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Fairway Home Mortgage on Tuesday announced a partnership with the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors (NAIFA) to unveil a new educational credential for NAIFA members.
The Certified Home Equity Advisor (CHEA) credential aims to help financial and insurance professionals “responsibly integrate home equity into comprehensive retirement planning,” Fairway explained in a press release. The continuing education program centers on the “ethical and strategic use of housing wealth — including reverse mortgages, when appropriate — as part of modern retirement strategies for clients age 55 and older.”
The CHEA credential will be offered exclusively to NAIFA members through an eight-hour program of academic research, case studies and fiduciary-aligned planning frameworks. The partnership is seeking to address a “long-standing gap in traditional financial education that often overlooks home equity as a retirement asset.”
Fairway and NAIFA developed the program together and will use licensed reverse mortgage specialists as teachers. The goal is to make more borrowers aware of reverse mortgages as a potential financial tool but not necessarily to increase product sales.
Those who complete the program earn the CHEA designation, along with access to a professional toolkit of consumer education resources and more.
“This program is about education, not origination,” George Bain, Fairway’s vice president of reverse lending initiatives, said in a statement. “Our goal is to help advisors better understand how housing wealth fits into retirement planning conversations, while maintaining the highest standards of compliance, ethics, and consumer protection.”
“Housing wealth is one of the largest and most underutilized assets in retirement planning,” said John Wheeler, NAIFA’s president-elect. “The CHEA credential reinforces NAIFA’s commitment to ethical, client-first education by equipping our members with the knowledge and confidence to address this asset responsibly and collaboratively.”
The course is being launched virtually and is initially available to NAIFA members in Colorado, with additional states being added during the first half of 2026. Those in Colorado can register online for a pair of four-hour sessions that are scheduled for March 17 and 19.
“The CHEA credential reflects growing industry recognition that retirement planning must evolve alongside demographic and economic realities, including longevity risk, market volatility, and rising healthcare costs,” said Brendan Bernat, senior director of credentials for NAIFA.
Fairway is a full-service national mortgage lender that does business across the forward and reverse channels. It was the sixth-largest originator of Home Equity Conversion Mortgages (HECMs) during the year ending in January 2026, according to data compiled by New View Advisors, endorsing 1,009 HECMs for a 3.8% market share.
While those at Fairway are fully capable of discussing RM (reverse mortgage) strategies, are they also capable of discussing them using a fiduciary and ethical framework? Perhaps theoretically but most likely not nearly as much experientially. The word, fiduciary, in its highest and most demanding use is a legal term, not merely a philosophical one. Law generally demands the highest standard of conduct when defining fiduciaries. It is doubtful if that term legally applies to the originating operations at Fairway.
California Civil Code Section 2923.1 states that a specific group of California licensed mortgage originators, (i.e., mortgage brokers) must act as fiduciaries as to their California clients. Mortgage lenders rarely have clients since they are offering a product, a mortgage. California mortgage brokers carry a fiduciary duty since they are offering a service to advise which products among the products which the lenders with which they work are most suitable for the California client. As to origination, almost all mortgagors are customers to a mortgage lender but clients to a mortgage broker. As to whether a mortgage broker MUST act as a fiduciary, that is a matter of state law.
If there is no legal requirement to act as a fiduciary, most legal advisors question if there is any fiduciary relationship at all. So in what situations would a lender like Fairway be legally considered or, more importantly bound, by a fiduciary duty?
Then there is the question of ethical standards. In our industry what so called ethical standards are even enforced to any extent at all? Compared to most “professions,” do we have sufficient ethical standards?
NAIFA has both fiduciary and relatively high ethical professional standards. Many of today’s RM strategies do NOT reflect the application of fiduciary standards. Too many presentations lack competitive suitable alternatives if there is ONE “obvious” choice that will close a deal. Also many times originators do NOT encourage prospects (or applicants) to get other “professionals” involved because the other “professionals” are viewed by the originators as likely deal killers.
While the NAIFA agreement may be good for some originators at Fairway, is it good for the industry as a whole? This fiscal year is starting as THE worst year for HECM endorsements since fiscal year 2003 despite many proclaiming that financial advisers are more receptive to discussing the place of RMs in their practices. Of course, we have been hearing this for almost 16 years now and even in several fiscal years before fiscal year 2010!
Then finally over what period of time did Fairway generate 1,009 HECM endorsements? I doubt if it was during the month of January 2026 or in the first four months of the fiscal year ending 9/30/2026. Since there is no common year that ends “IN” January 2026, what year is being referenced, one starting on 2/1/2025 and ending on 1/31/2026? If so, why was that not plainly stated?