More consumers are shopping for homes online and naturally finding their mortgage lenders online. As part of the mortgage product and pricing engine solution, a mortgage lender has the option to use a website embed that offers consumer-facing custom rate quotes or rate comparisons on their website. These tools would enhance the consumer's experience on the lender's website and create transparency to build trust and ultimately help convert a visitor into a high-quality lead. Mortgage pricing engines may offer these as a free add-on or additional charge to the lender. 

We will review our current and soon to support pricing engines and the consumer-facing website widgets features offered by pricing engines Optimal Blue, LoanSifter, Mortech, Polly.io and LenderPrice and compare those to BankingBridge website embeds.  

Many new mortgage products and pricing engines have hit the market in the last few years due to the hot housing market. There are new names such as Lender Price or Polly.io and more established names like Optimal Blue, Mortech and LoanSifter. The mortgage market probably has 8-10 product and pricing engines (PPEs) to choose from but the majority of market share is held by Optimal Blue and Mortech for the correspondent lenders and Loansifter for the broker market. Optimal Blue and Loansifter are owned by Black Knight which is currently in the process of an acquisition by ICE Mortgage Technologies to create a huge mortgage and real estate technology marketplace.  

Optimal Blue

Company Summary - Optimal Blue, which is a division of Black Knight, continues to be one of the leading mortgage digital marketplaces. With different secondary marketing solutions, their platform has been a staple in the mortgage industry for over 15 years.

Price - Optimal Blue is an enterprise solution which requires a cost breakdown from an account executive.  You can request more information here.

User Experience - The user experience of the Optimal Blue rate quote widget is a table format that can produce a few different rate quote options with cost. From a user experience standpoint it does provide the minimum needed to keep the user engaged. We would recommend more of a modern design similar to the BankingBridge rate table design, where you have different filters and options to tailor the loan options to your exact scenario. You can view a live Optimal Blue rate widget at this link. 

Lead Conversion - Lead conversion with a simple tool such as the Optimal Blue quick rate quote widget is not ideal. Optimal Blue is built for more complex and larger mortgage lenders, banks, and credit unions which require a more complete mortgage shopping experience.  This goes beyond the simple quote tool that Optimal Blue offers. 

If you’re a one-person mortgage broker, this tool is very affordable and can help you to convert more traffic into leads. If you’re looking to continue growing your business in the modern digital world, an option similar to the BankingBridge or Lender Price rate table experience would provide more value to your potential customers.

Cost/ROI - While this rate quote widget can help to get more lead submissions on your website, there are more robust options that from an ROI aspect, will bring more high-quality leads to your loan officer team. We would recommend a larger investment to bring a better user experience to your website and more high quality leads converted. 

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Mortech

Company Summary - Mortech, a Zillow company, product & pricing engine offers BestEx pricing across supported investors that includes lock workflows, change in circumstance historical pricing, and live MI quoting.  Fully automated processes eliminate the need to manually search, compare, and price mortgage products.  View and compare hundreds of investors' rate data on a single screen, providing the best product for each loan scenario.  Mortech looks to provide their lenders with a scalable and efficient API for online marketplace quoting where they will see faster response time and continued business growth. Currently, Mortech processes over tens of millions of online rate requests per day.

Price - Mortech does offer different entry level price points and API solutions. We recommend reaching out to an account executive. You can request more information here.

User Experience - It’s not clear if Mortech has a website rate quoting tool but they do offer a rate comparison table similar to that of Bankrate.  This rate table allows a mortgage lender to compare their rate and fees or display rates across several high traffic websites such as Zillow, Trulia, LendingTree, or Smart Assets. Although this model can be expensive for the mortgage lender it does provide a consistent way to advertise in market refinance and home buying opportunities.  

Lead Conversion - The rate comparison table Zillow provides is ideal for lead conversion.  The website visitor has a complete comparison shopping experience which helps shorten the decision making process.  It is also a great opportunity to increase your website traffic as many of the visitors to these rate table websites will also visit your website to learn more about your brand.  If you have competitive rates a rate comparison table should convert well. 

