Mortgage industry vendors Mortgage Coach and Sales Boomerang announced this week that both companies are set to merge, and the new entity has appointed tech-focused executive Richard Harris to serve as the CEO of the unified organization.
As of now, the unified company is simply known as “Sales Boomerang and Mortgage Coach,” according to the officially-released materials announcing the merger. Both companies currently maintain separate websites and social media presences, and Harris’ LinkedIn profile lists his current position as CEO of “Sales Boomerang & Mortgage Coach.”
The merger and the CEO
The merger has been in the works for most of the year, ever since Philadelphia-based private equity firm LLR Partners strategically invested in both companies this past January. When the investment was announced, it was also detailed that both companies would “maintain their existing brands and teams.”
Sales Boomerang acts as an automated borrower intelligence and retention system for the mortgage industry, while Mortgage Coach is a platform that allows mortgage lenders to create interactive home loan presentations for prospective borrowers. The reverse mortgage ambitions of both companies are relatively recent developments.
“Together, Sales Boomerang and Mortgage Coach will position lenders to reach borrowers with the right information at the right time, empowering borrowers to build wealth through homeownership by helping them select the best mortgage strategy for their unique housing needs,” the merger announcement said.
Using his background in the tech space, Harris is looking ahead to synergizing both companies going forward.
“Sales Boomerang and Mortgage Coach are both impressive, mission-driven organizations that have earned tremendous brand equity in the mortgage realm through their expert grasp of the industry and proven ability to deliver substantive value to mortgage lenders and borrowers,” said Harris. “I look forward to bringing the organizations together and leveraging my background in data, analytics and insights to help mortgage lenders better understand their borrowers and provide personalized service that helps them attain their homeownership and financial goals.”
While the announcement does not specify future reverse mortgage ambitions, founders of Sales Boomerang and Mortgage Coach respectively, Alex Kutsishin and Dave Savage, will maintain leadership roles in the newly-unified company, according to the announcement.
“By bringing together the very best in database monitoring, market intelligence, automation, personalization and education, Sales Boomerang and Mortgage Coach deliver the short- and long-term financial results lenders crave,” said Kutsishin. “We are united in our mission to provide borrowers with the right loan at the right time, and I am confident we will reach new heights under Richard’s leadership.”
“Together we have the expertise, the synergy and the platform to put game-changing tools in the hands of our lenders and loan officers,” Savage added.
Sales Boomerang and reverse mortgages
Both companies entered the reverse mortgage space very recently with different products. In the case of Sales Boomerang, this past February the company introduced “Reverse Mortgage Alert.” Similarly to other customer intelligence products offered by the company, it is designed to inform a lender when a borrower in its system would be a “good candidate” for either a Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM) as administered by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), or a proprietary reverse mortgage with higher lending limits.
The alert can trigger based on different parameters chosen by the lender, such as when a borrower is both age-eligible at 62, or maintains enough equity in his or her home to potentially qualify for a reverse mortgage loan. Describing the opportunity in terms familiar to the reverse mortgage industry and in considering record levels of home equity accumulated by seniors, company representatives see the industry as a largely untapped resource.
“For a long time. I had a lot of companies reach out to us and [ask if we do] anything for reverse mortgages or other types products, and the answer was no for the longest time,” said Richard Grieser, VP of marketing at Sales Boomerang to RMD in an interview at the time. “Now, we have this alert, which we’ve just rolled out because so many of our clients were asking for it. What that alert does is notify the lender the very moment any of their borrowers in their database could qualify for, or benefit from a reverse mortgage.”
Grieser also described the educational journey required of the company’s staff to develop a product that is centered on the reverse mortgage business, and how the company would also seek out partnerships with lenders active in the space.
Mortgage Coach and its ReverseVision partnership
In April, Mortgage Coach and reverse mortgage loan origination system (LOS) provider ReverseVision introduced an online program allowing loan originators to give consumers a comparison between reverse mortgages and traditional mortgages over the lifetime of the loan.
Describing how the reverse mortgage product — particularly on the HECM side — has gone through a series of notable refinements in recent years, Mortgage Coach President Joe Puthur described in an interview with RMD the general optimism with which Mortgage Coach views the reverse mortgage landscape on top of the favorable demographics in the industry’s corner.
“Never before has anyone been able to show a forward and reverse side-by-side, which is probably the largest challenge when you have a majority forward originator workforce that doesn’t have any capability of even introducing the reverse product,” Puthur told RMD in an interview. “Now, we’ve solved that. So, large lenders can have a bridge between the forward conversation and the reverse introduction with a total cost analysis.”
How the reverse mortgage offerings between both companies could now interact after the merger is currently unclear, but RMD will report on any additional developments when they happen.
