Tag: Acquisition
— Resitrader by Optimal Blue connects lenders and investors in real time to accelerate results —
For the last several years, the mortgage industry has experienced a disruptive wave of technology innovation by vendors aiming to improve results and lower costs. Until recently, the vast majority of these innovations have focused on automating the front-end of the digital mortgage loan process, leaving significant opportunities to automate post-closing processes such as whole loan pricing and loan trading. Now, Optimal Blue has upended the status quo in the mortgage industry by building a revolutionary digital marketplace that is transforming the way loans are bought and sold in the secondary market.
Optimal Blue’s recent acquisition of market leader Resitrader created the largest loan trading platform in the industry. In the last year, Resitrader saw a 350% increase in the number of sellers and more than 300% growth in loan trading volume, while also increasing the offer-to-purchase rate for sellers on the platform.
“Given Optimal Blue’s unique and strong market share position, the acquisition put us in the front seat to create an industry-standard platform for whole loan pricing and trading,” explained John Ardy, vice president of Resitrader by Optimal Blue.
By connecting lenders and investors in real time, Resitrader automates what used to be a manual, email-based trading process and makes it incredibly scalable. Besides the immediate time savings, the Resitrader platform fosters real relationships between engaged buyers and sellers, which is mutually beneficial to both sides.
Benefits for sellers
On the sell side, Resitrader empowers the lender to optimize true best execution by offering loans to an entire marketplace of buyers instead of the four or five investors they are used to dealing with. Originators can connect with new investors almost instantly and accelerate the traditionally protracted, difficult shadow bidding process, so what used to take weeks is now accomplished in seconds by clicking on someone’s name to view their pricing.
Benefits for buyers
The transparency of pricing within the platform creates the opportunity for sellers to find investors quickly and provides investors with valuable insight into the competitiveness of their bids. Resitrader reports this information automatically, so investors can see why they won or lost certain bids and adjust their strategy accordingly.
“Resitrader takes a function that was manual from end to end and fully automates all of it,” continued Ardy. “It streamlines communication and eliminates the latency that occurs with the manual process. It’s very exciting — in an area that was never very exciting.”
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
Understanding their critical role as investors, Optimal Blue has paid special attention to streamlining connections with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The company completed an early integration with Fannie Mae’s Pricing and Execution – Whole Loan application last year and was first to integrate with Freddie Mac’s Loan Selling Advisor in August. Because Optimal Blue operates in a SaaS environment, Resitrader clients had full access to the new capabilities on the same day.
The integration with Loan Selling Advisor allows the user to seamlessly acquire Freddie Mac pricing data and compare against alternative executions, such as bulk bids. It also enables the automated commitment of Freddie Mac loans by returning trade confirmations directly back to the Resitrader user, so they don’t have to use multiple systems to conduct a single transaction.
Optimal Blue then followed up with an enhanced integration that fully automates the cash pricing and commitment process to include cash pay-ups for fixed-rate mortgages across all specified loan attributes. Prior to this integration, sellers would have to download and print a .PDF from Freddie Mac and calculate these loan details.
Now, that data pull takes seconds.
New efficiencies
Once buyers and sellers see the ability to interact at such a fast rate, the platform quickly becomes indispensable to their business model.
Jim Glennon is the director of secondary services at Optimal Blue and he noted a major gain in efficiencies using Resitrader for Optimal Blue’s full-service hedge advisory clients. “As we add new layers of innovation to our core platform, we are giving lenders and investors incredible new opportunities to get things done faster and better. This is part of the mortgage process that no one spent much time on, and now it has caught up to the rest of the digital mortgage process,” Glennon said.
As significant as the evolution of the Resitrader platform is individually, the seamless integration of Optimal Blue’s solutions across the entire secondary market platform is the true game changer.
