The mortgage industry is no stranger to disruption since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lenders have seen it all this year: high volumes, volatility, market uncertainty… the list goes on and on. Amid evolving market conditions, today’s mortgage lenders continue to seek new and innovative ways to leverage advanced automation—the great accelerator.
As the premier provider of software, data and analytics solutions to the mortgage and capital markets industries, Black Knight further strengthened its position as a market leader with the acquisition of Optimal Blue in September 2020.
By combining Optimal Blue’s suite of secondary marketing automation solutions with its Compass Analytics suite of capabilities, Black Knight is uniquely suited to support the secondary market by delivering a suite of industry leading solutions, including product, pricing and eligibility (PPE), hedge analytics, risk management, loan trading, and MSR valuation capabilities.
Leverage a PPE both broad in reach and deep in functionality
Black Knight’s industry-leading PPE engine provides lenders with the most advanced capabilities available in the market. Broad in reach and deep in functionality, the PPE manages many core functions in mortgage lending, such as decisive product eligibility and sophisticated pricing strategies, as well as automating the rate-lock process.
Black Knight’s proven PPE delivers the tools lenders need to create and maintain an extremely competitive product offering, providing the ability to choose from thousands of leading conforming, non-conforming, jumbo, and government products—even supporting a lender’s in-house portfolio products.
Lenders who leverage the PPE benefit from lower costs, more efficient workflows, increased profitability and enhanced competitiveness. Further, they appreciate its value in terms of stability, performance and functionality, as well as the use of automation to decrease workloads and automate most aspects of the lock desk, including lock requests, price concessions, profile changes, product changes, relocks and lock extensions.
Granular auto-accept functionality also saves time and industrializes key workflows, while margin automation and itemized dynamic markups allow for maximum profitability.
Support strategic decisions with risk management and MSR valuation solutions
Black Knight also delivers leading risk management, loan trading, and MSR valuation solutions for lenders of all sizes.
The company has introduced significant workflow efficiencies with mini-bulk loan sales, allowing users to send bids to multiple investors and integrate with the MSR broker community to value MSRs with brokers assumptions and create multiple automated commitments with just one click.
Through real-time integrations and fully connected, end-to-end secondary marketing automation, Black Knight provides significant competitive benefits to its users, including a powerful concept called True BESTX™ which presents the best option—highest revenue or lowest cost—for any mortgage financing scenario based on clients’ configurations and tolerances.
Sophisticated pooling capabilities can automatically solve for optimal combinations and considerations, allowing users to send multiple auto-commit requests simultaneously. The solution automatically accepts prices that are returned within a client-defined tolerance with note-rate detail, to individually approve prices outside of those parameters.
Through the industry’s most robust and granular MSR valuation model, Black Knight also provides the tools, reporting, analytics and automation necessary to help servicers value and price portfolios in a seamless and timely manner. The MSR valuation model includes the ability to integrate with third-party MSR valuation providers and MSR brokers to bring their valuations and duration profiles to lenders on a daily basis for pricing, loan sales and hedging.
Two industry leaders, one united focus
The combined strengths of Black Knight and Optimal Blue will only further advance lenders’ transparency and visibility into their business, their competitors and the mortgage market.
Black Knight remains committed to delivering innovative, seamlessly integrated secondary marketing technologies that boast superior capabilities and functionalities—enabling mortgage market participants to realize greater efficiencies, better manage and mitigate risk, and maximize profitability.
