knowledgeable about reverse mortgages and comfortable with their decisions. AI is the tool for propelling reverse mortgages into 21st century commerce, says Torres. Gen X on the Way Technology is “not the friend of reverse mortgages,” says Torres. “Not because companies didn’t have resources or even the dream, but because the demographic didn’t ask for it. People who qualified for a reverse mortgage in years past haven’t demanded advanced technology.” Previous generations had different mentalities—meet in person, sit across the table and shake hands. But in 2027, the Gen Xers born from 1965 to 1980 will begin to qualify for HECMs. Already, their late-Boomer predecessors are comfortable with technology. The Gen X wave will expect digital immersion because today’s technology has its roots in their childhoods. “We grew up with Atari, with cable,” Torres says. “We saw the cellphone being born, 24-hour news, the internet, you name it.” The forward mortgage side is already steeped in technology “because who’s buying homes? Twentysomethings. Thirty-somethings. They’re living with technology every day in every way, and their homebuying experience is no different.” Torres wants to see reverse mortgages catch up to the forward side, and he has become an evangelist. He speaks at NRMLA conferences. He meets and educates lenders, loan officers and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development officials. He participates in industry-specific technology webinars. It’s a perspective honed as a sales and marketing entrepreneur and by early experience in mortgage companies, including roles as a top-producing loan officer and a wholesale account executive. Since 2018, Torres has been deeply involved in reverse mortgages as a fractional chief marketing officer for multiple lenders on the forward and reverse sides of the business. While working in reverse mortgages, Torres recognized the field’s limited use of technology. The arrival of ChatGPT in November 2022 gave urgency to correcting that oversight, and he founded Reachality in January 2023. “It’s my mission to ensure that by the time Gen X becomes eligible for reverse mortgages, we will have the best technology available,” he says. The Reachality platform operates on the principles of simplicity, education and “making a complex product or something that someone has never seen before easy to digest by communicating and asking questions.” The education push begins when Reachality’s conversational AI mines every bit of information available on a reverse mortgage firm’s website. Customers popping in with questions get automatic, humanlike answers. There’s no waiting for someone to track down the information. No one is forced to wade through generalized knowledge bases that might or might not address their concerns. Instead, responses are instantaneous and conversational. The voice of the AI assistant—and he says that, ethically, the customer should know they are dealing with an AI assistant—is designed to resonate with the customer base. The tone can be formal and professional or 20-something and laid back, depending on the target audience. Through this process, better-educated clients make better decisions. “Conversational AI isn’t about making a sale,” says Torres. “The CEOs I work with and my clients might think otherwise, but if you’re educating customers and they get to trust you and get to know you, they’re more likely to do business with you.” New Way of Interacting Almost everyone deals with AI every day, whenever they ask Siri for a weather report or ask Alexa to play their favorite songs. Infusing AI into the reverse mortgage industry is a lateral step with enormous payoffs. AI brings the following multiple advantages to reverse mortgage settings: • It can schedule appointments and ask the same questions that schedulers would ask: What year were you born? When are you available? What is your email address? And it won’t call off sick. The result: capturing and scheduling customers when the opportunity presents itself. Evangelizing for AI continued on page 24 REVERSE MORTGAGE / MARCH-APRIL 2024 23
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