Optimal Blue leans into additional AI offerings

Optimal Blue is expanding its artificial intelligence offerings amid new rollouts for its loan officer and investor customers. 

The capital markets technology provider is boosting its AI Assistant Suite within its Compassedge hedging and trading platform, it announced Monday. A new Position Assistant will summarize for users the biggest changes affecting their hedged mortgage pipeline positions, such as adjustments in securities pricing and loan volume. 

Compassedge will also have an updated Profitability Assistant that gives capital markets leaders end-of-month analyses, bypassing the need to manually compile daily reports. The updates follow Optimal Blue's July unveiling of three AI-powered assistants. 

Courtesy of Optimal Blue

"These latest enhancements to Compassedge deliver on our AI philosophy to address real-world use cases for lenders," said Joe Tyrrell, CEO of Optimal Blue, in a press release.

The firm is also making its Investor Pricing Insight data tool free for clients. It will allow those users to examine their non-qualified mortgage rate sheet pricing to competitors in real-time, and generate price comparison reports on a schedule. Optimal Blue said its investor network makes it the most comprehensive source of non-QM pricing data.

"With the growing popularity of non-QM tools, there was a clear need for the transparency of pricing data," said Erin Wester, vice president of product management at Optimal Blue, in a press release. 

The tool comes amid a potentially growing market for non-QM originations, with those locks trending up slightly in September against larger interest rate volatility. Lower rates sent lock-volume at-large up 6% from August to September, including a massive spike in rate-and-term refinance locks, according to Optimal Blue. 

The company's other release is a new Scenario Optimizer within its product, pricing and eligibility engine that will generate for LOs side-by-side comparisons of loan scenarios. Scenario Optimizer is now available to ICE Encompass users via Encompass Partner Connect, and Optimal Blue said it plans to make the new offering available for other loan origination systems in the coming months. 

This new offering is just one sign of how Optimal Blue works with ICE Mortgage Technology following the divestiture that resulted from the latter's Black Knight acquisition.