Black Knight’s Erin Wester Named by PROGRESS in Lending as One of the Most Powerful Women in Fintech

Wester has made a significant impact as vice president of product management in the Optimal Blue division of Black Knight

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – July 25, 2023 – Erin Wester, vice president of product management for Optimal Blue, a division of Black Knight, Inc. (NYSE:BKI), was named by PROGRESS in Lending to its list of “Most Powerful Women in Fintech.” PROGRESS in Lending’s annual award recognizes women in the financial services industry who are playing a pivotal role in helping their organizations evolve to offer quicker, more convenient and reliable service to their customers.

Erin directs the strategy, development and support teams for the Optimal Blue product, pricing and eligibility (PPE) engine to further innovate the PPE’s application programming interface (API) solutions and integration efforts. Her support of the company’s API-first strategy led to the creation of a complete API library that digitally connects hundreds of clients and 70 industry third-party providers to integrate accurate loan pricing into a lender mortgage technology stack for increased pricing transparency and efficiency.

Examples of some APIs that Erin led her team to develop from the ground up include:

• Scenario Pricing API

that supports the return of BESTX™ product and pricing, all eligible and ineligible products, pricing, and fees;

• Post-Lock Changes API

for key functionalities related to post-lock changes such as product changes, lock extensions, relocks, price concessions, all leveraging the customer-specific intricate policy settings configured within Optimal Blue to leverage worst-case pricing, historical pricing or current market pricing;

• Lead-Quoting API

, which connects the Optimal Blue PPE to other industry technology, gives consumers on-demand access to accurate, transparent product and pricing information from hundreds of investors and across thousands of loan products for virtually any mortgage financing scenario.

• OBMMI Current Indices API

that provides values for over 16 mortgage market rate indices, calculated from actual locked rates from over 30% of all mortgage transactions closed nationwide;

• More APIs for pipeline and initial locks;

• Lock desk management; and

• Configuration administration APIs

The pricing-related APIs are called more than 11 million times monthly to provide lender-specific mortgage pricing to both those lenders and third-party vendors powering the mortgage life cycle. In addition to her support of these APIs, Erin is responsible for the Optimal Blue Integrations Team, which supports the direct integration of Optimal Blue’s leading secondary marketing capabilities with major loan origination systems.

“Fintech is reshaping financial services. Erin has taken this opportunity to lead a team to create tools that enable our clients to communicate seamlessly via APIs without user intervention or awareness, so they can easily ramp up efficiency – both internally and externally,” said Kevin McMahon, president, Optimal Blue. “It’s great to see Erin receive this well-deserved recognition for helping more financial services providers access the data, products and services needed to support successful digital customer experiences.”

“I’m humbled by this recognition from PROGRESS in Lending and would like to extend this honor to all my teams, whose accomplishments continue to amaze me,” said Wester. “Our role as technology providers is to show financial institutions how to leverage new technology advancements – such as APIs, artificial intelligence and machine learning — that can help them focus less on tasks that can be automated and more on interacting with customers on a personal level. For us, it’s immensely satisfying that this advanced technology can decrease the cost for mortgage lenders to originate a loan, while helping borrowers reduce expenses through a more affordable loan package and a quicker path to homeownership.” 

About Black Knight
Black Knight, Inc. (NYSE:BKI) is an award-winning software, data and analytics company that drives innovation in the mortgage lending and servicing and real estate industries, as well as the capital and secondary markets. Businesses leverage our robust, integrated solutions across the entire homeownership life cycle to help retain existing customers, gain new customers, mitigate risk and operate more effectively.

Our clients rely on our proven, comprehensive, scalable products and our unwavering commitment to delivering superior client support to achieve their strategic goals and better serving their customers. For more information on Black Knight, please visit www.blackknightinc.com/.

About Mortgage Women Magazine
Mortgage Women Magazine is the preeminent publication and resource for women in the mortgage industry, publishing quality, timely and relevant articles that are meaningful and helpful to our subscribers. We maintain highly visible, knowledgeable and respected writers for the magazine, and provide business resources to our subscribers that assist them in their everyday mortgage business responsibilities. We keep the magazine focused on our subscribers’ needs by providing a publication that is solely focused on the needs of women working in the mortgage industry.