Black Knight : Creating a Better Pricing and Product Experience for Lenders

Product and pricing eligibility (PPE) technologies can help significantly reduce complexities in the lending process. They play a key role in facilitating efficiencies and accuracy, as well as reducing overall turn times. But not all PPEs are created equal. Technology that provides direct access to a loan origination system as well as flexibility, ease of use, and lender control can deliver even greater efficiencies and a better overall experience for users within the various lending channels.

Streamlining Product and Pricing in the Correspondent Channel

From initial loan pricing through post-closing, correspondent lending requires extensive interaction between buyers and sellers, and often requires the use of several different applications. The amount of communication and steps involved in correspondent lending, as well as the use of disparate platforms, can add time, complexities and the potential for errors to the process.

Ideally, buyers and sellers should have a single access point to integrated technology where they can interact with each other and perform all of their tasks, including pricing, locking and relocking loans.

Black Knight has built a digital ecosystem to facilitate communication and collaboration between participants in the correspondent lending process by integrating several technology products. The most recent product integration into this ecosystem is Black Knight’s industry-leading product and pricing eligibility engine: CompassPPE.

Correspondent buyers who use the Black Knight Empower® Loan Origination system, as well as their sellers, now have streamlined access to the comprehensive pricing-related data and capabilities they need. Sellers can easily search pricing, lock loans, and manage relocks and extensions; buyers benefit from CompassPPE’s dynamic and granular margin- management functionality and robust investor content.

By accessing CompassPPE’s robust pricing and product eligibility engine directly within this larger technology ecosystem, lenders experience more seamless process automation, helping them improve efficiencies and reduce overall turn times.

Offering Lenders More Flexibility and Control

Many pricing engines today don’t provide lenders with the flexibility and control they need for product administration. For example, when agency conforming loan limits change each year, lenders must wait for their provider to release the technology updates. This makes it difficult for lenders to know whether new loan limits will apply when the loans are ready to be sold.

Black Knight introduced an industry-first capability in CompassPPE that enables users to configure county loan limits by client and loan program group. With this enhancement, lenders have the flexibility to determine when they want to deploy the loan limits within their PPE, helping to facilitate a smoother migration to the new loan limits.

Another constraint lenders often experience with their PPE technology is the inability to define custom values for fields. While this may seem like a granular issue, it can be a significant pain point for lenders.

Using CompassPPE, lenders now have the ability to create their own custom values for certain fields, such as loan purpose and property type – another industry-first capability. Clients can still leverage the platform’s managed investor content but now can create custom fields to better support their business needs.

As we continually focus on enhancing and integrating our technology, our primary goal is to deliver best-in-class features and functionality. Our recent CompassPPE integration and enhancements deliver industry-first capabilities and give lenders greater flexibility and control over their product and pricing engine experience.