When news came down about the acquisition of American Advisors Group (AAG) by Finance of America (FOA), reactions across the reverse mortgage industry were largely optimistic. Now that some time has passed, FOA leaders are largely looking ahead at the business possibilities for the next year.
This is according to James Mittleman, FOA’s senior vice president of retail sales, in a recent interview with HousingWire’s Reverse Mortgage Daily (RMD). Mittleman, who has been a part of the reverse mortgage industry since at least 2007, has seen a lot of change come to the business. But he also said that much of the work to merge the people, systems and processes of two companies under one roof should help FOA maintain its positive momentum.
‘Integrations are tricky’
FOA is optimistic about its prospects going forward, largely owing to the work it has done over most of the past year to consolidate its workforce and technology stack under one company, Mittleman said.
“I think the two businesses are coming together to where it’s now starting to really hit its stride,” Mittleman explained. “The innovation work at Finance of America has enabled efficiencies, as well as challenged thought processes into how the business is done. It’s also highlighted the different strategies involved with retail. This last year has been a journey to where we went to places that we hadn’t been previously, regarding a lot of the production and milestones we reached within our loan sales and overall numbers.”
Early in 2025, Mittleman said there is a lot of excitement internally since there are several initiatives the company had not had a chance to pursue while it was still accomplishing the core tasks of the integration.
“This year, we plan on building on what was already done really well for getting everybody where we’re at today,” he said. “Integrations are tricky sometimes, and this one had its bumps along the way. But going into the end of the last year, we definitely see a really exciting path and have a lot of opportunities for success.”
Different companies, different technology
When asked about the potential “bumps,” Mittleman said it often came down to reconciling different tools used for specific reverse mortgage processes.
“The two businesses had retail channels that previously existed, and they had subtle nuances within the technologies and just the overall process that end-to-end fulfillment went through,” Mittleman said. “It was actually exciting to work between the two worlds, and figure out what’s the best way to actually serve our customers and work within our business, and to figure out how things worked.”
Mittleman called the integration “extremely successful,” and he saw an opportunity to either combine or choose the best tools to accomplish certain tasks in the process.
“We were able to examine both companies’ processes, and then take from that what we loved and put it together to take the best from both worlds and create something special,” he said. “With technology, there was a lot of work in getting different systems to speak to each other and work fluently.”
Despite some bumps that presented themselves, Mittleman said these were ultimately pretty minor.
“Plus, it was still a fun project to work through as we try to take two companies and create one great company with the retail channel,” he said.
Customer impact
When asked how customers are most impacted by the integration work, Mittleman said that one of FOA’s core values is being “customer-obsessed.” This attitude, he said, naturally crossed over into the integration process.
“That core value is a big passion point for me, being in the industry as long as I have,” he said. “When you wrap everything around the customer, everything just becomes a lot easier because they’re happy. And so, therefore, everything gets easier and everybody’s happy.”
This necessitated a closer look from a customer’s point of view at the various interactions they might have at different milestones in a loan’s life cycle.
“We aim to just really challenge ourselves on finding the best way,” he said. “Are they getting the satisfaction they need, and are we completing everything they’ve asked us to do when they gave us the opportunity to help them with the transaction?
“So, from a customer side, I’ve only been more excited about the process we’ve made, because there’s a full commitment within the business of being of the best service to our seniors that we possibly can be as the industry continually evolves and and we have to go in new directions.”
Assessing the process for customer experience was an end-to-end process, Mittleman said. It involved technology tools like the company’s loan origination systems, customer intake and messaging, customer relationship management and even the company’s phone systems.
