In an ever-changing real estate market, loan originator retention is a key challenge for lenders. Loan officers need faster product rollouts and fewer barriers to focus on core tasks. Leading capital markets platform Optimal Blue helps retain talent with pricing engines and features like generative AI and virtual originator assistants.

In a exclusive executive conversation, HousingWire president Diego Sanchez sits down with Erin Wester, Optimal Blue’s vice president of product management, to explore lender retention strategies, market trends and more. 

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Diego Sanchez: Optimal Blue is the leading Capital markets platform in terms of market share. Why is loan officer retention a priority for the company? 

Erin Wester: We speak a lot to the secondary marketing components of all of our customers’ departments. Optimal Blue supports 65% of the top 50 lenders in the nation, and over 130,000 users are originators. We have just a massive amount of users on our platform that support the origination of mortgages, so we needed to make sure that we are giving the options to our lenders to retain top talent.

It comes down to agility and flexibility that brings things to market quickly. And, that could be something like a product rollout. 

If you’re introducing a new product type or a new specialty program, how you’re training your staff, implementing it into your technology stack, and then marketing it is key. Your speed to market, reaction to market conditions, how you’re engaging with your customers are always core components to success. 

Also, making the originator feel very transparent and also easy for them to work through the application to closing is really important.

DS: How can a lender use Optimal Blue’s capital markets platform to prevent those LOs from getting poached by competitors?

EW: Not only do you want a platform that has a capital market platform, but it’s also a platform that can grow quickly as the market changes and products are brought into the market or revived.

A good stat that we have here is tied to the non-QM space, the expanded guidelines space. So, if we look at August’s rate lock data, non-QM or expanded guideline programs made up 5% of total production over the month of August. If you’re not offering non-QM or expanded guideline products, you make yourself less competitive to one out of every 20 borrowers nationwide. You need a technology provider that brings you to that market and makes that an easy flip of the switch for you. 

DS: Rates have declined over the past couple of months, and we might see a mini refinancing boom. How can Optimal Blue help lenders capture market share if there is a burst of refinances coming up?

EW: We have our Compass Capture product, which tells you what the pricing would be and allows you to choose the borrowers that you’re looking to go after from a marketing perspective. 

There’s ways you can do that and put that in the hands of the originator. Give them more control. Allow them to set up specific rate alerts for the customers that they serve. 

DS: How does Optimal Blue enable your lending clients to prevent margin compression?

EW: Understanding your margins is more important than ever. The best way to make educated and actionable decisions is by looking at statistically accurate and relevant data so you can trust the decisions that you’re making on your margins. In August, across our 30 largest MSAs, we were seeing differences of 70 to 80 basis points in those areas alone, which is a pretty massive difference, especially in the market that we’re in right now. 

So, being able to quickly and dynamically make those changes with data-based confidence is really important.

DS: What’s on the roadmap for the next year that you’re really excited about?

EW: We’ve made a very large investment into generative AI. We’ve implemented a lot of that into our hedge platform for trade assistance, profitability assistance, and surfacing information for our capital markets friends so they can quickly look at all of their pull-through, to quickly look at allocations and making educated decisions. 

We are also going to be unveiling our originator assistant at our customer conference, which is tied directly into the 130 ,000 users I mentioned before. We offer them very critical automated pieces that take a lot of the thought process out of dynamic loan creation and get them to the best product at the best price for borrowers. 

We are very excited to get that out and into the wild, as they say. That is just on the PPE and hedge platforms. We also have a compliance platform that we are releasing a solution center for, so we have a lot that we have been working on and we are excited to bring to market.