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Technology Stocks : FNCM Finet.Com -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: flopwedge who wrote (1043)	4/25/1999 8:35:00 PM
From: $Mogul	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 2420

Friday, April 23, 1999 Inman News Features According to reports, Finet Holdings Corp. is close to a Web portal deal for its Finet.com mortgage site. This past week, StreetQ reported Finet was in talks with Internet giant AOL regarding a portal arrangement. In a recent interview with Radio Wall Street, Finet President L. Daniel Rawitch would not confirm rumors about any portal deals, but did say that the company is out talking to Web traffic aggregators. "Isn't it logical that we would be out talking to everybody that you can possibly think we should be talking to, to drive traffic to our various sites?" Rawitch said. "Common sense would dictate that we're talking to the right people everyday." Portal space is much desired in the online realty category, as Web directories such as Yahoo!, Excite and AOL attract millions of Web surfers every day. Finet, which is restructuring itself as an online mortgage bank, does not currently have exclusive arrangements any top portal sites, so a deal would provide significant exposure. Earlier this year, Finet announced an e-commerce strategy with the goal of making the company the "America's leading electronic mortgage bank." In the past several months, the company has integrated its Web services iQualify.com, Interloan.com and debuted a new Web site and hired mortgage industry veteran Mark Korell as CEO. Stock shares for Finet (FNHC) jumped into double digits last week to more than $15, several times its price last November. The company's stock has since calmed down a bit to between $9 21/32 by closing on Friday. Some observers are also expecting Finet stock to benefit from the pending public offering of E-LOAN, generally seen as the leader in the online mortgage industry. Finet Holdings Corp. was founded in 1989 by the merger of three mortgage companies and now provides end-to-end mortgage service for originations and fulfillment.