“When Resitrader operated independently, we were able to grow to $2 billion a month,” said Ardy. “Now, backed by the power of Optimal Blue’s Digital Mortgage Marketplace, our growth rate will accelerate and catapult Resitrader into the largest industry destination for digital loan trading and bring considerable value to platform participants.”
As adoption of these interactive loan trading platforms flourish, Optimal Blue aims to continue looking toward the future of the industry with an ongoing commitment to deliver market-leading mortgage automation.
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 PPE network now includes more than 2,000 clients —
Over the last two years, Optimal Blue has strategically acquired several companies, built an extensive API network, and invested heavily in automation and technology with one goal in mind: to create an entirely automated secondary marketing ecosystem for mortgage originators and investors, as well as the technology providers they rely upon every day.
Those efforts have established Optimal Blue’s product and pricing as the mortgage industry’s system of record — from leads at the beginning of the process to hedging and selling into the secondary market — approximately one of every three mortgages is facilitated by the company’s Digital Mortgage Marketplace.
Optimal Blue’s recent acquisition of LoanLogics’ PPE business unit, LoanDecisions, is just the latest in a series of strategic buys, including its purchase of Comergence in 2017 and Resitrader earlier this year.
Comergence enables Optimal Blue to offer a wide array of comprehensive due diligence and oversight capabilities, while the acquisition of Resitrader assets created the industry’s largest digital loan trading platform, allowing Optimal Blue to support more than $750 billion in transactions across its marketplace.
With the LoanDecisions acquisition marking the beginning of what seems to be a consolidation trend in the PPE space, Optimal Blue has expanded the reach of its PPE network to a client count exceeding 2,000+.
These customers are already in the process of migrating to the Optimal Blue PPE and the company will continue to expand its partnership with LoanLogics to automate correspondent loan transactions.
Essential to all of this innovation is Optimal Blue’s expanding universe of APIs, created over the last 18 months by a dedicated team of developers. The company has more than 50 customers using their APIs directly, with more than 40 vendors providing solutions that allow originators and investors to build a custom set of solutions that maximize opportunity at every critical inflection point throughout the mortgage process.
Originators are using Optimal Blue APIs for best execution product and pricing, loan and pipeline management, configuration, search results, and lock management, while investors are leveraging them for counter party oversight, NMLS verification, historical production, prospect marketing, compliance questionnaires, and FHA performance scores.
In September, Optimal Blue launched the latest in its series, a set of post-lock management APIs that enable users to easily incorporate worse case evaluations, change request submissions, and historical pricing for any loan or scenario.
Erin Wester, senior product manager at Optimal Blue, explained how the new post-lock APIs fit into the company’s initiative to fully automate everything within the Optimal Blue user interface via an API.
“We took a look at the API products we have today and some common use cases — how our clients are using them,” explained Wester. “With the post-lock APIs, users can now execute searches, create and manage loans, and submit lock requests. You can lock and register the loan through our APIs.”
The new offerings include APIs for change requests and APIs related to historical pricing results. The latter allows searching for a loan ID with a desired date and time, or even searching for a specific scenario based on a certain date and time.
Optimal Blue also recently introduced a direct data access option for its business intelligence suite, which provides users with a robust data that contains an extremely granular history of every change that has taken place within the Optimal Blue platform — including who requested a change and when, who accepted it, who denied it, etc.
The direct data access option lets users connect internal data warehouses, support custom analytics, and uniquely integrate to any in-house visualization solution. This includes data visualizations on locking analytics and change request analytics. For example, users will be able to see how many times a lock desk is having to touch a loan, as well as average cost and days per lock extension.
“The direct data access product is an automated way for the user to gain access to their organization’s unique raw data and run their own in-house, custom analytics,” Wester said. “This competitive and actionable insight is then reported to internal data warehouse solutions within the institution, opening the door for any mortgage professional to quantify and transform operational data into an advantageous asset.”
In reflecting on the previous year and the extensive progress that the company has achieved, CEO Scott Happ explained, “2018 has been a prolific year for Optimal Blue, both from an acquisition and product development perspective. Not only have we strengthened our offering with substantial new capabilities, we’ve expanded our network with scores of new client and vendor relationships.”
