A Closer Look: Chris Larsen, MBA 1991

E-Loan's Chris Larsen created a traditional brick-and-mortar home mortgage business before turning it into an e-commerce success.

LIKE MOST SUCCESSFULventures, E-Loan didn't happen overnight. Fresh from business school, Chris Larsen met former Xerox executive Janina Pawlowski and the two teamed up to create a "brick-and-mortar loan brokerage" in 1992. It was that enterprise that would evolve into user-initiated E-Loan, which launched in June 1997.

"Before it became the in-thing for recent MBAs, Chris and Janina had a vision," says Sharon Ruwart, MBA '94, who is E-Loan's director of marketing. That vision, according to Ruwart, was to take a huge and inefficient industry and then transform it into a customer-oriented information resource for home buyers.

The premise behind E-Loan is fairly basic: "to put the consumer in charge of the process of researching and securing a loan," says Larsen. In effect, it's helping consumers manage debt the way they manage their investments.

How is this done? Basically it allows mortgage customers to search a database with over 50,000 loan products from more than 60 of the nation's top lenders. Then, using data collected from the customer about debt objectives, risk profile, hold periods, and other financial criteria, E-Loan displays customized product quotes and comparisons and recommends the best product available on that particular day. In addition, it also offers performance forecasts and other personalized customer services such as 24-hour online loan tracking.

And how are they doing so far? E-Loan recently welcomed (read that, scored) Joseph Kennedy as senior vice president of business development. Quite a coup, considering that Kennedy joins E-Loan from Saturn, where he was the director of marketing and one of the founding members of that company.

"We've also just filed to go public," Larsen said in an interview in April. He anticipates that the company will indeed go public this summer. "That is a very exciting development for a relatively new concern.

"We're very optimistic," says Larsen, who sees opportunities to reach a diverse group of prospective home buyers. E-Loan already has assisted people who may have been excluded from buying a home because of the daunting process of securing a mortgage. And with industry forecast predicting a 10 percent share of the mortgage market online by 2005, "E-Loan's future looks bright," he says. -- Peter Callahan