Cost/ROI -  The cost to participate on rate tables can vary.  We see a typical cost per click model to be around $15 per click and a cost per conversion model to be around $125-$200 per conversion.  To improve ROI we would recommend having a CRM in place to build out nurture campaigns for up to 120 days. 

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‍Lender Price 

Company Summary - Lender Price has recently launched their “Marketplace 2.0” for mortgage brokers that quickly finds the best rates and programs for borrowers inside one place. Lender Price is the “first modern pricing engine that uses natural language processing and proprietary algorithms to automate the management of loan programs, margins, loan adjustments, and loan eligibility.” This helps small to midsize mortgage lenders be able to compete on a large scale through innovative technology. Below we will explore the Lender Price Tabular Design pricing widget that mortgage lenders can utilize. Here you can review the live rate comparison plugin offered to clients.

Price: Marketplace 2.0 is free to mortgage brokers. Full enterprise solution pricing available from Lender Price account executive.  The tabular widget is an additional cost, you can request a demo here: https://lenderprice.com/request-demo/

User Experience - The Lender Price Tabular rate widget offers the user to view different rate scenarios and change the details of the loan very quickly. Each function is quick, and updates simultaneously. The rate widget experience could be improved by allowing the user to better navigate between 30-year Fixed, 20-year Fixed, and 15-year Fixed options rather than utilizing the dropdown feature. 

Lead Conversion - From a lead conversion aspect, after sifting through multiple different loan scenarios that are specific to their next mortgage, the user can select the loan and it prompts a new page to input their personal information. While this is a good experience, this could be improved by requiring less manual data inputs from the lead as most “lead forms” tend to shy away from potential leads. 

Cost/ROI - From a cost perspective, the Lender Price tabular rate widget is an affordable tool that can be utilized by any small to mid-sized mortgage lender to provide a more interactive experience on their website. Easily laying out the different loan options and scenarios for your potential leads is a better way to have more engaging conversations when the lead is ready to move forward in their mortgage process. 

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Loansifter 

Company Summary - Loansifter is a mortgage broker-specific Product Pricing Engine (PPE) that serves over 2,000+ mortgage brokers and is part of the Optimal Blue suite of products. Over 120+ Investors are supported. Loansifter has announced their new API functionality to automate data exchange between mortgage brokers and their technology partners. A simple to use product that has been the industry standard for mortgage brokers for the past 10+ years. 

Price - $79/mo. Additional costs for rate quote widgets. You can sign up here: https://www2.optimalblue.com/product-and-pricing-for-mortgage-brokers/

User Experience - The user experience of the Optimal Blue rate quote widget is just your typical input with a few dropdowns that can be seen above. From a user experience standpoint, this is more of an old-school way to shop for a mortgage rate quote. We would recommend more of a modern design similar to the BankingBridge rate table design, where you have different filters and options to tailor the loan options to your exact scenario. You can view a live Loansifter quote widget at the bottom of this page. 

Lead Conversion - Lead conversion with a simple tool such as the LoanSifter quick rate quote widget can vary based on how you present it. If you’re a one-person mortgage broker, this tool is affordable but will not generate many top of the funnel leads. If you’re looking to continue growing your business in the modern digital world, an option similar to the BankingBridge or Lender Price rate table experience would provide more value to your potential customers.

Cost/ROI - While this rate quote widget can help to get more lead submissions on your website, there are more robust options that from an ROI aspect, will bring more high-quality leads to your loan officer team. With the recently released news that Loansifter now has their API available for other technology partners such as BankingBridge and other third-party vendors, this opens up the options available for mortgage brokers and how they use and display mortgage rate quotes to their potential borrowers.

