In an ever-changing real estate market, retaining lenders is a major challenge for lenders. Credit 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 an 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 with the secondary marketing components of all our clients’ departments. Optimal Blue supports 65% of the top 50 lenders in the country, and more than 130,000 users are originators. We only have a huge number of users on our platform that support mortgage lending, so we needed to make sure we gave our lenders the options to retain top talent.
It comes down to agility and flexibility that gets things to market quickly. And that could be something like a product rollout.
If you’re introducing a new product type or specialty program, how you train your staff, implement it into your technology suite, and then bring it to market is critical. Your speed to market, your response to market conditions and the way you interact with your customers are always core components for success.
It is also very important to ensure that the initiator feels very transparent and that he or she can easily work through the application until its closure.
DS: How can a lender use Optimal Blue’s capital markets platform to prevent these LOs from being poached by competitors?
EW: Not only do you want a platform that has a capital markets platform, but it is also one that can grow quickly as the market changes and products are launched or revived.
A good statistic we have here is related to the non-QM space, the extended guidelines space. So looking at the August rate lock data, non-QM or extended guideline programs made up 5% of total production in the month of August. If you don’t offer non-QM products or products with extended guidelines, you make yourself less competitive against one in twenty borrowers nationwide. You need a technology provider that will get you into that market and make the transition easy.
DS: Interest rates have fallen in recent months, and we could be seeing a mini refinancing boom. How can Optimal Blue help lenders gain market share as a refinancing burst comes along?
EW: We have ours Capture compass product, which tells you what the price would be and from a marketing perspective allows you to choose the borrowers you want.
There are ways you can do that and put that in the hands of the creator. Give them more control. Let them set specific rate alerts for the customers they serve.
DS: How does Optimal Blue ensure that your credit customers can avoid margin compression?
EW: Understanding your margins is more important than ever. The best way to make informed and actionable decisions is to look at statistically accurate and relevant data so you can trust the decisions you make within your margins. In August, across our top 30 MSAs, we saw differences of 70 to 80 basis points in those areas alone, which is a pretty big difference, especially in the market we’re in now.
It is therefore very important to be able to implement those changes quickly and dynamically with confidence in data.
DS: What’s on the roadmap for the coming year that you’re really excited about?
EW: We have made a very large investment in generative AI. We’ve implemented many of these into our hedging platform for trading support, profitability assistance and information for our capital markets friends so they can quickly view all their pass-throughs, quickly look at allocations and make informed decisions.
We are also going to reveal ours originator assistant at our customer conference, which is directly related to the 130,000 users I mentioned earlier. We provide them with highly critical automated components 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’re really excited to get that out there, as they say. That’s only on the PBM and hedging platforms. We also have a compliance platform that we’re releasing a solutions center for, so we have a lot that we’ve been working on and we’re excited to bring it to market.
