Lew Ranieri has joined ROOT Markets

Lew Ranieri has joined ROOT Markets, the first financial exchange for consumer leads. As you might know, in the 1980s, as Salomon Brothers’ head of mortgage trading, Ranieri created the trillion dollar mortgage-backed securities market.

Ranieri has teamed with Internet advertising pioneer Seth Goldstein (SiteSpecific, Flatiron Partners, Majestic Research) to create Root Markets, which applies the transparency of a traditional financial exchange – in which price movements are accessible in real-time – to the emerging market of Internet lead generation – a $12 billion market that is fractured and inefficient.

According to Ranieri, “ROOT Markets will be the first exchange to marry Wall Street and Madison Avenue. By creating a more efficient Internet lead generation marketplace with transparent pricing and explicit consumer permission, ROOT Markets has an opportunity similar to that which I saw on Wall Street more than twenty years ago in the mortgage market prior to securitization.”

We would welcome your coverage of Ranieri coming on board to ROOT Markets. Attached for your review is one-page overview of ROOT Markets. Please contact me with any questions.