Mortgage – HousingWire

A second reverse lender is targeting Gen X with private-label products
Digital mortgage platform Maxwell raises another $52.5M
What Microsoft’s new cloud platform means for mortgage
Lawsuits, red tape & interest rates: Do mortgage JVs have staying power?

A second reverse lender is targeting Gen X with private-label products

Posted: 26 Oct 2021 02:16 PM PDT

Leading reverse mortgage lender Finance of America Reverse (FAR) has lowered the minimum qualifying age for its "HomeSafe" suite of proprietary reverse mortgage products to 55 in the majority of the states in which the suite is available, Reverse Mortgage Daily has learned.

This makes FAR the second major reverse mortgage lender in the nation to lower the minimum age requirement on its proprietary, non-agency products. While the new threshold applies across a very prominent brand in the private-label reverse mortgage space, the new hybrid forward/reverse mortgage proprietary product that FAR introduced earlier in the year maintains its existing requirements related to the period which requires payments.

Read more details of the change to FAR’s HomeSafe product suite at Reverse Mortgage Daily.

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Digital mortgage platform Maxwell raises another $52.5M

Posted: 26 Oct 2021 10:12 AM PDT

Seven months after a $16 million Series B round, digital mortgage platform Maxwell has raised $52.5 million in additional funding, the company said on Tuesday.

The latest round was led by Fin VC, the venture capital firm that also led the Series B capital raise. Existing investors TTV Capital, Prudence, and Rotor Capital participated in the round, as well as Wells Fargo Strategic Capital.

A source told Bloomberg that the latest financing – split between $28.5 million in equity and $24 million in debt – valued the company at $450 million.

Tom Richardson, head of strategic capital principal technology investments at Wells Fargo Strategic Capital, said in a statement that the capital "will help them achieve their business goals and continue to expand their product offering."

Maxwell has raised a total of $73.8 million in the last 16 months. The company, founded in 2015, uses artificial intelligence to streamline and accelerate the mortgage process for community lenders and their borrowers. Community lenders represent 50% of the $4 trillion U.S. mortgage market.

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Maxwell’s premise is that small and midsized lenders have historically struggled to offer cutting-edge technology, scale effectively and hire the talent needed to meet the demand in boom markets.

"Large, online lenders are increasing their market share each year. For local and regional lenders to compete and survive, they need to digitally overhaul and enhance their processes," John Paasonen, Maxwell's co-founder and CEO, said in a statement.

Paasonen told Bloomberg that Maxwell has facilitated around $52 billion in loan volume year-to-date in 2021, expects to facilitate about $70 billion, and that more than 70% of the origination volume comes in the form of purchase mortgages. Annualized revenue should approach $100 million in the next 18 months, he told the business publication.

In September, Maxwell launched a trading platform to provide community lenders access to the secondary market, connecting these loan sellers to buyers.

Sadie Gurley, who leads Maxwell Capital, previously told HousingWire that the startup will use its capital to buy loans from community lenders. The company will not own the loans but sell to investors, picking up the spread.

However, because buying and selling mortgages is a capital-intensive business, Maxwell needs to raise more capital to grow the platform.

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What Microsoft’s new cloud platform means for mortgage

Posted: 26 Oct 2021 07:49 AM PDT

HW-Bill-Borden — Bill Borden, corporate vice president of worldwide financial services at Microsoft

Tech giant Microsoft plans to launch a new cloud-computing offering targeting the financial-services market on Nov. 1 as part of an effort to further bolster its fast-expanding cloud business. The secondary market may want to take note.

The Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services has been operating in a preview mode since March, with lenders like Navy Federal Credit Union and Virgin Money UK among the first financial institutions to take it for a test drive, according to a company blog. But Microsoft already has an impressive array of financial services companies as clients in the cloud-computing space, including Morgan Stanley, Standard Chartered Bank, BNY Mellon, Franklin Templeton and Fannie Mae.

"Microsoft's Azure [cloud-computing product] has been steadily gaining market traction for quite some time now, but Amazon's cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services, leads the cloud-computing space, which is a major headwind," states a recent research report by Zacks Investment Research. "… [Microsoft's] Intelligent Cloud segment, which includes server, and enterprise products and services, contributed 37.6% to total revenues. The segment reported revenues of $17.375 billion, up 30% year over year [for the company's fourth quarter ended June 30]."

Amazon, too, has a cloud segment dedicated to the financial services industry. Still, Microsoft's pending entry into that market with industry-dedicated cloud offerings promises to ratchet up the competition for clients who are seeking out digital and automation services in a fast-evolving market.

Microsoft also has lined up a host of partners that will be offering services and products through the financial-services cloud platform. Among them are accounting and consulting giants KPMG, EY and PwC as well as a host of independent software service and product providers — such as digital-lending platform Mortgage365, financial-software solutions platform Finastra and the financial-data solutions fintech BaseCap Analystics.

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Lawsuits, red tape & interest rates: Do mortgage JVs have staying power?

Posted: 26 Oct 2021 03:00 AM PDT

This is part two of a two-part series on joint ventures in the housing industry. To read the first part of this series, go here.

On a sunny, serene fall afternoon, the Chicago neighborhood of Ravenswood featured quiet socializing on outdoor brewery patios, cyclists of all ages, and, hidden alongside the elevated train tracks, the headquarters of mortgage lender Guaranteed Rate.

Founded in 2000 by its current CEO, Victor Ciardelli, Guaranteed Rate has Chicago brand recognition after it paid $2 million a year to rename where the White Sox play baseball. The lender's headquarters features a side entrance that headquarters three more companies: Guaranteed Rate Affinity, Proper Rate, which is the Guaranteed Rate/@properties joint venture, and OriginPoint, the forthcoming Guaranteed Rate/Compass JV.

Ciardelli has put together a literal side door of joint ventures, to the annoyance of his competitors.

"It's not like we just announced a deal with Guaranteed Rate like everybody's got to have a Guaranteed Rate kind of thing," said eXp CEO Glenn Sanford during an August earnings call discussing the partnership with Kind Lending. "This is actually something much more strategic."