Patrick Boyaggi went mortgage shopping. His own bank lost.

Patrick Boyaggi’s own mortgage presented a small embarrassment for the banking business. He worked in it. He understood it. And when the time came to borrow for his home, he took his business elsewhere. An employee discount might flatter the ego; a better mortgage has rather more time to make itself useful.

There was a business question tucked inside that personal choice. Boyaggi had the experience to recognize his options and compare them. How was someone outside the industry supposed to reach the same decision? Buying a home already demands enough amateur expertise. Few people arrive at a viewing hoping to acquire a second career in lending.

That gap became the premise for Own Up, which he co-founded in 2016 with Mike Tassone and Brent Shields. A decade later, Experian completed its purchase of the business for $175 million. The distance between those two moments includes a banking career, an ungainly early pitch, a change of name and an unusually frank account of the help he received.

“I’m the guy that didn’t get a mortgage from his own bank.”Patrick Boyaggi

Before the pitch, a spreadsheet

Boyaggi studied history at Bates College, graduating in 2003, and competed in football and track. He later earned an MBA at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. His professional background includes management consulting at Accenture and residential lending at Leader Bank. The route gives him a useful combination: experience examining a business, followed by experience running part of one.

The qualifications did not make every transition easy. Returning to Bates for an alumni career event in 2011, he described the difficulty of finding work after business school. He had expected rather a lot from his MBA. Finding the next job involved hundreds of calls and follow-ups, organized in a spreadsheet.

There is something reassuringly unceremonious about that detail. The degree gets a frame. The telephone calls get rows and columns. Boyaggi drew on his experience of recovering after a bad play in football, and encouraged students to enter the working world even if the first position fell short of their ambitions. The advice had the practical texture of somebody who had needed it.

At the time, he was also helping the Boston Bates Business Network. Years before starting his own company, he was talking about the value of people willing to help someone else find a way forward.

Boston supplied the introductions

From 2010 to 2016, Boyaggi ran residential lending at a bank outside Boston. Tassone joined him in 2013. Together, their work involved more than $11 billion in home loans. Those years supplied the industry experience behind their next venture, originally called RateGravity.

They were entering unfamiliar territory nevertheless. In his account of the company’s first months, Boyaggi admitted that neither he nor Tassone had previously founded a technology company. Their early pitch, he wrote, had been “embarrassing to say the least.” The admission makes a pleasant change from founding stories in which even the office furniture seems to have anticipated the exit.

Raizlabs accepted the young business into its XLR8 incubator. Harvard contacts offered feedback; the startup won the Harvard Real Estate New Venture Competition. Evertrue founder Brent Grinna helped with introductions and advice. By May 2016, RateGravity had become a MassChallenge finalist.

Boyaggi attached names to that assistance. His recollection suggests a founder who understood the mortgage problem well enough to pursue it and was prepared to ask for help with the company around it. That distinction matters. Experience can explain why a problem persists without furnishing every skill required to build an alternative.

A home deserves a better name

RateGravity sounded like a business interested in numbers. In February 2019, Boyaggi announced that it would become Own Up. Customers had helped the founders recognize that the original name left something out. A loan might be the product under discussion, but the customer’s ambition was to own a home.

Boyaggi connected that ambition to his family. His parents had met overseas while his father was serving in the Vietnam War and later came to America. Homeownership mattered to them. It mattered to him and his wife when they bought a home after having their first child.

That is a revealing choice of explanation for a financial technology founder. He could have confined the announcement to efficiency and branding. Instead, he made room for parents, a child and the significance of a home. The company’s language was catching up with the reason people were using it.

There were numbers in the announcement too: more than 1,200 customers helped in 2018, securing mortgages worth over $650 million. Those were historical results reported at the time. Put beside the family story, they show the two scales Boyaggi was trying to keep in view: a business measured in loan volume, and a purchase experienced one household at a time.

Making comparison feel ordinary

The company’s approach brought software together with home advisors. Borrowers could evaluate options and receive guidance rather than being left alone with a collection of figures. Boyaggi’s recurring concern was the difference between the information held by the industry and the information available to its customers.

Own Up’s 2022 mortgage-shopping research put that concern into a formal exercise: an online survey of 1,000 US adults who had recently secured a mortgage or were seeking one. The company described a marketplace in which people could review personalized offers without disclosing identifying information to the lenders at that stage, with advisors available to answer questions.

In a September 2022 industry discussion, Boyaggi spoke about the need for a transparent display of data. He also acknowledged limits: technology would not simply invent financing products that made homes meaningfully more affordable. It could help people understand the transaction and compare what was available.

The restraint is useful. A clearer shopping process cannot conjure another bedroom into a budget. It can make a complicated choice easier to examine. For a founder selling change in an expensive market, explaining the boundary of that change is part of earning a hearing.

He continued discussing the business in interviews, including a 2021 appearance on the Fuse Show. The episode’s listed book recommendation, Empowered by Marty Cagan, fits the product-building concerns of that period. The former lending executive was spending his time on the practical work of creating a service people could use.

A promise with dates attached

Boyaggi’s public writing also records a moment when the question of fairness turned toward his own conduct. In June 2020, he published a personal pledge on racial equality. He acknowledged that believing in equality had not amounted to sufficient action, and accepted responsibility for the lack of racial diversity at his company.

With his wife, Hannah, he committed to four volunteering days and $4,000 in donations each year for ten years. At least half the time and money would support organizations fighting for racial equality. The commitment was expressed as a family practice, including an ambition to encourage their sons’ participation in social activism.

Those were announced intentions, rather than a retrospective account of completed work. Their specificity remains relevant to the portrait: he chose quantities, a duration and an admission about his leadership. He placed the gap between principle and practice in public view.

It adds a more demanding meaning to the company name. Owning up is an agreeable phrase when it concerns another institution’s shortcomings. Applied to the business one runs, it asks for considerably more. Boyaggi’s essay made that personal responsibility explicit.

The $175 million next chapter

As the company grew, its ambitions required distribution as well as a useful service. In October 2019, Own Up announced a $14.9 million Series A led by Link Ventures. A $12 million round led by Brand Foundry Ventures followed in 2021. In 2022, another $25 million funding announcement accompanied a partnership with Move, the operator of Realtor.com.

That relationship placed mortgage education and comparison alongside a place people already searched for homes. It carried the founding idea into a broader setting: reach the borrower during the purchase, rather than expect the borrower to discover an unfamiliar service independently.

Boyaggi appeared on Inman’s 2025 Best of Finance honoree list. Then came the next corporate chapter. Experian announced an agreement to acquire Own Up in February 2026. The purchase closed on April 1; Experian subsequently disclosed the $175 million price. The plan was to bring Own Up’s mortgage-shopping capabilities into Experian’s consumer marketplace.

For Boyaggi, the transaction gave the original premise another route to borrowers. The scale had changed. The question remained recognizable: how can someone making an occasional, consequential purchase gain access to information an industry professional uses routinely?

His own bank had once lost a customer who knew where else to look. Boyaggi spent the following years building a business for people who deserved that same chance. It is an unusually persuasive place for a banker’s story to begin: with the decision to shop around.