Torrey Larsen has retired, and his farewell has rather a crowded cast. There are brothers, a first business partner, a capital markets mentor, operational colleagues and the banker he compares to George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. For someone who has occupied the president’s office, he devotes an unusual amount of his retrospective to the people outside it.
The comparison to Bailey belongs to Jeff Schmid, whose team at Mutual of Omaha Bank bought Synergy One Lending in 2018. Larsen remembers a combination of technical ability and generosity. It is a revealing choice of cinematic hero: a banker whose story depends on the people around him. The boardroom has produced less sociable ambitions.
Larsen’s own business history runs through conventional mortgages, reverse mortgages, company sales and a research initiative that eventually found a university home. Follow the company names and there are several turns to keep straight. Follow the people and the story becomes easier to recognize.
Before the executive title, a number 30
At Westmont College, Larsen appeared on the 1982-83 men’s basketball roster as a sophomore forward wearing number 30. The roster lists Wheaton, Illinois, and Wheaton Central High School, with business as his field of study. His professional education listing places him at Westmont from 1981 to 1985.
A basketball roster is a pleasantly economical biography. Name, position, number, hometown: very little room for corporate embroidery. The later mortgage executive was once one entry among a dozen players. His subsequent fondness for describing colleagues as teammates has that earlier, literal counterpart, although the roster tells us nothing about how he behaved in a huddle.
His account of entering mortgage leadership begins with Ron Krueger, who entrusted him with capital markets at Dollar Mortgage when he was 28. Seven years later, Larsen says, he started his own firm. He identifies David Entrekin Sr. as his first business partner in 1999. In his telling, professional knowledge arrived through relationships before it became a company of his own.
The paperwork has a chapter, too
An earlier business, Home Capital Funding, brings a less celebratory episode into the record. Washington’s Department of Financial Institutions identified Larsen as its chief executive and a co-owner. A 2008 consent order resolved charges involving lending practices, including unauthorized fees and late disclosures.
The respondents agreed to a $30,000 fine, $134,176.67 in restitution and $1,380 in investigation costs. They did not admit wrongdoing. The regulator’s summary marks the terms completed and the payments made. These were obligations of the respondents collectively; the figures should not be mistaken for a personal payment total assigned to Larsen.
It is an essential qualification to any account built around a lender’s stated values. A lending business is judged in the details of its transactions. The borrower encounters the company through a disclosure, a fee and a deadline, long before anyone asks what the chief executive believes about leadership.
A stake for the people making the loans
By 2012, Larsen was president of Security One Lending, which introduced a tracking-stock incentive for loan originators called the President’s Club. The announced plan connected rewards to productivity over five years and contemplated distributing 30 percent of the division to qualifying loan officers.
Its first 10 percent was to be earned over an initial 14-month period. These were the terms of an announced program, rather than proof of what every participant eventually received. Even with that distinction, the proposal gives substance to Larsen’s interest in the people doing the work: compensation and participation were part of the company-building discussion.
The vocabulary of ownership can become ornamental very quickly. Here it had a proposed schedule and a percentage attached. For a loan officer choosing where to build a career, that is a different proposition from a warm speech at the annual meeting. It also makes retention a matter of shared economic prospects.
“renters” of a company to “owners” of a company
Torrey Larsen · On the 2012 incentive plan
Four employees, then a national sale
Security One had grown from a four-person startup into a major retail reverse mortgage lender under Larsen’s leadership. In May 2013, Walter Investment Management announced completion of its acquisition. The announced price was up to $31 million, including a performance-dependent component.
The transaction included a retail brand and more than 400 originators. Those are company figures, not a measure of Larsen’s personal wealth. They show the operating scale of the business at the point of sale: the little starting group had become a distributed enterprise with people serving customers across the country.
A sale makes a clean milestone on a timeline. Working life is usually untidier. For Larsen, the next chapter would involve returning to the same industry with another business. Familiarity with the market remained useful; ownership of the old company was no longer required.
Starting again while the rules were changing
In January 2015, Retirement Funding Solutions entered the reverse mortgage business as a division of Synergy One Lending. Its plans included a San Diego fulfillment center and retail, consumer direct and third-party distribution. Larsen was back in the business of assembling an operation.
He explained that his noncompete had expired in November 2014. The timing also put him at the arrival of new financial assessment requirements. Existing lenders had established workflows to revise; a new entrant could design its processes around the requirements from the beginning. To Larsen, industry disruption offered a practical opening.
