to do something right but hadn't thought it all the way through. That's the reality of how far there was still to go.

Val: How did this experience change each of you personally and professionally? Brian, let's start with you.

Brian: What struck me most was the zest for learning these people had. They desperately wanted to grow, and they wanted to teach and share the knowledge. I'm a teacher at heart, and seeing that embrace — that lasting impression — has never left me.

Susheila: On a professional level, going to Egypt gave us credibility back home in a way that was hard to anticipate. People would hear we'd trained in Egypt and it opened doors. But personally, I'd also say this — the CMB was the same way. Brian and Stephen Balladeras pushed me to earn it when I thought I didn't need it. The day I got my CMB, it was like a curtain opened. All these wonderful people were there saying, "How can I help you?" It truly changed my career. The Egypt experience did the same thing.

Alan: I still treat this as the highlight of my career. Three things stand out. First, these are my best friends. At the end of that first week, one of our new Egyptian trainers said, "You guys have been teaching together for years — we can't replicate that cohesiveness." And we looked at each other and said, "We met on the plane over here." They were shocked.

Second, I learned what relationships really mean. In the U.S., we're trained in "relationship selling" — but what that usually means is fake a relationship long enough to close the sale. In Egypt, relationships are real. That reframing has stayed with me.

Third — and this goes back to your question about the CMB — the reason they chose MBA was credibility. The reason they chose CMBs specifically was credibility of the designation. And the reason we were there for five years instead of just the original two-year contract was the relationships we built.

Val: Last question — if a similar opportunity came up tomorrow in another country, would you do it?

All three: Yes. Absolutely. Yes.

Susheila: Especially with these two. Although — the one time I traveled alone (Alan and Brian had left ahead of me, and I was by myself in Turkey where we'd been asked to give a presentation), my purse got stolen. I was stuck for 48 hours. If I hadn't gotten out when I did, Ramadan was starting and I would have been there for two more weeks. Very painful. So yes — I will go anywhere in the world with these two, but I have to travel with them.

Thank you so much for joining me today on CMB Connect. This was the first episode of Season 2, and what a way to start. I'll see you next time.

CMB Connect is produced by Val Buresch, 2024 Chairman of the CMB Society. To learn more about the Certified Mortgage Banker designation, visit the MBA's website.

‍