non-parseable settings in maven

I saw a very odd error while building our project with maven.

 
[ERROR] Error executing Maven.
[ERROR] 1 problem was encountered while building the effective settings
[FATAL] Non-parseable settings C:\Program Files
(x86)\Apache\apache-maven-3.0.5\conf\settings.xml: entity reference
names can not start with character '<' (position: START_TAG seen
...myPassword<... @12:33)  @ C:\Program Files
(x86)\Apache\apache-maven-3.0.5\conf\settings.xml, line 12, column 33

Nothing in the project changed so it shouldn't spit me an error. Then I saw the error line and remembered that I changed my corporate password and put it in the settings.xml because our corporate proxy need it for working. So if you see a similar error, keep in mind that this is because and invalid character in the xml file. My password contained an ampersand and thus I had this issue.