We’ve talked a little bit about what an application programming interface (API) for a mortgage pricing engine can do for home loan lenders. And if that piqued your interest, you probably want to know more about your options in this field.

So today, we’re going to look more closely at the leaders in mortgage product and pricing engines (PPEs) and the APIs available to plug those tools into your website. This way, you have the means to show anyone who visits your site real-time rates and personalized loan details. 

There are six pricing engine APIs you should explore before choosing one for your mortgage institution. And don’t get reader fatigue on us here. The last option we go over — our new RateFlow tool — lets you get info from all of these PPEs in one place. 

Optimal Blue

Optimal Blue is owned by Black Knight and offers a variety of mortgage sales and marketing solutions. That includes the Optimal Blue Pricing Engine, which many mortgage pros use internally. This tool lets them price out loans using real-time data from investors offering conventional, non-conforming, government, portfolio, and other home loans. Your team can also use the BESTX™ pricing tool to explore mortgage insurance premiums.

From a customer-facing perspective, Optimal Blue’s pricing engine API can deliver through the company’s engagement and e-quoting enhancements. These pricing tools give you a way to provide quick quotes and feature your real-time rates on your own website. The API is specifically designed to ensure the quotes you provide are compliant with industry regulations, too. 

Mortech

Like other PPEs, Mortech’s pri

cing engine gives mortgage professionals an easy way to access current mortgage pricing information across multiple sources. It also includes mortgage insurance quote functionality. And again, you can use that internally to support your sales team.

But with the API, you can also integrate Mortech’s pricing engine into your website or even your mobile app. And the Mortech team promises this integration in as little as two weeks. 

Polly

Polly built its PPE on patent-pending technology. It’s mobile-friendly and lets you automate workflows to power up your loan officers. And with the company’s growing suite of APIs, you get not just the PPE’s API, but also Polly’s relatively new Initial Lock API, which builds out its lock desk workflow automation suite. 

From a customer-focused perspective, the pricing engine API from Polly has a lot of promise. You can configure it to automatically run loan scenarios with up-to-date rates, letting your potential borrowers explore their options from the comfort of your own website. 

Loansifter

Also falling under the Black Knight umbrella, Loansifter is a PPE that compiles thousands of products from more than 120 wholesale investors. It’s designed to be plug-and-play, meaning your loan officers shouldn’t need much training to get up and running with this tool. And with features like search defaults you can pre-set and integration into your loan origination system, Loansifter can be a powerful internal tool. 

In October 2022, Black Knight announced an API for this PPE. This one isn’t designed to help the tool plug into your website, though. Instead, it lets brokers share information within the PPE. While this makes Loansifter more useful by feeding it more information, it doesn’t help you get that information in front of your potential customers. But don’t worry. With a BankingBridge API, you do have a way to get that Loansifter rate data onto your website embeds. 

Lender Price

Lender Price offers a cloud-native mortgage pricing and underwriting solution. Its PPE promises to serve up retail, wholesale, and correspondent options in one place. And to do so without the headaches that have long plagued mortgage pros using PPEs, like slow load times and system crashes when too many requests or users are in play at once. 

Lender Price also offers a variety of integrations — including custom ones — to help its user base plug the PPE in where they need it. For example, the company has a BankingBridge API that allows you to embed real-time rates from this robust solution onto your website. 

Getting all of these PPEs in one place with BankingBridge

Clearly, you have options here. Maybe you’re drawn to a solution that has a long track record of serving mortgage pros, like Optimal Blue. Or maybe you want leading-edge technology to enable your sales team and you feel a pull toward Lender Price or Polly. 

But why should you have to choose just one? Limiting the tools your company uses means potentially limiting what you can offer to borrowers. And that could risk losing them a competitor.

To give your mortgage lending institution the advantage it needs, you don’t need to invest in several different PPEs. Instead, you can choose one: RateFlow from our team here at BankingBridge. 

As you might be able to tell from some of the APIs we touched on earlier, we have relationships with all of the providers of these PPEs. And we’ve worked with them to help get rates from their solutions to our customer’s internal systems and to their websites. But why stop there?

With RateFlow, we’ve developed a new API to help you pull information from all five of these leading PPEs. It gives you a single, standardized, seamless interface so you can tap all of these resources.

Just as importantly, the API lets you display rates in real-time on your website, helping you better engage with your potential customers. 

What’s more, RateFlow integrates with our other BankingBridge tools to help generate and nurture leads. Not only can we help you display updated rates on your website, for example, but we can also do it on a widget that includes a “Get Started” button. 

Once a website visitor clicks it and inputs some minimal information (name and contact info), they can enroll in “Rate Subscription” emails. We can automate these emails to go out from your loan officers on a regular basis, updating your leads on rate movement. Ultimately, this helps your team best engage with leads and convert them into customers.

Clearly, APIs can do a lot to support your mortgage lending business — provided you choose the right ones. To learn more about RateFlow and the other BankingBridge tools that we offer, schedule a free demo with our team today.