Mortgage data provider Optimal Blue this week announced the launch of Competitive Data License, a product that is designed to help lenders price loans accurately and drive profitability.
In its announcement, the Texas-based company described the product as “a collection of key national mortgage pricing data that enables lenders to price products competitively, operate more profitably, and react swiftly to changing market conditions.“
Competitive Data License draws upon data from the Optimal Blue product pricing engine (PPE), which the company said is used to price and lock more than 35% of mortgages in the U.S. The product offers insights into loan markups, loan-level pricing adjustments, service-released premiums, concessions, loan officer compensation and more.
“We often hear from our lenders how difficult it is to make informed pricing decisions given the lack of visibility into detailed market data,” Brennan O’Connell, director of data solutions at Optimal Blue, said in a statement.
“Competitive Data License ensures that our PPE customers have full transparency into the granular pricing components needed for a full price trace from buy-side to sell-side — giving Optimal Blue clients a strategic advantage in benchmarking their entire pricing strategy.”
The data license product allows lenders to see which loan locks were completed using the dataset and which loan officers locked the loan. Lenders can “feed the raw data from Competitive Data License into their own business intelligence platforms to assess their performance relative to competitors and adjust pricing strategies — such as repricing or hedging optimization — based on market shifts,“ Optimal Blue explained.
The new product is available only to Optimal Blue PPE users, but the firm noted that its Market Data License product will remain available to lenders not using the PPE.
Earlier this month, Optimal Blue landed a big name in the industry when it hired Joe Tyrrell as its CEO to succeed Scott Smith.
In an interview with HousingWire shortly after the announcement, Tyrrell explained his reasoning behind the move after previous career stops at ICE Mortgage Technology and Medallia.
“What lenders really need is the ability to maximize their profitability on every single loan, so that they can just stay in business and then continue to reinvest their business to help more people,“ Tyrrell said. “There is nobody in this industry that’s more critical in that than Optimal Blue: a secondary marketing platform that’s the only end-to-end solution.“
