loan-origination
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Steve Thompson
Steve Thompson is President and CEO of PrimeLending, the Dallas-based national mortgage lender that operates as a subsidiary of PlainsCapital Bank under Hilltop Holdings. He oversees roughly 1,300 loan originators nationwide along with the company's National Operations, Capital Markets, Joint Ventures and Marketing organizations. A UCLA economics graduate with an MBA from UC Irvine's Merage School, Thompson climbed from a regional sales manager who joined PrimeLending in 2011 to president in 2017 and to president and CEO in 2020, and he was named a 2023 HousingWire Vanguard for his leadership of the mortgage company.
Nora Apsel
Nora Apsel is the co-founder and CEO of Morty, the New York-based online mortgage marketplace she helped build from a Techstars idea in 2016 into a full-stack platform that has facilitated over $2 billion in home loans across 45+ states. She joined as Morty's founding engineer, rose to COO, and took the CEO seat in 2020. A former nonprofit worker who retooled as a software engineer at Meetup and Flurry, she is driven by using product and technology to democratize access to financial products and make one of life's most opaque transactions - getting a mortgage - transparent and buyer-first.
Christopher Coleman
Christopher Coleman is the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Clutch (withclutch.com), a San Francisco-based fintech company transforming how credit unions compete in the digital age. A MIT mechanical engineering graduate and Stanford MBA, Coleman co-founded Carlypso (a Y Combinator-backed used-car marketplace sold to Carvana in 2017) before joining Carvana as Senior Product Director and then launching Clutch in 2020 with co-founder Nicholas Hinrichsen. Clutch has raised $106 million in total funding, including a $65M Series B in January 2025 led by Alkeon Capital with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, and now serves 150+ credit unions - including 6 of the top 10 largest in the country - having facilitated over $10 billion in consumer loans and deposits.
Larry Katz
Larry Katz is CEO and President of MeridianLink, a leading SaaS platform for digital lending and account opening used by banks and credit unions across the United States. A Harvard MBA and Yale graduate, Katz spent 15 years at JPMorgan Chase before leading finance and operations at Genesys and StubHub, then pivoting to private equity advisory before joining MeridianLink as CFO in 2024. Within 18 months he rose to President and then CEO, steering the company through a $2 billion acquisition by Centerbridge Partners in October 2025 and launching an AI-powered lending agent called Millie. His platform ethos — 'Lending Made Human' — sits at the intersection of algorithmic decisioning and community financial relationships.