Celink takes reverse mortgages to the cloud with Gravicore

About the Client

Celink is the United States’ leading subservicer of reverse mortgages. With a portfolio of over two hundred and fifty thousand loans, Celink is the subservicer of choice for the nation’s largest reverse mortgage lenders. Celink’s fully scalable servicing platform, ReverseServ Elite, supports proprietary reverse mortgage products and the government-insured Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM). Reverse mortgages are home-equity products that help older homeowners stay in their homes and enjoy fulfilling retirements. Celink maintains an SQ2 rating as a primary servicer of reverse mortgage loans from Moody’s.

The Challenge

Celink sought a multi-year, ground-up redevelopment of its core servicing system, ReverseServ, that would address system redundancy and scalability issues while also heralding the transformation of Celink into a technology-powered enterprise.

Gravicore’s Solution

Since the Celink team had no native expertise with Amazon Web Services, bringing in an experienced partner to accelerate cloud adoption was a natural choice. Celink turned to Gravicore.

With 50 years’ combined experience in mortgage origination, servicing and capital markets, Gravicore fuses financial services domain knowledge with technology delivery expertise to rapidly deploy innovative and highly scalable solutions.

First, Gravicore established a secure hybrid cloud environment, connecting Celink’s collocated data centers with a new AWS infrastructure. Then Gravicore architects and engineers worked alongside the Celink team to accelerate the planning, configuration and automation of a well architected framework, supplementing AWS best practices with their own opinionated solutions. 

Gravicore also provided managed services for Celink’s DevOps, establishing a variety of teams, processes and tools around cloud architecture, software development lifecycle (SDLC), continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD), security operations (SecOps), site reliability engineering (SRE), release management and developer support. 

With automated infrastructure and event-driven data management capabilities in place, further modernization of Celink’s servicing platform required integration to existing legacy systems and the redevelopment of business process management modules for servicing operations.

To mitigate risk and increase speed-to-production, Gravicore utilized an iterative, microservices-based approach that allowed Celink to incrementally deploy new services as they became ready for business adoption. To date, Celink and Gravicore have modernized more than a dozen technology-enabled workloads representing a comprehensive set of business functions.

Outcomes and Benefits

With the help of Gravicore’s partnership, Celink’s investment in modernization has paid off in a big way, delivering measurable business value that spans cost savings, staff productivity, operational resilience, organizational controls and business agility. 

• 40% reduction in fulfillment times
  Automating previously manual processes has allowed Celink to reduce the days required to fulfill line-of-credit draws from five to three. Similar gains in efficiency have been reported across Celink’s business processes.
• Eliminating late disbursement penalties
  Consistent and timely fulfillment of line-of-credit draws has virtually eliminated Celink’s exposure to regulatory penalties imposed when mortgage servicers fail to make timely disbursements to borrowers
• Hundreds of hours a month in time savings
  By replacing manual spreadsheets with automated investor reports, Celink has saved its investor reporting team an estimated 14 to 16 man-hours per business day while greatly reducing reporting lag and strengthening controls. Moreover, automating LOC draw intake and processing resulted in the reduction of over a dozen full-time resources.
• 10X increase in software deployment frequency
  The move to Amazon Web Services has significantly improved Celink’s agility. Whereas the previous IT structure supported no more than two code deployments per month, now Celink can deploy changes multiple times a day for faster bug resolution and rollout of new features.
• A best-in-class borrower experience
  Celink’s Borrower Portal has quickly become a beloved tool for the more than 50,000 active users on the system to date. Whereas borrowers once had to call, fax or mail Celink for customer support, today more than 40% of borrower LOC Draw requests come in through the portal — a digital transformation that is especially impressive given that reverse mortgage borrowers in America have a median age of 73.
• Lower total cost of ownership (TCO)
  Going serverless has allowed Celink to control its infrastructure spend at will, eliminating expenses associated with over-provisioning and server management while improving uptime. For example, The technology systems and software expense of Celink’s production borrower portal is currently less than $1,000 per month.