Scott Smith: We provide a ton of data and being a new owner, I probably won’t even do it justice how much we actually provide. The monthly originations market report uses rate lock data from the Optimal Blue PPE to give the market a view into origination activity. Our Optimal Blue Mortgage Market Indices provides an interactive analysis of actual locked rates. Our customers have access to the product data, so they’re seeing in real time what’s going on in the market whether that’s on the PPE side or on the hedging and trading side.

Kim: Since Optimal Blue began as an information services business, it has expanded to offerings in the secondary market and a whole loan trading platform. What is the vision for the company going forward?

Smith: When you think about the product itself with the PPE product, our hedging, trading products, Compass Analytics and CompassEdge product, I think we’re the only real end-to-end solution from pricing a loan to hedging, trading and selling a loan. We’ll see more work that continues to solidify that position.

Kim: What kind of tech are lenders interested in acquiring? I often hear lenders talk about the difficulties of implementing add-on products with ICE becoming the largest tech provider in the industry.

Smith: I think integration is key. I don’t think there’s a one-stop shop for your tech. Open platforms of integration are critical. Optimal Blue integrates with all the loan origination systems (LOSs). We have lots of integration points, I think we have about 70 partners that use our application programming interfaces (APIs) as well. So I think an ongoing open platform is critical.

I genuinely don’t think there’s ever been a place where it’s just one provider supplies for everybody. If you have the LOS side of the business, you have the product and pricing engine side of the business, hedging, trading, servicing and so on. From our perspective, the integration side is pretty key. You’re going to use the tools and we’re going to make sure our platforms are open and able to integrate.

Kim: You currently serve as co-president of Romulus portfolio at Perseus Group of Constellation Software as well. Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) is a major competitor in the mortgage tech space. How is Constellation preparing to get ahead?