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As the provider of a mortgage product and pricing engine that touches one of every four mortgage loans in the United States, Optimal Blue sits atop more than a decade’s worth of pricing data collected from hundreds of originators interacting with numerous investors.
Given the popular trends around “big data” and “data visualization,” our company realized that we are uniquely positioned to offer clients unique insights that will help them make better and more timely decisions in running their business by creating a true business intelligence solution for our industry.
However, with this came another recognition. Optimal Blue’s development staff faces the same challenges as other organizations across a variety of industries. With an already full schedule of priorities to tackle, the prospect of taking on a brand-new initiative would pull us too far outside our roadmap and stretch our resources too thin.
It’s something every software organization faces at one time or another – all resources get tied up following the existing flight plan, in addition to the team spending any remaining availability trying to keep current with the explosion of new technologies and ongoing changes in software. Given these realities, starting a new project from scratch appeared to pose more risk than reward. Nevertheless, lacking both time and opportunity to deliver on a promising new product offering was not a good enough reason to defer development.
To move forward, we took the approach of identifying partners that could help us achieve our goals of delivering a valuable solution. We also wanted to gain on-the-job training and education for our in-house technical staff, so that in the future, we could further enhance and refine that solution. Knowing that we already have a talented development staff, we determined that hiring additional full-time staff – with just the right set of skills – would only add long-term expense and push delivery far into the future.
We started by developing a very simple proof-of-concept that aggregated loan lock data into Microsoft’s Power BI product, with limited capabilities to analyze the results in a few different visualizations. We leveraged our existing relationship with Microsoft, and engaged with them to help us quickly identify ways we could turn this POC into a robust product offering. We also contracted with SysLogic Inc., a Microsoft partner out of Brookfield, WI, with years of demonstrated experience in building business intelligence solutions for clients.
After SysLogic performed some initial research into the Optimal Blue data landscape, the three companies sat down together at a Microsoft Technology Center to discuss design options that would meet our functional and time goals. Microsoft brought in subject matter experts to help us quickly identify best practices for a project like ours, and validated the approach put forward by SysLogic. That done, we moved quickly with SysLogic to build out the solution.
Starting with the simple mortgage lock visualizations in our POC, SysLogic modeled the data in our transactional systems and showed us ways to understand both strengths and weaknesses of the existing data for the purposes of performing BI analysis on the results.
They continued to execute on providing the initial deliverables around mortgage lock data, while working with a few Optimal Blue developers to accelerate the learning curve of building out a BI solution. When we started working on a set of visualizations that allow our clients to analyze their lock change request data, SysLogic split all tasks with our staff so that we would be forced to own and understand the technology we would be selling and supporting.
After a small number of development sprints working with our partner, we are now ready to release a new business intelligence tool that allows users to analyze all aspects of their mortgage locking activity with compelling visualizations.
While most developers prefer an “in-house” strategy for product development, and relish the opportunity to learn new technologies as they create innovative solutions, finding development partners that reduce the ramp-up time helps companies like Optimal Blue to achieve the best of both outcomes.
Our development staff did acquire new skills, and were able to leverage newer technologies in Microsoft Azure. Meanwhile, our business team added another offering to our market-leading solution. Finding the right partner to achieve both ends is critical, and we proved very fortunate to have Microsoft and SysLogic as our partners.
As we make final preparations for our initial release, we are already looking at future opportunities to extend the data under analysis and visualization. In providing a sneak-peek of our offering at our client conference, we learned many customers would want access to data around margin management.
We also learned there is a strong appetite for us to model and expose the data managed with our hedging solution, tied directly to the information coming from our pricing engine.
Finally, our recent acquisition of Comergence will open a whole new horizon of data for investors and originators to explore in the realm of risk management and compliance.
We learned many valuable lessons on successfully implementing a BI project from our partners. Given our plans for this BI offering, we will apply those lessons to move quickly and with confidence as we extend and refine our solution. Most importantly, our partnerships allowed the majority of our staff to continue with core priorities while producing a new product offering in a timely fashion.