It has, in fact, been a noteworthy year for Optimal Blue, as the company continues to thrive in its quest to fully automate the secondary marketing function.
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
— New alliance includes Optimal Blue acquisition of LoanLogics’ PPE business, LoanDecisions™ —
Optimal Blue, the leading secondary marketing automation platform in the mortgage industry, and LoanLogics, a recognized leader in loan quality technology for mortgage manufacturing and loan acquisition, announced today a newly formed strategic partnership aimed at changing the digital correspondent experience. By delivering a real-time integration between LoanLogics’ LoanHD® Correspondent Lending platform and Optimal Blue’s product eligibility and pricing platform, the companies significantly advance the automation of correspondent loan transactions and create a compelling competitive advantage for clients of both firms. In conjunction with this partnership, Optimal Blue has acquired LoanLogics’ product, pricing, and eligibility (PPE) technology business, LoanDecisions™.
LoanLogics’ LoanHD platform provides automation for every step in the loan acquisition process – from initial seller application review to loan funding and servicing onboarding – and overcomes the challenges that stem from a traditionally manual and fragmented correspondent loan purchase workflow. With the capabilities of LoanHD, investors ensure the loans they are buying are high quality, compliant, and accurately priced, while sellers experience rapid turnaround for funding and enhanced availability of warehouse lines. Additionally, both parties gain value by finding and curing defects before loans are purchased.
Through real-time integration with Optimal Blue’s product eligibility and pricing platform, LoanLogics fully automates loan-level pricing and eligibility controls that are pervasive throughout loan file review and enhances a critical aspect of the correspondent workflow inside the LoanHD Correspondent Investor Module. The granular feature set of the Optimal Blue solution will drive greater configurability of the LoanHD platform, bringing new and unique capabilities to clients. Additionally, Optimal Blue will provide support for automated adjustments to loan- and bulk-level pricing based on automated due diligence results, while simultaneously delivering maximum flexibility in support of an investor’s secondary guidelines and pricing requirements.
“Working closely with the Optimal Blue team, we will expand the value each company can offer our respective clients through an integrated solution,” explained Brian Fitzpatrick, LoanLogics CEO. “Individually, we are leaders in our respective disciplines. Together, we offer powerful technology to help investors ‘automate first’ across their loan purchase, pricing, hedging, trading, and counterparty risk oversight practices.”
“We are delighted with this transaction and extend a warm welcome to LoanDecisions’ customers and staff,” said Scott Happ, Optimal Blue CEO. “We are investing deeply in our PPE technology and are committed to delivering the best-in-class solutions and innovative partner connections across our marketplace.”
LoanLogics and Optimal Blue share a long-term vision for the relationship and consider this the first step of many together. With a collective focus on providing innovative automation for the mortgage industry and compelling value for joint customers, additional strategic initiatives and collaborative integrations across the companies’ respective technology platforms are already being considered.
ABOUT LOANLOGICS
LoanLogics was founded in 2005 to improve the transparency and accuracy of the mortgage process and improve the quality of loans. Our regtech capabilities help residential mortgage lenders, servicers, insurers and investors validate compliance, improve profitability and manage risk during the manufacture, sale, and servicing of loan assets. We are proud of the recognition our loan quality management and performance analytics technology has received, the corporate recognition of our business and client growth through Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500™, corporate culture awards and executive leadership team recognition, including the leadership of our women executives. As the digital mortgage process evolves, our innovations and compliance expertise will continue to help ensure the accuracy and performance of loan assets. To learn more, visit www.loanlogics.com.
