- 2 days ago
In this conversation with HousingWire’s Allison LaForgia, Longbridge COO Bill Packer discusses the company’s evolving approach to technology innovation, from bringing development in-house to deploying AI-powered agents that improve reverse mortgage productivity and customer engagement. Packer shares how tools like Loanbridge Bridget and IRIS are streamlining operations, why human expertise remains essential and how Longbridge is investing in new lending products to meet changing borrower needs.
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00:12From Chicago with HousingWire, I'm Alison LaBorgia, and I am sitting down with the
00:16Longbridge Financial Chief Operational Officer, Bill Packer. Bill, thank you for joining me today.
00:22Thanks for having me. Really nice to be here.
00:24Now, Bill, Longbridge has invested heavily in technology and product innovation over
00:30the past several years. How has your approach to innovation evolved and where have you focused
00:35your attention as COO? Thanks, Alison. Our strategy over the four and a half years that I've been
00:43with the company has really evolved. When I first arrived at the company, we were primarily focused
00:50in a vendor partnership model in which most of the heavy lifting on the technology side
00:56was done by our vendor partners. As we've evolved, matured, our practice and our capabilities,
01:03brought people into the company to run our technology and really understand it. We've
01:10matured that strategy so that today, a lot of the heavy lifting is done by our own teams.
01:16Now, don't get me wrong. It doesn't mean we're not partnering with vendors. Absolutely have
01:21strong vendor partnerships, but more and more of the work is done by our own teams.
01:26Now, Longbridge has introduced new tools and platforms across the business,
01:30from Borrower Portal to Iris. How do you decide where technology can solve real business or customer
01:38problems rather than simply adding another tool to the mix?
01:42That's another really great question, Alison. So, when we think about where we're going to make our
01:47investments, the very first thing we do, whether it's myself, our CEO, Chris Mayer,
01:54our chief marketing and chief revenue officer, Melissa Macereto, we listen to our customers.
02:01We go out in the marketplace. Just like this morning, we're having breakfast with a client,
02:06listening to what are their needs? How can we help them? How do we make their business better?
02:11Same thing on the retail side, listening to our loan officers. So, we spend a lot of time
02:15listening to our loan officers and understanding what are the key challenges that they're facing?
02:21How do we make their lives easier? And therefore, how do we make our customers' lives easier? How do
02:25we make that experience easier? On the servicing side, where we spent an awful lot of time,
02:31it's really listening to that servicing customer, as well as where that loan originally came from,
02:38whoever partner or internally generated, because often that customer will reach back out
02:45to the originator and talk to them about good and bad that they're having. So, we really try to listen
02:50to that and infuse that into our roadmap for future technology innovation. One of the things you
02:58mentioned, the borrow portal, I'll just touch on that for a second. Once you make this investment,
03:04then a natural question is, well, has it been successful? And if we look at the borrow portal,
03:11which is still in beta, we haven't gone fully GA with it yet, still in beta, fully 40% of
03:19the
03:19customers that we invite to participate in the portal, so almost half, 40%, I'll round up,
03:25they are choosing to use the borrow portal rather than more traditional methods of reaching out
03:31directly to their loan officer. So, we're getting really good adoption. And keep in mind, this is a
03:35demographic. You have to be at least 55 years or older, depending upon your state and the product
03:42you're talking about. This is a demographic that most people would say tend to be less reluctant
03:48to adopt technology than maybe your first-time home buyer who's in their 20s and 30s.
03:54But nonetheless, we're getting excellent, excellent adoption on that product, just as one example.
04:00Now, AI has become a significant part of Longwood's technology strategy, including the use of AI-powered
04:08agents in servicing and internal operations. Where are you seeing AI create the most meaningful
04:14efficiencies today? And where do you still believe human expertise is essential?
