San Diego-based Smartfi Home Loans, which primarily is active as a wholesale lender in the reverse mortgage space, will launch a retail division that offers reverse mortgage products and has hired industry veteran Paul Fiore as its president of retail sales.

“I am thrilled to announce that I have started my new role as president of retail sales at Smartfi Home Loans,” Fiore posted on social media on Monday. “Joining a team of highly accomplished professionals to establish a retail platform from scratch is an incredible opportunity.”

Fiore, who most recently worked at Finance of America (FOA) after its acquisition of his longtime employer American Advisors Group (AAG), sees a unique opportunity to build a new retail division in the industry from the ground up. He expressed excitement about the opportunity in an interview with HousingWire’s Reverse Mortgage Daily (RMD).

Making the move

Fiore described feeling a sense of possibility following his departure from FOA.

“In early June, I essentially — for the first time in 15 years — had the opportunity to explore opportunities in the market and consider how I was going to go forward,” he said. “I absolutely knew that I wanted to remain in the reverse mortgage industry. I’m still very passionate about what we do and the future potential that still remains for us. I surveyed the landscape, started thinking about what was a good fit for me, and began having discussions with Smartfi.”

Early on in these conversations, Fiore said he felt like Smartfi was the right fit for him.

“To me, the most successful working relationships are ones where you connect with the people you’re going to be working with and you have a shared vision for the future,” he said. “Through multiple conversations with various people in the organization, many of whom I know because they’re industry veterans, it was very clear that there was a shared vision for the future.”

He officially started as the company’s president of retail sales on July 29, which gives him the opportunity to build a retail division from the ground up. That’s because Smartfi exclusively operates as a reverse wholesale lender today. Having a degree of symbiosis between the existing wholesale channel and the new retail channel will be imperative for the company going forward, Fiore explained.

“It’s a holistic benefit to the organization when you have a retail platform and a wholesale platform that can work together,” Fiore said. “The innovation comes in when you build a retail platform from the ground up, starting with the basic technology and infrastructure build-out. You have to consider where the market is heading, where the borrowers are heading and how they want to transact.”

Keeping the trajectory of the market and borrower preferences in mind will be keys in the build-out of the new division, he added. The ways that both the industry and reverse mortgage borrowers have changed is also important to keep in mind.

“The borrower today is very different from the borrower 10 years ago,” he said.

The ground floor

Fiore said he is excited about the prospect of getting to be on the ground floor of an entirely new division, which he said feels similar to his earliest days at AAG. As far as first steps go, tools like the technology stack and the general workflow of the organization will need to be fully evaluated before the company starts hiring personnel — including loan officers.

If the company moved too fast and hired LOs prior to having the mechanics determined, that could prove suboptimal, he said.

“For me, it’s not about just hiring a bunch of loan officers and starting to sell loans,” he said. “You’re doing a disservice to everyone in that scenario. For me, a ground-up build literally means sitting down, meeting with compliance, meeting with tech and learning all the different systems — how they work today and how they need to be implemented for retail —all of that good stuff.”

Fiore will also reunite with a former AAG colleague, Kim Smith, who joined Smartfi last year as its senior vice president of wholesale lending. Being able to renew an established working relationship will help Fiore’s efforts to build out the new retail division, he said.

As for the addition of a new retail player in the reverse mortgage industry, Fiore said he hopes his colleagues at other companies are excited about the prospect.

“Our future success as an industry is dependent upon new players entering the space and existing players expanding the market with thoughtful, innovative messaging,” he said. “I’m hoping that people will take this in a positive way because my goal has always been to be additive to the industry. I think we all, as leaders, should be thinking of ways to expand this market. The product is more important than ever for the client base today.”

Fiore remains a strong industry advocate for both the product and his colleagues, he said.

“I’m championing and rooting for all of my former colleagues to be successful because I think the industry needs that. So, the more players, the better,” he explained.