Optimal Blue Unveils Historical Pricing Functionality

Functionality has tremendous implications for workflow, Fair Lending and compliance

PLANO, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Optimal Blue, award-winning developer of an enterprise level, end-to-end secondary marketing automation platform, today announced it has released Historical Pricing functionality that enables mortgage lenders to automatically recreate all of the loan profiles available at any time in the loan’s history.

“Since the introduction of PPE technology, every vendor in the market has only been able to price a loan from current market pricing”

With tremendous implications for a lender’s workflow and Fair Lending compliance, Historical Pricing takes all market information into consideration, including investor pricing, eligibility guidelines, loan level pricing adjustments, the lender’s markups and overlays, LO Compensation, etc. – anything involved in the calculation of a price can now be derived through the Optimal Blue system at any point in time. Today, Optimal Blue customers say they re-evaluate a loan an average of five times (for product changes, rate changes or changes in the lock information, such as credit score, LTV, etc.). Each evaluation takes approximately 15 minutes. If a lender locks 500 loans a month, that’s 625 hours or 78 business days spent manually re-evaluating loans. Optimal Blue’s Historical Pricing eliminates most of that manual work through automation.

“Since the introduction of PPE technology, every vendor in the market has only been able to price a loan from current market pricing,” said Larry Huff, co-CEO of Optimal Blue. “We are the first – and the only – who can offer a perfect historical recreation of a loan’s price at any time in its history. The time savings and efficiencies gained are significant, but this goes beyond workflow and into compliance, including Fair Lending. At the push of a button, whether for an auditor or a customer, lenders can automatically recreate all loan products available on a specific day for any given borrower scenario. While there is a huge impact on efficiency to the lender and originator, the compounding effect regarding adherence to the new regulatory environment is equally compelling. This is truly game changing functionality.”

Huff also cited the impact to its hedging technology via Secondary Interactive. Historical Pricing allows lenders using Secondary Interactive to easily and accurately track the impact of any post-lock loan characteristic changes and report instantly on the impact of those changes to the company’s profitability and hedge efficiency. In addition to strengthening hedge efficiency, Historical Pricing saves time, increases accuracy, improves response times, reduces manual re-locking efforts and automates change requests, including extensions and product changes.

Huff continued, “This is the largest advancement of our technology since its inception and is a huge step forward for the industry as a whole – from a compliance standpoint and from a workflow perspective. No other system can do this and we think that’s a tremendous competitive advantage for Optimal Blue. When we were beta testing this functionality, the response was immediate and overwhelming.”

One customer commented, “While the time savings is awesome, the added degree of accuracy for re-prices is really where this functionality shines. Everything about this functionality is a win and we look forward to seeing our customers benefit from using it.”

Another customer stated, “I can probably avoid hiring two employees for all the data entry and checking that we will have to do next year doing twice our current volume.”

About Optimal Blue

Founded in 2002, Optimal Blue is a Web-based provider of managed-content, product eligibility and pricing engine (PPE) technology. Based in Plano, Texas, Optimal Blue has developed a comprehensive suite of products designed to give lenders the ability to automate the management and distribution of their products, pricing and secondary marketing activities, enabling originators to then source, manage, price, lock and sell loans in a way that is efficient, accurate and easy to use. Without having to be technology experts, Optimal Blue's solutions allow clients to leverage superior technology and content for a competitive advantage. For more information, please visit www.optimalblue.com.