ReverseVision, which operates the largest technology platform used in the origination and servicing of reverse mortgages, suffered an outage with its RV Express system because of a hardware failure. It's the second technology disruption for the San Diego-based vendor.
The company sent an email to lenders apologizing for the performance issues with its system, which occurred during the overnight hours of Jan. 30, the last business day of the month. Like in the forward mortgage world, the end of the month is the busiest time for closing reverse mortgages.
"We had very high demand on the system over the last couple of days, approximately the last 48 hours. That demand level was high enough that for some users their transactions were very, very slow, to the point of feeling like [the system] is down, like it is not responsive," John Button, ReverseVision's president and CEO, said in an interview with National Mortgage News.
He compared it to a bad news, good news situation. The bad news was that the volume was affecting ReverseVision's ability to deliver its services. The good news was the cause; there has been an increase in
"The load on our system has grown substantially over the past few months. The industry is now adding loan records to our system at the rate of over one million per year — that's averaging 83,000 each month. Over 850 additional companies were added to the system in 2014 and the pace is higher this month," according to the email that was sent out under Button's signature.
ReverseVision had a team working on the system the night of Jan. 29 looking to increase capacity going into the last day of the month, Button said in the interview. But as they were finishing up that work, a piece of hardware on its main database server failed and that took the system offline, which was still the case as of 4:45 eastern time on Jan. 30.
The failed hardware has been replaced and is being brought online and the system should be active later on Jan. 30 or early on Jan. 31, he said. ReverseVision plans to update clients by email hourly or when there is additional information to be shared.
The company has added additional application servers to increase capacity. Separately, ReverseVision is in the process of bringing on board a whole new data center, with "a revised structure of hardware that has more capacity. That revised environment has been underway for the last few months and the intent is to migrate into that environment to give us considerably more capacity in the not too distant future," said Button.
Earlier in January, the company had an unrelated problem with RV Exchange, where there was an incorrect Internet address which redirected clients to the wrong server to get a software update from.
That problem did not affect the RV Express operating environment and is not related to the most recent issue, he said.