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‍Polly

Company Summary - Polly is transforming the mortgage industry with its modern, data-driven capital markets ecosystem. Banks, credit unions, and mortgage lenders nationwide trust Polly's revolutionary Product and Pricing Engine (PPE), Loan Trading Exchange, and actionable data and analytics to automate and optimize the entire capital markets value chain, helping their secondary teams operate faster, smarter, and more profitably. Polly was founded in 2019 by a seasoned team of technology and mortgage experts and is headquartered in San Francisco, California. To learn more, follow Polly on LinkedIn or visit www.polly.io.

Price - Polly's capital markets platform is fully customizable and tailored to each mortgage lenders' unique business need and strategy. Due to the level of flexibility available, it does require a cost breakdown from an account executive which is delivered in the form of a zero-obligation ROI analysis. The ROI analysis allows Polly to demonstrate to potential customers the sustained value out of the platform based on their unique mortgage operations. You can request pricing detail, here.

User Experience - Polly's modern, cloud-native PPE was built with patent‑pending technology to solve the core limitations of legacy solutions and is designed to maximize margins and facilitate speed, accuracy, and confidence across all loan pricing and lock processes. Lenders that leverage Polly gain access to the most technically advanced solution which makes configuring new products and channels significantly easier. Workflows become automated, speed to market is increased, and they can truly optimize the margins and revenue on every loan. You can learn more about what sets Polly's PPE apart, here.

Lead Conversion - Watch this quick video to learn how lenders are improving transparency and lead conversion using the powerful API integration between Polly and BankingBridge.

‍BankingBridge

Company Summary - BankingBridge helps mortgage lenders of all sizes to improve their website lead conversion by utilizing digital tools to display rates, providing a seamless shopping experience. Custom branded lead conversion workflows, mortgage calculators, real-time rate display tools, and loan officer pages. Maximize lead conversion with the highest ROI on your ad spend. BankingBridge provides two different popular consumer-facing embeds that allow website visitors to receive a custom rate quote or compare rates in a rate table format. Here we will review the rate comparison table. To learn more, visit https://www.bankingbridge.com/demo. 

Price: Starting price of $250/mo includes 15 monthly lead submissions and rate alert emails.

The rate table experience has become a staple in the mortgage shopping experience throughout the past few years. When prospective buyers or current homeowners want to view different rates provided by a lender, the BankingBridge rate table experience provides it all. 

Immediately after inputting your loan scenario information, you are greeted with a “featured” tab that outlines the top loan products that fit your scenario. As seen below in the photo, there are 30-year fixed, 20-year fixed, 15-year fixed, and various ARM products. The loan information including rates and APR is presented in a clean, easy-to-read format friendly to all who may view them. 

User Experience - In the modern online shopping environment, the user experience (UX design) is everything when it comes to keeping your end users engaged, and willing to come back. The same is true for mortgage tools on your website, the more refined and robust a digital tool that you can provide, the more memorable that experience will be for your potential customers. BankingBridge’s Rate Table embed not only provides a clean, easy-to-use user experience, but the rate table provides all of the loan information in clear detail. The customer can change different values of the loan and the table responds and updates quickly. The tab design at the top of the rate table allows the end-user to quickly view different loan terms from 30-year Fixed, 20-year Fixed, 15-year Fixed, and even ARM products. This ensures that even a first-time home buyer can understand the different aspects of your loan products. Check out the live BankingBridge rate table at this link https://fivestar.bankingbridge.com/todays-rates/

Lead Conversion - The BankingBridge rate table focuses on the all important top of the funnel lead conversion. It allows users to quickly compare different loan options and then move forward by clicking “Get Started” on the loan option that best fits their needs. This then prompts a page where the lead can input their First, Last, Email, and Phone Number and also allows them to enroll themselves into “Rate Subscription.” These are branded emails from your Loan Officer/Team that go out twice a week to keep these top-of-the-funnel leads engaged in what the market is doing as far as rates.

‍Cost/ROI - BankingBridge’s rate table offering comes bundled with other mortgage lead conversion digital tools such as a lead workflow, digital rate cards, rate subscriptions, and more. Starting at just $250/mo for individual brokers, and $500/mo for branches or small teams, it presents an affordable entry point to help any size lender improve their online mortgage shopping experience.

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