— Integration builds on legacy of disruptive secondary marketing automation and sets stage for significant ongoing enhancements —

Optimal Blue, the leading provider of secondary marketing automation and services in the mortgage industry, announced today the completion of a “lights-out” integration between its comprehensive hedge advisory and loan trading platforms. The announcement exemplifies Optimal Blue’s ongoing commitment to provide enterprise, end-to-end automation through superior technology with functional depth.

The only one of its kind, this real-time integration uses a library of proprietary APIs to seamlessly automate vital functions within the secondary marketing process that to date, have been increasingly complex and resource intensive. Further, the two-way integration builds on the advanced workflow automation that is already established within the Optimal Blue platform.

For years, Optimal Blue clients have recognized the significant competitive advantage of a seamless integration between the company’s flagship product eligibility and pricing and hedge advisory platforms by automatically updating the hedge position based on loans locked in the product eligibility and pricing engine. The new and highly anticipated “lights-out” integration between the hedge analytics and trading platform takes it a step further by fully automating the feed of loans that are “ready-to-sell” and returning post-trade updates to sync hedge positions in real time.

“We are thrilled to deliver this next generation of automation to our clients,” said John Ardy, Vice President of Resitrader by Optimal Blue. “More than half of our clients have already transitioned to the integrated platform and those that remain will be migrated over the next several months.” Optimal Blue anticipates monthly trading volumes to exceed $5 billion upon completion of client onboarding.

Optimal Blue views this integration as the foundation for several significant innovations and ongoing enhancements, like the use of proprietary machine learning algorithms to assist buyers and sellers optimize their trading strategies, as well as a fully automated “lights-out” loan execution to deliver a full roundtrip automation experience linking buyers and sellers. In addition, Optimal Blue is pursuing the expansion of axe posting for CRA, non-QM, and Jumbo transactions.

“There is considerable value in a unified technology platform,” explained Scott Happ, CEO of Optimal Blue. “This integration provides further transparency into whole loan transactions and delivers the connectivity, efficiency, and liquidity necessary to thrive in today’s competitive environment.”

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PRESS CONTACT FOR OPTIMAL BLUE
Robert J. Brandt
Vice President, Marketing & Strategic Alliances
(469) 609-5585
bbrandt@optimalblue.com

— The only social media compliance automation platform designed for the mortgage industry —

The mortgage industry is aggressively pursuing the digital mortgage while margins are tight and competition is at an all-time high. Additionally, vendor integration is a must and consumers are requiring transparency like never before.

Because of all of these challenges, the industry is calling for an integrated platform, as well as more granular automation and functionalities. Optimal Blue, a pioneer in secondary marketing automation, offers an innovative, integrated, end-to-end platform that lenders rely on to meet and exceed their secondary marketing needs.

With the largest resource commitment to secondary marketing technology in the industry, Optimal Blue is used more widely than any other solution and is exclusively focused on helping lenders streamline the entire secondary marketing process, from content to commitment, and everything in between.

“Our comprehensive secondary marketing automation platform sits at the center of our Digital Mortgage Marketplace, which breaks down silos between industry participants – lenders, investors, and mortgage technology providers – and brings them together for mutual success,” said Optimal Blue CEO Scott Happ.

The Optimal Blue platform includes a robust content management application, a product eligibility and pricing engine (PPE), a hedge analytics and digital loan trading system, data and analytics, and the only social media compliance automation platform designed specifically for the mortgage industry.

In addition, Optimal Blue offers a comprehensive set of APIs and automatic connections to a broad network of best-of-breed mortgage technology providers and strategic partners.

Due to Optimal Blue’s size and reach, participants benefit from the “network effect.”

Investors and originators benefit from a larger pool of both buyers and sellers, while technology providers benefit from being connected to the largest networks of originators, investors and real-time content versus a “closed network” strategy.

By bringing loan buyers and sellers together — along with best-of-breed mortgage technology providers — on a single, unified technology platform, Optimal Blue equips every player in the secondary market to compete and thrive.

EXECUTIVES PROFILED IN THIS ARTICLE

Scott Happ, CEO
Scott Happ has 30 years of experience in financial services and mortgage lending technology. He founded Mortgagebot in 1997 and built the company into a nationally recognized SaaS solutions provider, selling the company to D+H in 2011. In 2016, Happ teamed with GTCR, a leading private equity firm, to acquire Optimal Blue, where he serves as CEO.

Sue Baker, VP of Product and Client Services
Sue Baker brings over 30 years of experience in the mortgage industry, beginning as a loan officer and later assuming responsibility for sales and training for a network of over 200 loan officers. She also designed a software solution that allowed loan officers to gather applications and request online underwriting approval electronically at the point of sale. Baker serves as chief product officer at Mortgagebot.

