The company, which already serves the Ontario market, has expanded to Canada’s westernmost province
Bloom Finance Company, a brokerage and lender billing itself the first fintech entrant to Canada’s reverse mortgage sector, has announced its expansion into the British Columbia market.
The company had initially operated solely in Ontario following its launch last year, with founder Ben McCabe (pictured top) telling Canadian Mortgage Professional that the move into BC marked the next phase of its plan to become a fully national reverse mortgage provider.
The news will see Bloom’s home equity release platform made available for homeowners above the age of 55 in Canada’s third-most-populous province.
“In terms of the size of the market and the opportunity, BC was the logical next step in the expansion,” McCabe said. “Home prices have risen dramatically across the country, but I think that rise has been especially pronounced in BC – certainly in the metropolitan areas.
“There’s certainly a lot of untapped equity that’s built up in homes in BC, and the amount of wealth in home equity in that province is potentially disproportionate to the income that those homeowners might have earned throughout their career.”
In addition to those surging home prices, two other characteristics of BC’s housing market have been an aging population and sometimes inadequate retirement savings, McCabe said. To that mix he added inflation, which has ballooned in recent months and currently sits at its highest national level for over three decades.
“With rising costs of living, seniors who are often living on a fixed income are especially feeling the pinch of higher prices,” he said.
“In the context of a rising price environment, the utility of a reverse mortgage to enhance purchasing power for them is obviously quite strong. So that’s another dynamic that’s going to influence the market over the next year.”
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Bloom is already setting its sights on further expansion over the next 12 months, McCabe added, with the Alberta market likely next in its sights before the planned establishment of a full national presence.
That marks a rapid evolution for the company since its home equity release platform was launched in September last year, a move that aimed to create a digital solution to streamline and accelerate the reverse mortgage process for aging and elderly Canadians.
The surging popularity of reverse mortgages in Canada shows little sign of abating, Bloom noted in a Press release to accompany news of its latest expansion, primarily because homeowners are beginning to utilize another means of tapping into the wealth they’ve accumulated in their home.
That’s allowed borrowers to access equity for debt consolidation, home renovations, and gifting down payments to family members to purchase their own property.
Having launched in Ontario as a “totally unknown entity,” McCabe said that Bloom had made rapid progress since its foundation, with the mortgage broker channel a key focus as it continues its growth both in 2022 and the years ahead.
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“We’ve been really happy in the way that [the company] was scaled in Ontario,” he said. “We started out really focused on the direct-to-consumer channel, leveraging the skillsets that a lot of the founding team had from our other experiences previously, and then [starting] in 2022 to put a lot more emphasis on the mortgage broker channel and building up our relationships there.”
Bloom’s key differentiator for McCabe has been its emphasis on customer experience optimization – cutting down on friction and the customer onboarding process to create as simple and seamless experience as possible for clients.
Unsurprisingly, the company’s focus on streamlining that mortgage process means it’s keeping a keen eye – like all technology firms in the mortgage space – on developments on the open banking front in Canada.
“We really are trying to get to the point where the only thing we need to ask the customer for is their name, their address and their date of birth, and various consents to pull information from other sources in order to get to the point where we can offer them a commitment,” he said.
“Integral to that is the ability to access their financial information, with their consent, from their financial institutions. Obviously, that requires advancement on the open banking side – so that’s certainly something we continue to encourage, as do most fintechs in the country.”
