MISMO reverse mortgage work group on track to deliver new standards

The Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization (MISMO)’s dedicated reverse mortgage development work group is targeting January 2025 as the release window for reverse mortgage standards it is helping to develop. Industry professionals hope these standards can go a long way toward normalizing reverse mortgage products within the mainstream lending ecosystem.

To get a better idea of how this progress is going, and to hear more about the particulars of the work, HousingWire’s Reverse Mortgage Daily (RMD) recently sat down with George Morales, national sales director for Mortgage Cadence. After being appointed over the summer to serve as chair of the group, Morales said that the work is on track and features input from multiple industry stakeholders.

Contributing to the conversation

Morales told RMD that MISMO’s work is moving at a steady pace and features contributions from multiple company types — including loan origination system (LOS) providers, the National Reverse Mortgage Lenders Association (NRMLA) and multiple lenders. Almost as important, he added, is the participation of non-reverse lending companies in the conversation.

A representative from Fannie Mae has participated, he said, as well as some of MISMO’s own policy “architects” and other industry stakeholders.

“In our recent meeting, we actually had representatives from reverse title companies there as well,” Morales said. “We’ve also noticed that we’re starting to get a little bit more interest in the group from other people [with some] new additions over the last several months. Part of my mission has been to make sure that I maintain the energy of the group.”

That’s an important part of the process, he said, because the group is comprised entirely of volunteers who are not paid for their efforts.

“As a matter of fact, it’s the opposite,” he said. “It’s costing some people some time, effort and energy to pour into the mission that we have set before us. And so, I’ve been personally doing a lot of one-on-one outreach, thanking people, and aiming to acknowledge their effort and contributions in an authentic way.”

Agreeing on the task at hand

Morales said he relishes this kind of work, since he has an outgoing personality and travels to industry events whenever he can. He said that energy and momentum can be maintained as long as people know their contributions are valuable, and Morales aims to make that clear to them.

“We’ve also been able to achieve some milestones within the MISMO process,” he said. “There are milestones that we’ve achieved here in the last couple of months since I was voted in as a chairperson, which is the result of all these people who have been contributing even before I was the chair.”

The work can be challenging — and even tedious. Determining how to move forward with specific data points and examining the best terminology to use within certain tech platforms are some examples, Morales said. But now, there is more specific work on language, he explained.

Like other elements of the work being done to broaden the scale of the reverse mortgage industry, the working group has people who are technically competitors but are also believers in the “rising tide” adage.

“If you just were to look at us on paper, you would see competitors,” Morales said. “But what you’re seeing is a common jar, and we’re all pouring into it [with a sense of common purpose]. And the reason is that most of the conversations that I’m having really have to do with the people who are industry veterans. They’ve been in the space long enough to see that there’s a larger opportunity.”

Uniform language needs

Mortgage Cadence previously characterized the group’s work as addressing “a long-standing challenge in the industry — the lack of standardized data formats that has historically made it difficult for traditional lenders to incorporate reverse mortgages into their existing systems.”

Uniform standards will ideally enable any lender, vendor or other party “in the loan manufacturing ecosystem interested in entering the reverse mortgage space to do so with greater ease and efficiency,” the company previously said.

The group is focused on creating reverse lending language and terminology, and aiming to embed a new language that will “live in a place that can be accessed by as many forward and reverse people as possible in every aspect of the lending life cycle,” Morales said.

“So, we want it to be backwards compatible, forward compatible, and in the most modern version of the MISMO standards.”

The work is in a comment period, allowing other MISMO members to contribute to the structure and viability within the work group itself.