Previous AI promises an enormous opportunity for lenders, but the real story isn’t adoption. It’s a transformation, and most organizations are still only scratching the surface. In this conversation, Optimal Blue’s Kevin Foley speaks with Allison LaForgia about the difference between simply deploying AI tools and building an organization that runs on AI-powered insight.
From market forecasting to operational decision-making, Foley explains why mortgages are uniquely positioned for AI innovation and how technologies like Virtual Economist are helping lenders interpret complex market signals faster than ever before. The discussion also highlights the real challenges lenders face, from data readiness to strategic alignment as the industry moves to the next era of intelligent lending.
“AI is here, and AI is here to stay,” Foley said. “If lenders are out there and you’re still thinking about AI as a buzzword or a fad or a distraction from your business, that’s the big shift that lenders need to be making now.”
But for Foley, the story is not about automation replacing people. “We’re not talking about replacing humans,” he said. “We’re talking about AI augmenting human capabilities.”
That approach, he added, is what Optimal Blue calls “human in the loop,” where “AI is serving up insights for humans to ultimately continue to be the decision maker.”
Foley said one of the biggest mistakes lenders can make is treating AI only as a technology initiative. “The real value from AI is going to come not from keeping this a tech-focused conversation, but turning this into a people-focused conversation and thinking about process change,” he said.
Success, in his view, requires “a wider set of cross-functional stakeholders” to align on “how to implement AI,” “embed it within your workflows,” and build trust, governance and accountability around it. “It’s not simply a tech conversation, it’s a people conversation,” he said.
He also argued that mortgage is especially well-positioned for AI because of the industry’s data foundation. “The mortgage industry, compared to other industries, we sit on a lot of structured data,” Foley said.
Because that data is already organized around clear objects and relationships, “when we’re feeding in structured data into AI, it doesn’t need to guess.”
That gives mortgage companies, he said, “a few steps beyond the starting line” and creates two clear advantages: “AI can save people time by generating insights faster,” and “we can generate insights that humans just can’t reliably see.”
Foley pointed to several examples inside Optimal Blue’s platform.
With Position Assistant, he said, a process that once took him “up to two hours” to explain changes in a lender’s secondary gain loss now “happens automatically as soon as the pipeline is run,” with “an AI summary showing lenders exactly why their position changed overnight.”
With Originator Assistant, Optimal Blue surfaces “small changes in the loan scenario or the borrower profile” that can improve borrower terms over the life of the loan — insights that loan officers “wouldn’t be able to reliably do… every day” on their own.
Foley also highlighted Virtual Economist, Optimal Blue’s AI- and machine-learning-based forecasting tool for interest rates and lock volume. He said it addresses three major pain points in forecasting: maintenance, because market conditions change quickly; explainability, because teams need to understand the why behind the forecast; and interactivity, because leaders want to ask scenario-based questions in real time.
“The Virtual Economist solves that problem by having continuously updated market data,” Foley said, while also allowing users to ask questions like, “What happens to interest rates if the price of oil stays high for the rest of the year?”
Looking ahead, Foley said the lenders that win will be the ones that move beyond experimentation and focus on practical impact. “The things that are going to separate lenders who make the most of their AI investment are going to be the ones who are thinking about adapting more so than the ones who are questioning whether they should adopt,” he said.
Ultimately, he added, that has to show up in results: a new ROI study conducted with Market Wise found that lenders are seeing “over $1,000 of value per loan” by using Optimal Blue’s products across its ecosystem.
