July-Aug 2020

In Reverse Digital Shifts Ahead Technology Allows Businesses to Serve Customers Beyond COVID-19 By Thomas A. Barstow CORONAVIRUS DISRUPTED EVERY business nationwide, so we wanted to see what the leaders in the reverse mortgage industry are doing to adapt and to determine if they have found ways to better serve customers during the crisis. In this issue of Reverse Mortgage , several articles offer such guidance, including the cover story ( The New Normal , p. 18) by Joel Berg who talked to people like Leslie Flynne, senior vice president of loan servicing for Houston, TX-based Reverse Mortgage Solutions Inc. Disaster-planning guides must be produced by compa- nies long before a disaster happens, so they can best serve customers and help employees during hurricanes, earth- quakes or other natural disasters. Best practices suggest that the guides should be reviewed at least annually and updated after every event. With COVID-19, some of the ingenuity to weather the crisis created new standards that will last long into the future. Flynne determined that, over the years, the authors of the disaster plan for Reverse Mortgage Solutions had accounted for a pandemic, which allowed them to act decisively. Lesson learned: If your plan didn’t include a pandemic, add a new chapter. “I look and think geniuses must have written it, because it’s spot on,” Flynne tells Berg. Other stories include those fromlenders inMassachusetts who have been working with the state legislature long In Reverse continued on page 4 REVERSE MORTGAGE / JULY-AUGUST 2020 3