LoanPASS CRO on the cultivation of a reverse mortgage lender partnership

At the beginning of 2024, mortgage technology company LoanPASS was announced as a technology partner for reverse mortgage lender Smartfi Home Loans. The lender chose LoanPASS to provide its software-as-a-service (SaaS) product and pricing engine in its reverse lending operations.

This partnership has become a fruitful one, according to Bill Mitchell, chief revenue officer at LoanPASS. Mitchell, who has reverse mortgage industry experience in the loan origination system (LOS) space, sat down with HousingWire’s Reverse Mortgage Daily (RMD) to talk about the market opportunity that he sees and where he hopes the industry can go from here.

Getting the hang of reverse

Mitchell is a 25-year veteran of the mortgage technology space, primarily working for LOS companies. In late 2021, Mitchell was hired by the parent company of reverse LOS ReverseVision (RV) and Joe Langner, its leader at the time. Not long after, the company was acquired by Constellation Software.

Bill Mitchell

For the six months that Mitchell worked closely with RV, he described it as a “good time” and became far more familiar with the reverse mortgage industry. He digested its dynamics and the differences from the traditional forward mortgage space.

“If you think about it, we had pretty much all of the top 10, if not the top 25 reverse lenders,” Mitchell said of RV’s stature during that time. “I’d taken the first three to six months talking to CEOs, CTOs and these companies about their businesses, and really learned a lot about it. It was a pretty cool time in my career to go through that, and I wish it was longer.”

But it ended up having more value than he anticipated, because it set off a “light bulb” in his mind about what more could be done in the space.

“It showed me that there’s a great opportunity here for technology but also for the industry as a whole,” he said.

Steps toward reverse partnership

Mitchell credits his time at RV with illustrating how potential shortcomings in existing reverse technology stacks could be addressed.

After joining LoanPASS in 2022 for its newly created CRO position, he began having conversations with the company about side-by-side tools that can allow lenders to better understand the potential utility of adding reverse mortgages to their product suites.

“I told them it would be really cool if we could stand up a reverse next to a forward, so that lenders that are looking to open these channels in the future can actually do that,” he said. “That way, they don’t have to push someone later in life into a HELOC or another product that may not be a good fit for them.”

Mitchell said that work began pretty quickly, and the company started to cultivate customers just as fast. By opening that business line, Mitchell came into contact with Gregg Smith, CEO of Smartfi, and they spent the next several months talking about how LoanPASS could potentially fit into Smartfi’s reverse mortgage ambitions.

“If you think about it foundationally, where the technology needs to be to do this, it was a really good three or four months of discussions,” he said. “And then we got deeper into it and put a formal relationship together.”

What does the future hold?

The LoanPass-Smartfi relationship was announced publicly in January 2024. Since then, more conversations have taken place, including several meetings at this year’s Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) Annual Convention and Expo in Denver.

Mitchell said the partnership has largely been smooth sailing over much of the past year, which is helped by both teams’ focus on what he called a “larger road map.”

“If you think about the idea of having modern technology that allows them to configure quickly, and to bring in these [reverse-specific] calculations — the principal limit factor, non-borrowing spouses, all the things that legacy software doesn’t have today — when it comes to decisioning technology, we have that,” he said.

This is where education and conversations with Smartfi comes into play, and the companies are enthusiastic about where the accord will go, Mitchell explained.

“Now they leverage our open APIs with their other systems that they’re using so that data can travel through their operation upstream, downstream and so on,” he said.

But an impediment to greater adoption continues to be longstanding reputational hurdles that the reverse mortgage industry has long faced, Mitchell said. This doesn’t dissuade him, and he continues to think that the industry provides a product that more mortgage companies should take a closer look at.

“I think all lenders should be looking into it as a consideration,” he said. “It’s a great product. I’m getting closer to it every year, and I would say that the technology that’s available today really makes it easier for those lenders that want to take that next step.”