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PRESS CONTACT FOR OPTIMAL BLUE
Robert J. Brandt
Vice President, Marketing & Strategic Alliances
(469) 609-5585
bbrandt@optimalblue.com
— Combination expands network of buyers and sellers supporting $750 billion of transactions —
Today, Optimal Blue announced the acquisition of Resitrader, creating the mortgage industry’s largest mortgage loan trading platform. With the addition of Resitrader, Optimal Blue now supports $750 billion of transactions each year across its Digital Mortgage Marketplace, including nearly $600 billion of rate locks processed through its product and pricing engine and more than $150 billion of transactions through its hedging solution.
Since its founding in 2015, Resitrader has focused on bringing automation and transparency to the spot market for mortgage loans. 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.
“Two years ago, Optimal Blue set out to build a Digital Mortgage Marketplace that facilitates transactions between originators, investors, and the providers both use. This acquisition is another key step in that journey,” explained Scott Happ, CEO of Optimal Blue. “Resitrader is the clear market leader in bringing efficiency, transparency, and security to a critical and expanding segment of the mortgage market, and we are excited to offer this innovative solution to our clients.”
By making Resitrader available to Optimal Blue customers, the company expects a major expansion in trading volume over the next year. The platform will be integrated with Optimal Blue’s hedging solution and substantially expand the company’s capabilities in the bulk bid market, an execution widely used by lenders employing a mandatory delivery strategy. More than 50 buyers are already active on the platform and over 150 sellers are expected on the platform by year end. Additionally, Optimal Blue will seek to expand third party relationships with hedge advisors and whole loan traders needing access to the bulk market. John Ardy, CEO of Resitrader, said “We are thrilled to join an organization that shares our vision of creating the industry’s premier platform for trading mortgage loans.” He added, “With Optimal Blue’s backing, I expect Resitrader to continue its rapid growth, bringing depth and breadth to the market.”
The company is proud to share that John Ardy, Seever Sulaiman, CIO of Resitrader, and the entire Resitrader team joined Optimal Blue upon close of the transaction. According to Happ, “John and Seever are proven innovators and bring considerable experience in building trading platforms to our team. There is no limit to what we can do together.”
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PRESS CONTACT FOR OPTIMAL BLUE
Robert J. Brandt
Vice President, Marketing & Strategic Alliances
(469) 609-5585
bbrandt@optimalblue.com
— Building a more trusted mortgage marketplace —
Optimal Blue, operator of the mortgage industry’s digital marketplace and provider of comprehensive secondary marketing solutions, announced today that it has acquired Comergence Compliance.
Comergence is the leading provider of third-party oversight solutions in the mortgage industry. Founded in 2008, Comergence provides an array of third-party originator (TPO), appraiser, and social media risk management solutions that verify third-party compliance in real-time, a capability unmatched in the industry. Comergence has been widely recognized by the industry for its innovations in due diligence automation and ongoing surveillance services.
“We are thrilled to welcome Comergence to the Optimal Blue family and we are looking forward to extending their network management platform to our customers,” said Scott Happ, CEO of Optimal Blue. “Comergence solutions help build trust and confidence among marketplace participants by verifying third-party compliance in real-time, a capability unmatched in the industry.”
“We provide the best due diligence and ongoing surveillance services in the industry,” noted Greg Schroeder, President of Comergence. “We believe that by being part of Optimal Blue we can bring the benefits of our technology and expertise to an even larger segment of the mortgage marketplace.”
Michael Stallings, Executive Vice President of Comergence said, “Recent Comergence innovations, including an analytics tool to help account executives identify new TPO opportunities and a breakthrough solution for social media risk monitoring, strongly complement Optimal Blue’s existing product offering.”
“Optimal Blue and Comergence are well-aligned around our principal mission of facilitating transactions between buyers and sellers of loans,” added Scott Happ. “We are very pleased that Greg, Michael, and the entire Comergence team will be joining Optimal Blue as we execute our shared growth plans.”
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PRESS CONTACT FOR OPTIMAL BLUE
Robert J. Brandt
Vice President, Marketing & Strategic Alliances
(469) 609-5585
bbrandt@optimalblue.com