Kim Smith on SmartFi’s strategy to grow the reverse mortgage pie

While the reverse mortgage industry has historically relied on specialized originators to drive volume, wholesale lender SmartFi Home Loans is looking elsewhere to expand the market.

The company’s growth strategy hinges on “growing the pie” by equipping traditional, forward-centric loan officers with the tools and education needed to seamlessly offer reverse mortgages to their clients.

“I hear a lot of people talk about growing the pie — that forward base would be growing the reverse mortgage pie, and that’s our core focus for growth,” Kim Smith, senior vice president of wholesale lending at SmartFi, said. “We are going to continue to support those traditional, reverse-focused originators, but the growth mindset has to be looking at reverses that aren’t even done in the current market.”

To execute this strategy, SmartFi is leveraging technology to simplify the origination process for newcomers. The lender recently partnered with Reverse Mortgage Insight (RMI) to integrate its Choice proprietary loan program into RMI’s tech platform, putting the product directly in front of a wider audience.

Simultaneously, SmartFi is building out a user-friendly internal partner portal designed to give forward LOs a quick, intuitive way to run numbers and make the financial mechanics of reverse mortgages make sense to their borrowers.

Smith recently sat down with HousingWire’s Reverse Mortgage Daily to talk about SmartFi’s strategy, the macroeconomic landscape and the main challenges for the industry.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Flávia Nunes: How do you see the current macro landscape impacting reverse mortgages?

Kim Smith: When you think about the traditional forward mortgage space, higher rates are typically correlated to those higher monthly mortgage payments. With the reverse mortgage, it’s designed to offer an optional monthly principal and interest mortgage payment. The bottom line is rates are less impactful in reverse than they are in forward. Not that they don’t matter.

The other thing is, our Choice proprietary reverse mortgage program in this current rate environment can offer higher loan amounts than the traditional HECM program. I feel rates are fueling the growth of proprietary reverse mortgages.

As far as demand, I don’t know that reverse has a demand issue. We have a distribution and education gap. We are looking to bridge that gap through our account executives, technology, and bringing the product to the forward-centric loan officer to let them grow that distribution. Product innovation is going to be a key as well.

FN: How does the Choice proprietary reverse mortgage program compare to HECM?

KS: The product is not FHA-insured. The Choice proprietary loan program doesn’t have a mortgage insurance premium. That’s a big difference. It can be a lower-cost option. Right now, with rates being as high as they are, what we look at is the principal limit factor tables. With HECM, when you put it side by side with the principal limit factor table of the proprietary Choice loan, you see Choice winning in a lot of cases. In a lower-rate environment, that wouldn’t be the case.

We offer fixed-rate and adjustable-rate options. Along with that FHA insurance, you have an FHA guideline on a HECM loan, whereas our Choice guideline is more of a conventional underwriting, which provides more flexibility in the qualification with borrowers. We still are looking for ability and willingness to pay taxes and insurance. It just provides more flexibility in those reviews.

FN: SmartFi grew HECM endorsements 32% YoY in 2025, ranking 12th nationally. What’s driving that growth? How has the performance been in 2026?

KS: Our growth is attributed to our people and the culture. I’ve been doing this for a while, specifically wholesale reverse mortgage for over 20 years, and I can say this is the best combination of sales and operational excellence. That’s the key. We have team members that will pick up the phone, work with our partners. We have a solution mindset. That is our secret sauce.

Our goal isn’t to be the biggest in this industry. It’s to be the best. We want the best experience for the originators and their borrowers from start to finish. When you put that lens on service, that speaks to the industry, and that’s where we’re seeing our growth. What we are looking for at SmartFi is consistent growth. We’re not looking for a spike. We’re not looking to take over the world. We’re looking for month-over-month consistent growth. That’s what we saw in 2025, and that’s what we’re seeing in 2026. 

FN: SmartFi launched a retail division in mid-2024 and closed it roughly a year later. What did that experience teach the company, and what are the advantages of going all-in on wholesale?

KS: The mentality of SmartFi is to leave no stone unturned. We want to be the best company we can; we’re not afraid to try different strategies, and then we just will learn from those and continue to evolve.

It’s very refreshing to not compete with our partners. In every other role that I’ve had in the space, there’s been a retail organization. It’s been my experience that those don’t necessarily cross paths that much. That being said, it’s very nice to not have to even have that conversation. We will not compete with our partner.

FN: When you joined the company, you highlighted SmartFi’s freedom from legacy processes. Three years later, what does that “best-in-class wholesale platform” actually look like in practice?

KS: Building the right team is where it starts. The people are the most important part, and that’s something that has become abundantly clear to me in the last three years. The other piece is empowering those people. You can have the best tech, the best process, and if you don’t have the right people as your foundation for that process, you’re going to see cracks.

In three years, we’ve done a great job of bringing the right people together, and then what we’re now working on is building on top of that foundation, continuing to evolve our technology, whether it is our CRM, how our ops team is working, etc. Those are all works in progress.

Even the technology, outward-facing. There’s really one option right now in the reverse space when you look from a loan origination system, and the forward space does not have an easy way to access our product. Just continuing to brainstorm on how to grow on the tech side, both operationally and outward-facing, to grow the market.

FN: Is SmartFi developing technology in-house or relying on vendors?

KS: We’ll bring all the resources together. We’ve seen a whole host of different technologies launched in the last 12 months, just trying to solve this forward – kind of how do you speak forward? How do you get it in front of more originators? How do you make it simple?

We’ve partnered most recently with RMI. They built a tech platform, and we want the Choice product to be in all of those technologies that are out trying to make a difference in the space. We’ve had a long-standing relationship with RMI, so it was like a no-brainer to partner with them, and that’s part of the technology strategy. That was a natural evolution of 20 years of working with RMI. One of our goals is to bring our Choice loan program to a broader audience, and we saw the RMI tool taking us a step closer to reaching that goal.

Then, we also are building internally. We have our partner portal, trying to offer a quick, very user-friendly solution to those forward LOs to come in and be able to run numbers and make it make sense to them. We’re employing any strategy that could possibly expand the reach of the product.

FN: Will the growth in the space come from forward loan officers offering reverse mortgages or reverse-focused LOs?

KS: We’ve built teams to support both. I hear a lot of people talk about growing the pie – that forward base would be growing the reverse mortgage pie. That’s our core focus for growth. We are going to continue to support those traditional, reverse-focused originators, but the growth mindset has to be looking at reverses that aren’t even done in the current market.

FN: What is the main challenge for this to happen?

KS: Twenty years ago, I started in this space, and there was a complete misconception of what this product was. There was a lot of very bad press, old products that people had learned about that they still thought was a reverse mortgage. You would think that at this point, we would be past those misconceptions. We aren’t.

I still, every day, am talking to leaders of forward companies, originators, or the person sitting next to me on an airplane, and they say, “Oh, what do you do?” And when you say, “Oh, I do reverse mortgages,” the cringe that you still get just because of misunderstanding of the product – that’s still this industry’s biggest hurdle. That becomes an education gap. We need more respected people that understand both financial planning and lending helping people understand that this is simply a mortgage with an optional principal and interest payment. That is what this is.

The thought that loans can take dramatically longer than a forward mortgage loan — that’s just not the case. We’re closing loans in seven to 14 days at SmartFi. They don’t have to take longer. There are just these deep-seated ideas of our products that we have to unseat through education. I would say that’s the biggest challenge for both SmartFi and I would say the entire industry.