Optimal Blue, a division of Black Knight, is a leader in the mortgage industry with an API first mindset using Azure API Management

Headquartered in Plano, TX, Optimal Blue, a division of Black Knight, began as an information services business that automated the manual processes for paper rate sheets and loan-level adjustments. Today, they operate as a digital marketplace for the mortgage industry and are committed “to deliver impactful innovations that drive organizational success.” As an organization, they impressively lock over 42 percent of all mortgages completed across the US. This equates to over 240 million pricing quotes delivered across investors, lenders, and Loan Origination Systems.

A change in strategy

With any loan, part of that process involves sourcing and inputting key data into a system to determine the loan limits for which the borrower qualifies. Previously, lenders using the Optimal Blue PPE would be required to present Optimal Blue’s web application in addition to other mortgage technology applications as part of the workflow to price or lock a loan. This disrupted the ability of clients and other vendors to control the user experience and tightly coupled them to Optimal Blue’s presentation. Back-end integrations would transfer product and pricing data after the fact back to systems of record. This workflow was disruptive to a user and not efficient or scalable.

In 2016, Optimal Blue saw an opportunity to streamline this loan origination process for potential clients and third-party integrators while eliminating the need for custom integrations to their data. They decided to deliver a simple to consume, best execution mortgage product and pricing results through a set of API calls. This straightforward, transparent, and scalable solution would help clients perform all pricing actions on a loan from the lender’s pipeline and leverage Optimal Blue’s sophisticated pricing capabilities from multiple channels during the loan lifecycle.

The team at Optimal Blue went through a lengthy evaluation process across multiple vendors. Ultimately, they decided that Azure had the most robust solution that was also easily scalable for future growth. During implementation, the strong support they received from the Azure API team solidified their confidence in building their API solutions. They saw rapid adoption from customers who had been looking for those specific capabilities, even with just a few initial API endpoints. A very popular, yet unexpected, way for their API platform to grow was the third-party integrators that wanted to offer live pricing to attract borrowers to originate a mortgage online through their own applications. 

As Matt Cesarz, Chief Technology Officer for Optimal Blue, explains, “the initial number of API endpoints was small, but it was quickly obvious we found untapped potential to collaborate in new ways with our clients and partners. Using Azure and Azure API Management allowed us to focus on business value via our APIs, not on building and maintaining the underlying infrastructure to support our rapid growth.”

Building their future

As a company, Optimal Blue decided to build the next generation of their products on the Azure platform. The company aggressively rearchitected their existing data center infrastructure and solutions into Azure as part of a Platform-as-a-Service strategy. A key decision was the choice of Azure API Management, which allowed Optimal Blue to present functionality and capabilities to the market in a scalable, secure, and resilient manner. It also gave Optimal Blue a very professional Developer Portal for use by developers and integrators.

A superior technology stack

With Azure API Management specifically, they weren't looking to reproduce or build out functionality that would come out of the box. Azure API Management is a great example of so much engineering that's gone in to build the product over time, they realized they would not spend time reinventing core technical functionality. “The capabilities of Azure API Management gave us instant credibility and allowed us to present something in the market in a few months with a limited staff. It was something we couldn't have produced on our own with the level of impact it had when it released,” says Cesarz. 

The efficiencies were incredibly powerful because it was easily integrated with everything they were already choosing to do within Azure; it made things a lot simpler for Optimal Blue to reach the market. Not only have they allowed for quicker time to market for themselves, but also for third parties to bring real value to financial institutions that offer mortgage products.

More reliability and resiliency

A key for any product or service, especially in an industry utilizing up-to-the-minute information, must be response time and reliability. Optimal Blue has experienced very quick response times and extremely limited downtime. In fact, when the company expanded their geographical footprint to provide better resiliency to their clients, the use of API Management made that very easy for them to do. There was no need to stand up physical resources at a data center across different regions. It was as simple as the click of a button to set up that second instance and now they can route traffic to these regions in parallel. It has been a change in thinking—from a disaster recovery type mindset to always on and high availability.

Optimal Blue utilizes Azure DevOps to perform regular, no-downtime releases of feature enhancements into production. The team utilized the Azure Rest APIs to fully automate the publication of APIs and security policies into this process. 

Scaling their services

From serving only a few APIs in 2016, to now serving over 4 million calls a day, Optimal Blue has had to do essentially nothing with API Manager to support their growth. Even with the need to right size services behind the scenes, it took very limited effort with the use of Azure Platform as a Service (PaaS) resources. They were able to both cut coding time and add development capabilities without the need for additional time or staff. 

Development Director Ben Smith, who oversees API development at Optimal Blue, noted, “Azure API Management has been rock solid through that entire growth and it's never introduced any sort of degradation or latency into our clients’ processes or response times. It’s greatly contributed to the professional standard we aim for with our APIs.” 

Unrelenting security

Authentication before Azure was very manual and labor-intensive. Using API Management has helped Optimal Blue streamline and smooth implementations for clients across the board. Gone are the days of what the industry might call “homegrown authentication”—a laborious process with obvious limitations. Based on Azure Active Directory and OAuth 2.0 framework, their technical team manages client credentials to onboard partners and customers. Once credentials with the appropriate permissions are generated, those partners and customers are off to the races to begin building their own APIs using the documentation and guidelines provided by their integrations group. 

Eyes on the horizon       

Building on top of the tech stack offered by Azure, the team at Optimal Blue is excited about the future. The reliability and ability to scale means they can continue to add functionality and new capabilities to their APIs, quickly achieving and surpassing feature parity to their original web-based solution. According to Cesarz, “we're now in a position to develop our set of next generation web and mobile applications built on top of our APIs. Our ability to test our APIs allows us to move fast in creating new user experiences, and no-downtime releases provide the opportunity to quickly put new features into customers’ hands.” 

The product they have in the works now is going to be able to sit on top of those APIs and allow them to build that next generation platform much more quickly. “We're in a position where they can be that much more confident in the quality and the completeness of the solution, building on top of something in use across hundreds of implementations today. Over the next year we're going to be able to introduce updated versions of many of our legacy products into the marketplace,” says Cesarz. 

The team at Optimal Blue is eager to keep their technology current so they can move quickly to satisfy the needs of their growing list of clients. The entire migration to Azure has been a real opportunity for them to start moving and responding at the speed of the market. Smith believes, “we will continue to scale our services to be reactive to the marketplace and be more responsive to our customers as a result.”