Moving Forward Let’s Work to Better Explain How Our Products Work By Steve Irwin, President, NRMLA “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” —Seneca AS THE LATE Oren Harari, one of the world’s best minds in management, often explained to me, companies are not built for their employees and management teams. They are built for those customers who are willing to pay for the provided goods and services. This maxim holds especially true for the reverse mortgage industry. Our member companies are built for the reverse mortgage borrower, their families and their trusted advisers. Our success as an industry is dependent on the satisfaction of those customers and trusted advisers, and those successful outcomes depend on a service delivery that meets, or exceeds, those customers’ expectations. I have said it before, and it’s certainly worth repeating: a sure-fire recipe for exacerbating customer dissatisfaction is misaligning the customers’ expectations with the actual service that can be delivered. It is incumbent on all industry participants to strive to eliminate any disconnect between the expectations of reverse mortgage clients when their loan is transferred to the loan servicing team and the policies and procedures required of that loan servicing team. We must do all we can to ensure the borrowers’ expectations are met by the service that can be delivered. We have seen glowing testimonials of satisfied reverse mortgage borrowers. These positive outcomes are the result of the true alignment between those borrowers’ expectations and the service delivery they received. That may sound simple, but it remains difficult to execute. The best way to achieve this execution is for each of us to fully understand the complete reverse mortgage life cycle. We must arm ourselves with the knowledge of the processes and timing of the transfer to servicing partners, the regulations required for occupancy determination, the timing surrounding the distribution of draw requests, and, ultimately, the end-of-loan requirements. These loan administration requirements, once fully understood, must then be communicated to the borrowers in language as clear and plain as possible. NRMLA is here to help with these efforts. I want to remind you all that we have developed a set of consumer guides, which can be found on our member site, www.nrmlaonline.org, and on our consumer site, www.reversemortgage.org. If there are additional guides that might help our industry, please reach out to me, and let’s work together to develop more resources. We must continually strive to have customers’ expectations properly aligned with the realities of the entirety of the reverse mortgage life cycle. It’s a complicated product, and the nuances of loan administration need to be distilled to an easily understood set of expectations. Effectively establishing those customer expectations will strengthen our industry and further the cause of our products as customer-centric tools for effective aging in place. Steve Irwin REVERSE MORTGAGE / SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2022 5
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