His shorthand for building was deliberately ordinary: suitable people, protective systems and useful tools. He also treated originators as customers of the organization. There is an operational consequence in that idea. A company that wants loan officers to serve borrowers well must first give those officers a functioning place to work.
An idea that needed a bigger table
Alongside the lending companies came a different kind of institution. In 2012, Larsen and Shelley Giordano co-founded the Funding Longevity Task Force to examine housing wealth in retirement planning. A house could represent a substantial asset while sitting awkwardly outside the usual financial planning conversation.
Giordano later described the beginnings as a gathering of academics in San Diego. Bringing researchers together gave the question somewhere to be argued through. A sales organization naturally wants adoption; a research discussion has to leave room for conditions, limitations and disagreement. That tension makes the initiative a distinctive part of Larsen’s career.
In 2016, the task force aligned with The American College of Financial Services. Its participants included researchers and financial planning professionals such as Wade Pfau, Barry Sacks and John Salter. Retirement Funding Solutions was one of four supporting organizations. Larsen’s business and the wider educational effort were connected, with multiple organizations helping support the work.
From a San Diego meeting to Illinois
The initiative later became the Academy for Home Equity in Financial Planning and joined the University of Illinois in 2019. The university described its research and educational plans in March 2020, with the academy housed in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics.
Larsen explained its founding questions as understanding financial planners’ reluctance to evaluate housing wealth, and improving education through objective data. He credited Giordano’s persistence with carrying the early aims forward. By then, the project had a life extending beyond its original meeting and beyond one lender’s sales organization.
For a founder, that is an interesting form of continuity. Companies can be sold and trade names retired. A question can travel to another institution and remain productive there. The academy’s university chapter makes this part of Larsen’s story about building a place for inquiry as well as building a business.
A familiar name opens the door
Mutual of Omaha Bank’s acquisition of Synergy One was announced in May 2018 and finalized that July. Larsen, then president and chief executive, saw value in both the capital and the recognition of the buyer’s name. A young lender could acquire years of familiarity through the association.
He pointed to customers’ memories of Wild Kingdom, the television program associated with Mutual of Omaha. It is an unusually vivid detail in an acquisition discussion. Before a customer has evaluated an organization chart, a name can already carry a feeling. Larsen also described protecting that reputation as a responsibility.
By late 2019, Retirement Funding Solutions was moving to the Mutual of Omaha Mortgage name. In 2020, Alex Pistone discussed how the unified identity helped the business speak to customers and referral partners. Larsen’s earlier argument about recognition had become a decision about what name the business would put above its door.
- 2012Larsen and Giordano establish the task force.
- 2016The American College partnership.
- 2018Mutual of Omaha Bank buys Synergy One.
- 2019The academy joins the University of Illinois.
- 2020Management buys the Synergy One brand and retail channel.
Less time checking, more time talking
The customer experience also occupied Larsen at a less theatrical level. In a 2018 announcement about Finicity and SimpleNexus, he welcomed automated verification of assets as a way to simplify work for borrowers and originators. The task was small enough to sound unglamorous and important enough to slow a mortgage.
In a subsequent announcement about Finicity’s integration with Ellie Mae’s Encompass platform, Larsen said closing times had fallen after implementation. He did not supply a numerical reduction. The intended benefit was straightforward: less staff time spent verifying assets, leaving more attention for customers.
That makes a useful companion to the talk of brands and company culture. A familiar name may begin a conversation. A competent process has to carry it through. A borrower waiting for a closing is unlikely to be consoled by a particularly elegant mission statement.
The brand takes one road. Larsen takes another.
In June 2020, Synergy One announced a management-led asset purchase of its distributed retail channel and brand from Mutual of Omaha Mortgage. Steve Majerus and Aaron Nemec led the transaction. This is the important fork in the story of the original business and the Synergy One name that continued afterward.
A December 2020 account described Larsen focusing on strategy and business development at Mutual of Omaha Mortgage as Terry Connealy took the presidency. Larsen later served as executive vice president. His own public profile now says he is officially retired.
His reflections reserve particular affection for his brothers Tyler and Tim, whose differing perspectives, he says, balanced the organizations they built together. He also credits David Entrekin, Bill Trask, Alex Pistone, Dan Shackelford, Chris Kargacos and Majerus. The company names changed; many of the relationships endured. At the end of an executive career, Larsen has chosen to put those names back on the page.