How AI is helping solo brokers compete with big bank retail arms
“The more you know, the better you can compete,” she said. “A lot of that is not just things like margin and margin protection and margin competitiveness, which are very important. It’s also around volume trends, staffing patterns, where your users and employees are spending the most time, and how you reduce those friction points. All of that ties into getting more business, or decreasing the cost to originate.”
She compared the current moment around AI-ready data to an earlier shift in mortgage technology that also took time to click for most of the industry.
“It feels a lot like APIs back in 2015, where it felt so nebulous that it was hard to wrap your head around what that was actually going to do for you,” she said. “Everybody knows now how that’s helping them integrate or build something custom. The same story is going to be true with AI-ready datasets here in a couple of years, if not sooner.”
That shift, she said, puts real responsibility on technology providers like Optimal Blue to make the tools approachable rather than assuming every broker will adapt on their own.
“It’s our responsibility to evangelize and to stand behind the technology we build with real-life use cases and real-life success metrics,” she said. “A lot of it too is just listening. We have to listen to our customers. That’s gold to us. That is really what makes us who we are, because we support so many customers.”