Bob Brandt, VP of Marketing and Alliances
Bob Brandt has more than 20 years of experience in the financial services industry. Prior to Optimal Blue, Brandt established and managed the sales and marketing organization at Mortgagebot, where over 15 years he helped the company acquire productive, multi-year relationships with more than 1,500 banks and credit unions nation-wide and was named to the Inc. 500 list of America’s fastest growing companies.

This piece was originally featured on HousingWire.com.

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PRESS CONTACT FOR OPTIMAL BLUE
Robert J. Brandt
Vice President, Marketing & Strategic Alliances
(469) 609-5585
bbrandt@optimalblue.com

— The company’s suite of products provide a transparent process for buyers and sellers —

The last 18 months have seen a significant shift in both the primary and secondary mortgage markets. Facing shrinking loan volume and compressed margins, lenders have broadened their loan products for borrowers who fall outside of traditional government or conforming guidelines, prompting investors to add programs that incorporate these loans.

But these new opportunities present real challenges. The number of investors has grown significantly since the financial crisis, with 150 organizations now actively buying loans. And the types of loans available for purchase have also multiplied. Combined, these factors have compounded the complexity of the secondary marketing function, demanding sophisticated automation for accurate content management and execution.

Fortunately, Optimal Blue has spent the last several years relentlessly auto-mating the entire secondary marketing process — from content to commitment, and everything in between — and can meet these challenges head-on.

Optimal Blue, founded in 2002, provides not only industry-leading solutions for originators and investors but also an enterprise-level, end-to-end platform that processes more than $750 billion worth of transactions each year. Its Digital Mortgage Marketplace connects mortgage buyers and sellers in an efficient, transparent process that facilitates a broad set of secondary market interactions.

The company’s view into the data associated with these transactions led it to develop the Optimal Blue Mortgage Market Indices (OBMMI) to provide mortgage and finance professionals and market participants with greater visibility into key drivers of mortgage pricing. Based on actual locked rates with consumers across more than 35% of all mortgage transactions nationwide, OBMMI provide the most extensive and accurate interactive analysis of pricing ever conducted in the mortgage industry.

OBMMI aggregates data from 2 million transactions a year between 800 lenders, 3,000 brokers, and 200 buyers of loans and synthesizes that data into 16 primary and detailed mortgage rate indices. Updated daily through a robust API, the indices can be compared with each other to isolate specific market movements and spot trends.

“For close to two decades, Optimal Blue has led the mortgage industry with pricing automation technology designed to facilitate transactions between consumers and lenders,” explained Bob Brandt, vice president of marketing and alliances at Optimal Blue. “Complete with the industry’s largest product eligibility and pricing library, and backed by an unparalleled commitment to accuracy, Optimal Blue’s platform ensures that consumers are presented with the best-fit financing alternatives and that lenders consistently deliver the best price.”

Optimal Blue continues to evolve its platform, providing lenders and investors with inspired technology that automates key functions of the secondary marketing process.

AUTOMATING THE SECONDARY MARKETING FUNCTION

Product Eligibility & Pricing

Optimal Blue is the largest product eligibility and pricing (PPE) provider in the industry, serving more than 50% of the market and processing $600 billion worth of rate locks every year. The company has made significant investments to automate this functionality and the result is a robust system that delivers a single source of compliant pricing with 99.995% accuracy, making Optimal Blue’s PPE the system of record for the mortgage industry.

That accuracy is a hallmark of Optimal Blue, which uses an extensive set of product filters to identify applicable loan programs and then evaluates best execution pricing among eligible products. This capability is even more critical given the growing number of non-QM loan products in the market.

In addition to the execution, content, and margin management that Optimal Blue’s flagship PPE is known for, the company recently rolled out a new innovation — a “lights-out” lock desk functionality that can automatically lock the loan, change the lock, change the product type, grant exceptions, and more.

“When it comes to secondary marketing, the lock desk is a high-cost function,” said Optimal Blue CEO, Scott Happ. “We’ve automated the entire process. Lenders can configure auto-accept policies for locking and relocking products with characteristics that don’t require a manual touch, thereby reducing lock desk involvement in scenarios where automated policies can do the work instead.”

Hedging

Optimal Blue’s sophisticated hedge advisory and analytics platform integrates seamlessly with its PPE and digital loan trading platforms. This automated collaboration provides Optimal Blue clients with a tremendous competitive advantage.

First, interest rate locks from the PPE flow into the pipeline in real time, ensuring that the hedge position is always fully updated. Second, the broadest possible set of executions is available, ensuring that lenders will always discover the best price.

In addition, automating the loan trading and committing process through the Resitrader system reduces costs and error rates. “By combining exceptional analytics with unmatched system integration, Optimal Blue is uniquely positioned to help lenders succeed when deploying a mandatory execution strategy,” Happ said.

