Top-20 reverse mortgage lender 1st Reverse Mortgage USA is introducing a new pricing engine product through a partnership with Baseline Reverse. The engine, called ‘Surelock,’ utilizes real time data from capital markets and implements it into the 1st Reverse Mortgage loan origination platform.

By allowing loan officers to enter key pieces of information about a prospective borrower that is cross-referenced with real-time pricing data, the new engine simplifies the process so that an LO can provide their potential borrower with a series of options that are optimized for their specific financial situation. It can also offer LOs key information important to them, like commissions associated with each different product modeled.

“The engine by itself is a game-changer,” said Dan Harder, Senior Vice President, 1st Reverse Mortgage USA in an interview with RMD. “We’re able to incorporate it into a daily rate sheet, and that’s because of the live data feed and the technology we’re gaining from [Baseline].”

Much of the necessity for this new platform comes down to an increasing reliance on accurate information being delivered to loan officers with much greater speed, said Dan Ribler, president of Baseline Reverse.

Speed and simplicity

On the development side, one of the key issues that this new engine seeks to provide a solution for is the speed by which it can help to tailor specific product solutions for potential borrowers, something that’s much easier for originators to do on the forward mortgage side. Dan Ribler described the key realization during the development process for Surelock.

“The ‘a-ha moment’ for us was [realizing that] if the loan officer is on the phone with a borrower, [before] they’d have to tell them to hold on while they price out [a series of individual offers separately],” Ribler said in a phone interview. “So, we thought instead of making loan officers price each option on the rate sheet, what if we could just price them all at once, and let them sort by whatever it is that their consumer cares about?”

By orienting the engine around this idea, a loan officer can now enter in specific details about a potential borrower including their age, home value, and current forward mortgage amount owed and automatically determine which product best fits that senior’s specific needs, uniquely tailored to that senior’s situation under a product offered by the lender they’re originating for.

“Instead of finding a [merely] acceptable solution on a rate sheet, they can offer the absolutely optimized product for the rate sheet that [1st Reverse] and team are offering,” Ribler said. “So, you just kind of boil it down to its most simplistic: how to help this senior get the absolute perfect loan to solve whatever problem it is that we’re trying to help them solve.”

Commission details

Key for loan officers using this engine is that it can also provide details on what their commissions will be in each of the listed scenarios, Harder said.

“We’ve drilled down in our rate sheet all the way to the loan officers’ commissions now. We wouldn’t be able to do that if you don’t start with the base pricing that [Baseline] gives us live, and then put it into the pricing engine right into the rate sheet, and then right down to the loan officer’s ability to know what their commissions are,” Harder said. “So, this will be a one-stop shop for our loan officers. It’s great for our existing and our busy loan officers, but it’s an awesome tool for a forward loan officer that doesn’t do this primarily.”

The tool also makes things much easier for forward loan officers to begin originating reverse, since the user experience for Surelock was designed in such a way to be accessible for those LOs that operate on both the forward and reverse sides of the mortgage business.

“A forward guy going into a reverse mortgage loan origination system (LOS) today can be complicated,” Harder said. “From our standpoint, we have already launched this into what we call our retail direct guys, which is forward loan officers, and they’re accustomed to using an LOS system, running scenarios and looking at the rate sheet.”

Real-time data, wholesale applications

The ability of the new pricing engine to provide real time capital markets data, combined with the connectivity to the 1st Reverse Mortgage platform can give a reverse and forward mortgage loan originator the ability to secure accurate pricing on a much faster basis at the point of sale, says the press release.

Simplifying the overall process is beneficial to loan officers that have worked only with manual rate sheets in the past, Harder said. “I think Christmas came early for them.”

Ribler also specified that while 1st Reverse provided invaluable assistance to Baseline in the development of the Surelock platform, the product itself will be available to other companies like other Baseline offerings.

“[1st Reverse] has been fantastically helpful to us as we work through the finer points of using the engine, pointing out things that we may have not thought of,” Ribler tells RMD. “Like all Baseline tools, it’s available to everybody.”

One of the biggest applications for Surelock can be on the wholesale side of the reverse mortgage business, Ribler added.

“Let’s say you’re logged into the 1st Reverse platform. Rate sheets will be delivered to brokers based on [the platform they’re logged into],” Ribler explains. “We don’t compare pricing between wholesalers, but they can host an instance where their pricing, and only their pricing, is delivered to the brokers.”

Find more information on Surelock at its dedicated website.