04:19It's another really great question, Allison. I appreciate in terms of, you know, when you think
04:25about this new frontier, these agentic agents, how are they modifying our business? And how do we
04:33really judge where they should be deployed versus where we should have humans? And let me say
04:38categorically, and I think I've said this on previous HousingWire interviews, we always believe in
04:44keeping humans firmly in the loop. So if, for example, you're interacting with one of our chat bots,
04:53we call them the Bridges, Mr. and Mrs. Bridges. If Mr. and Mrs. Bridges should call you, say they want
04:58to
04:58do the welcome call, which we just released last week, say they want to do the welcome call, talk to
05:03you about the stipulations on your loan, what are the conditions? The first thing they tell you is they
05:10say, I'm an AI chat agent. If you'd like to speak to a human at any time, just let me
05:16know and I'll
05:16transfer you to a human. We really want to be transparent about that. And we always want to
05:20keep that human in the loop. Now, the deployment of these technologies like Mr. and Mrs. Bridges,
05:28they've made our entire team more productive. So we're seeing in our processing area, for example,
05:34that our processes are able to handle 12% more loans than they would have before we started to
05:41deploy these technologies. Keep in mind, we're just at the beginning of this. And that gives them the
05:47time to really focus on the more complex transactions. So back to your earlier point about
05:54how do we decide what does the AI work on? What does the human being work on? Let the AI
06:01work on the
06:02simpler, more straightforward transactions. And then when things get more complex, there's more
06:07discussion that needs to happen, you really need that expertise. Then you have the processor,
06:12the underwriter, the loan officer, whomever you need engage with that customer. And now they have
06:16the time because they weren't handling the more routine transactions. Now they have the time to really
06:23sit down with the customer or the client and go through that. I'll make one more point because you
06:30ask, where are we seeing the most significant? And I'll just say that the place where we've seen the
06:36most significant results has been in the technologies that have been in market the longest. So we have
06:43Bridget. Keep in mind, we're Longbridge. Bridget, Mr. and Mrs. Bridges, see the theme? Yeah, that's our
06:49marketing team. I love them. So Bridget, which is our chat agent, she knows all of our guidelines. She knows
06:59the
06:59procedures and you can chat with her. Since she went live in December of 2025, she's answered over 76,000
07:08questions, 76,000 questions. Of the 76,000 questions, I looked it up this morning. I don't want to, I
07:15don't
07:15want to get this wrong. Of the 76,000 questions she's answered 141 times, 76,000, 141 times,
07:25the person who's received the answer has said, that's not a good answer. I don't think you're
07:30right. So if you think about that, that is overwhelming positive acceptance. That's incredible.
07:36And that's 76,000 times that an underwriter or the loan structuring desk didn't have to engage,
07:44that it was actually answered by the agent directly 24 hours a day. I'll also, I looked it up this
07:52morning as well, that if you look at that 76,000 questions that she's answered, fully 15% of those
08:00are coming from our clients. So 85% are internally asking questions, 15% of the time, it's our client.
08:08So it's, it's really getting great, great use. So Bridget's internal and external. That's right.
08:14She's busy. She is busy. Yes. But she's wicked smart, as I like to say. It sounds like it.
08:19Now, reverse mortgages have traditionally been viewed as complex back to your point about some
08:26of the more complex transactions. And they're also viewed as a highly manual part of the mortgage
08:33industry. How is Longbridge using technology to make the experience simpler for borrowers,
08:38loan officers, partners, and employees? Yeah. I would say two things to that. First off,
08:45you know, in terms of it being more complex, I think it's actually less complex. You think about
08:52what we're doing. All we're really trying to do is make the home equity that's already there in the
08:57home available for the customer to help fund their retirement. Plain and simple. It's a very simple
09:04mission. I think it's been made complex because in the reverse mortgage industry, we've adopted
09:10language that's somewhat different from the forward mortgage industry. And I think that is where this
09:18notion of complexity comes from. For example, I'll give you an example. I was having breakfast this
09:24morning and we were talking about this notion of a principal authorized agent, PAA. Well, in the forward
09:32space, we just call that correspondent non-delegate. But for some reason in the reverse mortgage space,
09:39we adopted another term. And that's confusing to people. And then it sounds complex. It's not
09:44complex at all. It's just another term for the same thing. So I don't think it's more complex. In fact,
09:50I think it's actually less complex. You think about the straightforward interaction of what we're
09:55trying to do. So I would say that that's number one. To your second point, and I applaud, you know,
10:04Chris, Chris Mayer, our CEO, when he brought me on board, said, Bill, this industry has been for its
10:12existence, largely populated by folks that have executed these transactions manually. And we haven't
10:24done a lot of automation, which is really true. So for example, every transaction that gets underwritten
10:32is a manual underwriting. Now you tell me, Alison, where else in the mortgage industry is every single
10:38transaction manually underwriting? No, we have DU and LPA and total, et cetera, et cetera.
