Optimal Blue Launches New Generative AI Assistant Capabilities

Leader in capital markets technology announces AI capabilities and ongoing strategy focused on addressing real-world challenges for mortgage lenders

PLANO, Texas – July 23, 2024 – Optimal Blue today announced the delivery of generative AI capabilities centered on helping lenders maximize profitability on every loan transaction. Through direct engagement with its thousands of clients, the company has begun delivering generative AI capabilities built for secondary-market-specific use cases and purposefully designed to solve the real-world challenges that mortgage lenders face. The company’s launch of AI assistants has initiated with the release of three new AI capabilities in Optimal Blue’s CompassEdge hedging and loan trading platform.

“Optimal Blue’s priority is to continuously maximize profitability for lenders on every single loan, and generative AI affords us infinite opportunities to do so,” said Joe Tyrrell, CEO of Optimal Blue. “We deploy an intentional approach to developing and delivering AI assistants with machine learning capabilities that are based on actual opportunities and challenges lenders are facing. At a time when there is so much noise in the industry with companies claiming to have AI, at Optimal Blue, we are delivering true AI with the sole purpose to increase profitability for lenders, so all of these generative AI capabilities are being provided to our clients at no additional cost. We believe that core innovation shouldn’t represent incremental cost, but rather should be what you expect out of your partner.”

Optimal Blue Chief Technology Officer Seever Sulaiman, who has led the development and adoption of the company’s AI framework, added, “We’ve established a foundation for implementing AI capabilities across the entire organization. Our engineering team has been trained on utilizing AI tools internally to enhance productivity. This has, in turn, positioned us to deliver AI capabilities and other value-add innovation to our clients even faster.”

As part of its directed focus on AI, Optimal Blue has channeled its decades of experience and expertise to launch three new AI-powered assistants in its CompassEdge platform. These capabilities – a Profitability Assistant designed for chief financial officers (CFOs), a Projections Assistant designed for capital markets leaders, and a Trade Assistant designed for leaders of a lender’s trading desk – all help lenders reduce manual processes associated with profitability attribution, calculating projections, and optimizing trade selection.

“Secondary teams are responsible for maximizing pipeline profitability and communicating results to their executive teams, but doing so is fraught with time-consuming analyses, complex calculations, and inevitable human bias,” said Mike Vough, vice president of hedging and trading products at Optimal Blue. “We built the AI-powered assistants in CompassEdge with these pain points in mind so our clients can benefit from more accuracy and less manual work, all in favor of more basis points and greater profitability. We estimate that these assistants can help save a secondary marketing manager up to 30 hours a month in some instances – valuable time that can instead be channeled toward more strategic work.”

The first new capability in CompassEdge, Profitability Assistant, uses generative AI to write a succinct summary of the top drivers that caused a gain or loss of profitability in a pipeline, including new locks, fallout, loan sales, bulk AOT, and more. Designed specifically for CFOs and other members of a lender’s executive team, these summaries promote greater transparency between secondary and the C-suite.

Another new capability, Projections Assistant, uses AI to predict the real-time impact of various factors on the risk profile of a hedged mortgage pipeline, including originations, fallout, loan sales, and more. Otherwise requiring a seasoned capital markets professional, Projections Assistant automates the consumption of Optimal Blue’s extensive data sets and completes complex calculations to deliver extremely granular projections for position management.

Finally, Trade Assistant uses AI to reduce the guesswork that goes into the selection of a hedge, a process that would otherwise require an experienced capital markets professional. With one click, the tool suggests a combination of sells, buys, rolls, and swaps to maximize effectiveness in alignment with a lender’s hedge policy, while minimizing transaction cost.

All three AI assistants are available to CompassEdge users for no additional fee.

About Optimal Blue
Optimal Blue effectively bridges the primary and secondary mortgage markets to deliver the industry’s only end-to-end capital markets platform. The company helps lenders of all sizes and scopes maximize profitability and operate efficiently so they can help American borrowers achieve the dream of homeownership. Through innovative technology, a network of interconnectivity, rich data insights, and expertise gathered over more than 20 years, Optimal Blue is an experienced partner that, in any market environment, allows lenders to optimize their advantage from pricing accuracy to margin protection, and every step in between. To learn more, visit OptimalBlue.com.

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Media Contact
Olivia DeLancey, Optimal Blue
904.854.5459
Olivia.DeLancey@OptimalBlue.com