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Mortgage technology provider Optimal Blue says it will roll out an AI assistant that’s designed to provide high-level insights to executives later this month, the latest in a series of new products and features unveiled this week.
Optimal Blue’s conversational generative AI chat assistant, Ask Obi, helps mortgage executives probe profitability metrics with queries like, “Which loan officers issued the most concessions over the second week of January 2025?”
Erin Wester
According to Optimal Blue Chief Product Officer Erin Wester, Ask Obi beats tools that may require filters and manual selections, because “users can have an interactive conversation to better understand the data that drives their business.”
“Ask Obi is designed for ease of use and conversational interactions, while conveniently building off a user’s previous inquiries and suggesting preloaded questions,” Wester said in a statement.
Optimal Blue said it plans to offer Ask Obi to clients for beta testing later this month.
In a separate announcement, Optimal Blue announced new products and features including:
- Originator Assistant: An AI-powered tool in Optimal Blue’s mortgage product and pricing engine (PPE) that identifies alternate loan scenarios that can produce more competitive pricing.
- Rules Optimizer: A feature within the Optimal Blue PPE that “allows lenders to streamline the rule creation process by creating a single rule and applying it to multiple investor relationships.”
- Ratesheet Tool: A feature that connects front-end origination pricing with back-end secondary market pricing to generate ratesheet pricing with a known margin.
- Confirm Assistant: A feature in the CompassEdge hedging and loan trading platform that “uses AI to read files from broker-dealers, parsing the documents into usable formats.”
- Mortgage Rate Futures: Cash-settled contracts that provide direct exposure to the latest primary mortgage rate available to borrowers.
- Solution Center: A partner marketplace where users can sell products and services through a two-sided marketplace of vetted integration partners.
Formerly a Black Knight company, Optimal Blue was spun off to a subsidiary of Toronto-based Constellation Software Inc. in 2023 to satisfy antitrust regulators and clear the way for Black Knight’s acquisition by Intercontinental Exchange (ICE).
Joe Tyrrell
Optimal Blue CEO Joe Tyrrell — a veteran of Ellie Mae and Intercontinental Exchange — took over the leadership reins in June.
A large and growing conglomerate, Constellation Software has been dubbed “tech’s Berkshire Hathaway” by The Economist, which rates the company as “the world’s best acquirer of tech firms.”
Black Knight’s loan origination system, Encompass, is now owned by Dark Matter Technologies, a company within Constellation Software’s Perseus Group.
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