10:46So we looked at that and we said, we really have to bring a level of automation that's been unheard
10:51of into this environment. And you mentioned Iris a little while ago. Iris is our attempt at deploying
11:00automated underwriting, really to help the underwriters make credit decisions into the
11:06environment, streamlining the process for our customers, making it transparent, repeatable,
11:13and bringing really all of those capabilities that we've had in the more traditional space,
11:20more traditional mortgage space to the reverse mortgage world, as well as our other products
11:25like HELOC for seniors and some other products that I can't yet talk about, but they're coming down the
11:29pipe. Stay tuned. More coming. More coming. Definitely. Now, to your point about the expansion,
11:37Longbridge has also expanded beyond the traditional HECM through proprietary reverse mortgage products.
11:43More coming. And HELOC for seniors. How important is product innovation alongside technology innovation
11:50as you think about serving the changing financial needs of older homeowners?
11:56Yeah. Yeah. It's another really great question. And as we see our demographic evolving and the economic
12:05conditions evolving, interest rates, or I don't think anybody's happy where interest rates are today,
12:13right? And that's going to put new stress in the environment. I think we're not entirely happy where
12:19inflation is today either. That's also going to put new stress in the environment. It's important that we keep
12:25iterating on the products that we're offering so that we bring to market solutions that our customers
12:32need. And I would say, you know, again, Chris and Melissa, I really applaud them. They have been on
12:37the forefront of really keeping their eyes looking very far down the road and saying, what is our
12:43customer base going to need? How do we help our clients succeed? And then go in the back office,
12:50go in the kitchen and iterate on these really amazing products like HELOC for seniors and like some more that
12:57are
12:57almost here. I wish I could talk about them. But we've got a couple more that are just, I think,
13:02I think they're going to be
13:03game changers for the space and really help our clients succeed.
13:07Now, looking more towards the future, let's say the next three to five years, what do you think will separate
13:13the mortgage
13:14companies that truly innovate from those that simply adopt new technology? And where do you see the biggest opportunity
13:21for Longbridge?
13:22Yeah, so I think first off, companies that fail to adopt these new technologies and really move quickly down the
13:35the train, I think they're missing a really golden opportunity. However, I fully understand if a company says, you know
13:46what, I'm going to rely on my loan origination vendor to bring those technologies to me because I don't feel
13:52like I have the expertise to make those investments.
13:54And I think there'll always be a place for those clients. For us and the space that we're in, it's
14:01critically important that we introduce innovative techniques and new products so that we're always out ahead of what our demographic
14:11is going to need, which is older Americans, of which I am one of those, right?
14:17And so it's really important that we keep iterating and keep moving that train down the path. And then we're
14:25happy to have all of our clients come along with us as we make those investments and think about that
14:32future.
14:33I think we are at an inflection point. And I'm old enough to remember two things from my history. I'm
14:45old enough to remember the invention of the internet and how that became game changing, how it changed how we
14:54did business, how we interacted with each other.
14:56And it really was a boom to the economy and created a lot of jobs. I'm also old enough to
15:05remember when China became the manufacturing engine of the world and how that really in many ways resulted in very
15:16negative implications for large segments of American population that were involved in that and their jobs wound up going to
15:23China.
15:23So I'm old enough to remember both of those. I think where we are is we are at the dawn
15:30of like the new internet with all these AI technologies. However, I keep a careful eye on the fact that
15:36I also want to be cognizant that there is another path and we should be careful about that and thoughtful
15:42about that and not just proceed without learning from the past. So I keep both of those lessons in mind.
15:49Bill, thank you so much for sitting down with me.
15:52It was wonderful. Thanks for making it so easy, Alison. I appreciate it.
15:55And thank you for telling us what Longbridge is up to and how you're innovating, not just the technology, but
16:00also the product space.
16:01Great. It was my pleasure.
16:03More to come soon.
16:04Absolutely.