Early 2024, mortgage technology company LoanPASS was announced as a technology partner for reverse mortgage lender Smartfi home loans. The lender chose LoanPASS to offer its software-as-a-service (SaaS) product and pricing engine in its reverse lending business.
This partnership has proven fruitful, said Bill Mitchell, Chief Revenue Officer at LoanPASS. Mitchell, who has reverse mortgage industry experience in the loan origination system (LOS), sat down with HousingWire‘s Reverse Mortgage Daily (RMD) to talk about the market opportunities he sees and where he hopes the industry can go from here.
Mastering the reverse
Mitchell is a 25-year veteran of mortgage technology, working primarily for LOS companies. In late 2021, Mitchell was hired by reverse LOS’s parent company Reverse vision (RV) and Joe Langner, then leader. Not long after, the company was acquired by Constellation software.
During the six months that Mitchell worked closely with RV, he described it as a “good time” and became much more familiar with the reverse mortgage industry. He delved into its dynamics and the differences with the traditional market for term mortgages.
“If you think about it, we had pretty much all the top 10, if not the top 25 reverse lenders,” Mitchell said of RV’s status at the time. “I had spent the first three to six months talking to CEOs, CTOs and these companies about their businesses and really learned a lot about that. It was a pretty cool time in my career to experience that, and I wish it was longer.
But it ultimately had more value than he expected because it lit a “light bulb” in his head about what else could be done in the space.
“It showed me that there are great opportunities here for the technology, but also for the industry as a whole,” he said.
Steps towards reverse partnership
Mitchell credits his time at RV with illustrating how to address potential shortcomings in existing reverse technology stacks.
After joining LoanPASS in 2022 for the newly created CRO position, he began conversations with the company about side-by-side tools to help lenders better understand the potential utility of adding reverse mortgages to their product suites.
“I told them it would be really cool if we could put an opposite next to a forward, so that lenders who want to open these channels in the future can actually do so,” he said. “That way they don’t have to push someone into a HELOC or other product later in life that might not be a good fit for them.”
Mitchell said work started quite quickly, and the company started acquiring customers just as quickly. Opening this business line put Mitchell in touch with Gregg Smith, CEO of Smartfi, and they spent the next few months discussing how LoanPASS could potentially fit into Smartfi’s reverse mortgage ambitions.
“If you think about it fundamentally, where the technology is needed to do this, it was really three or four months of discussions,” he said. “And then we got into it more deeply and built a formal relationship.”
What does the future bring?
The LoanPass-Smartfi relationship was publicly announced in January 2024. More discussions have taken place since then, including several meetings at this year’s fair. Association of Mortgage Bankers (MBA) Annual Convention and Expo in Denver.
Mitchell said the partnership has been largely smooth over the past year, helped by both teams’ focus on what he called a “bigger roadmap.”
“If you think about the idea of having modern technology that allows them to quickly configure and implement it [reverse-specific] calculations – the main limit factor, non-borrowing spouses, all the things that older software doesn’t have today – when it comes to decision technology, we have that,” he said.
This is where education and conversations with Smartfi come into play, and the companies are excited about where the agreement will go, Mitchell explained.
“Now they’re using our open APIs with their other systems that they use so that data can travel upstream, downstream and so on through their business,” he said.
But a barrier to greater adoption remains long-standing reputational hurdles that the reverse mortgage industry has long faced, Mitchell said. This doesn’t deter him, and he remains of the opinion that the industry offers a product that more mortgage companies should take a closer look at.
“I think all lenders should look at this as a consideration,” he said. “It’s a great product. I’m getting closer every year, and I’d say the technology available today really makes it easier for lenders looking to take that next step.”