Loan Trading

In July 2018, Optimal Blue acquired Resitrader, creating the mortgage industry’s largest mortgage loan trading platform. Resitrader’s interactive trading environment enables buyers, sellers, and their advisors to transact in real time using an auction process and replaces the widely-used method of exchanging bid tapes via email.

The solution also helps traders optimize executions by supporting shadow-bidding, the posting of axes, chat-based communication, and color reports. Resitrader has achieved remarkable success with its trading platform over the past year, recording a 400% increase in transactions.

Optimal Blue has made it easy for investors to use Resitrader through the recent launch of another robust API designed to integrate with investors’ existing, internal systems. The APIs embed and trigger the market-leading capabilities of Resitrader into whatever trading application the investor is currently using, similar to the API plug-in capability offered through Optimal Blue’s PPE.

“Most clients are perfectly fine with coming into the Resitrader system to do their business,” explained Happ. “However, the largest investors look to our highly functional and real-time APIs to integrate with their own infrastructure and technology, so they are still able to take advantage of the benefits of the Resitrader platform. This is just another step for us to integrate into investor and origination businesses to maximize the efficiencies they require.”

Social Media Platform

Social media is an extremely powerful business development tool for lenders and Optimal Blue provides the only fully automated social media compliance platform designed specifically for the mortgage industry. The comprehensive platform enables lenders to manage the social media activities of loan officers through audits, monitoring, and collaboration. The audits are point-in-time, comprehensive reviews, while automated monitoring constantly evaluates social activity and proactively identifies trigger terms and keywords to isolate compliance concerns requiring remediation.

This piece was originally featured on HousingWire.com.

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PRESS CONTACT FOR OPTIMAL BLUE
Robert J. Brandt
Vice President, Marketing & Strategic Alliances
(469) 609-5585
bbrandt@optimalblue.com

— Integration modernizes MLS property specific listings with accurate, compliant pricing —

Optimal Blue,the leading provider of secondary marketing automation and services in the mortgage industry, announced today the integration certification of RatePlug. Through direct integration with Optimal Blue’s real-time product eligibility and pricing API, RatePlug’s proprietary mortgage marketing platform now seamlessly delivers compliant scenario pricing and connects today’s real estate agents, lenders, and homebuyers via participating Multiple Listing Services (MLS).

Optimal Blue’s advanced RESTful API endpoints enable RatePlug to provide property specific affordability calculations with over 70 MLS partnerships. This comprehensive pairing of technology brings mortgage transparency to the homebuying process and creates a unique, fully compliant flow of mortgage data between the MLS platforms that active agents, their lender partners, and homebuyers rely on daily to transact home purchases.

“We are excited to afford our audience of +800,000 real estate agents the ability to share real-time mortgage payment options directly to homebuyers that are actively searching for a home,” explained Brad Springer, President of RatePlug. “Any lender focused on purchase originations will recognize that this is an incredible opportunity to not only build deeper agent relationships, but to encourage more digital pre-approvals and write more loan applications.”

The RatePlug MLS footprint, coupled with Optimal Blue’s industry-leading product eligibility and pricing, sets the gold standard for MLS listing promotions and broadens the scope of opportunity for those shopping for affordable mortgage payments. The integration also creates additional marketing opportunities for lenders, such as ‘total monthly cost to own’ flyers and search results for special financing programs.

“Our partnership with RatePlug is unique in that it ties an MLS property listing to a borrower’s personalized profile,” said Chazz Huston, Manager of Strategic Alliances at Optimal Blue. “This integration exhibits another great example of leveraging Optimal Blue’s API technology to create a high-impact experience for lenders and their realtor partners alike, as well as today’s homebuyer.”

ABOUT RATEPLUG
RatePlug is the nation’s leading mortgage technology that is integrated directly into Multiple Listing Service platforms. Providing over 800,000 Agents and their homebuyers with real time mortgage information, including a digital pre-approval process, specific to every property they view. Realtors benefit from this technology as it has been shown to accelerate the speed of the transaction by upwards of 15%. Lenders benefit by having their information compliantly shared by their Agent’s with each and every homebuyer they work with, which increases capture rate and ultimately generates more purchase volumes. The RatePlug Program also includes an automated flyer system, and transactional alerts. To learn more about us, visit our site at RatePlug.

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PRESS CONTACT FOR OPTIMAL BLUE
Robert J. Brandt
Vice President, Marketing & Strategic Alliances
(469) 609-5585
bbrandt@optimalblue.com

PRESS CONTACT FOR RATEPLUG
Brad Springer
President
(630) 848-1335
brad.springer@rateplug.com