Sept/Oct 2021 Reverse Mortgage Magazine

ACCESSING YOUR MORTGAGE account online is fairly commonplace in the conventional mortgage world, but not so much in the reverse mortgage space. One reverse mortgage company is working to change that. Last year, Lansing, MI-based Celink, the largest subservicer of reverse mortgages, launched an online borrower portal at reversedepartment.com . This secure, interactive website allows borrowers to manage their reverse mortgage accounts online. It’s one of the most important innovations for the reverse mortgage industry in a long time, and one of the key people behind the effort was Sergey Dyakin, Celink’s chief information officer. Dyakin has extensive experience in managing technol- ogy development for mortgage and investment analysis products, as well as an expertise in modeling, acquisition, servicing and securitization. Prior to joining Celink, he was the founder of Aldan Group, a consulting company focused on cloud adoption by financial services companies. Dyakin’s involvement in reverse mortgages began when he worked at New York-based Fortress Investment Group from 2010 through 2016. During his time there, Dyakin helped Nationstar Mortgage Holdings Inc. create from scratch a leading reverse mortgage servicing business (Champion Mortgage). Reverse Mortgage magazine sat down with Dyakin to learn more about Celink’s new online portal, enhancements being considered in future updates, and why this is an important step forward for reverse mortgage borrowers. Reverse Mortgage: What’s your background? Where did you grow up? How did you become involved in mortgage technology? Sergey Dyakin: I grew up in Russia, got my master’s in physics and math there, and then worked for several years before I came to the U.S. to attend business school. I got involved in reverse mortgages around ten years ago while working to help build, at that time, the nation’s largest reverse mortgage servicer. By working in private equity on investments in mortgage-related assets, I had to use massive amounts of data to build investment models, or to conduct servicing oversight. I worked with my company’s IT department to build technology to develop, process and present the data. While doing that, I looked for ways to get better solutions for dealing with such data. This is how I got interested in cloud [technology] and the opportunities that it offered and eventually decided to switch to technology. Sergey Dyakin, Chief Information Officer, Celink By Darryl Hicks From the Top Sergey Dyakin 12 REVERSE MORTGAGE / SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2021