Big Plans for Acqura.

Dallas-In the mortgage business timing can be everything. Take the case of Amy Brandt, the former CEO of WMC Mortgage, once one of the nationas largest subprime wholesalers.

Ms. Brandt left WMC in late 2006, while the company was still riding high and earning money. In 2004, General Electric had bought the lender when it appeared that subprime and nonprime were the future of residential finance.

But Ms. Brandt walked away when her contract up was up. Executives who worked with her said being owned by a large conglomerate that liked to call the shots just didnat sit well with the WMC CEO. (She had worked her way to the top at WMC, starting out as an account executive, moving to branch manager and then EVP of production.)

Less than two years after her departure, Burbank, Calif.-based WMC is no more, yet another victim of the subprime industryas historic collapse. GE lost roughly $1 billion on its investment in the non-depository.

Now Ms. Brandt is back as the CEO of both a hedge fund, Vantium Capital, and its newly acquired specialty servicing division, Dallas-based Acqura Loan Services.

The way Ms. Brandt sees it, Acqura - which presently services about $100 million in mortgages - is getting in on the ground floor of a booming industry: the subservicing of subprime and nonprime mortgages for hedge funds and investment bankers, the latter of which supplied massive amounts of liquidity to non-banks lenders. The result: more than $2 trillion in A- to D loans were originated during the boom years of 2002 to 2007. About one-third of these loans are now delinquent.

aWithin 18 to 24 months we hope to be servicing $5 billion to $10 billion in loans,a Ms. Brandt said in an interview with Mortgage Servicing News.