In the middle of growth plans, it has technology that focuses on making mortgage processes quicker and easier
Alimi’s own description goes deeper.
“On the pricing side, we provide a different way of actually managing… loan products, eligibility rules and loan-level price adjustments than traditional pricing engines,” Alimi said. “If you look at pricing engines, most – especially the popular ones out there developed in the early 2000s… the way [they were designed] was using the frameworks that were available back then.
“As you know,” he added, “technology frameworks have gotten much better.” That’s particularly prevalent on the back end and in Lender Price’s favor, Alimi noted.
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“On the back end, we use a system called [Natural Language Processing (NLP)] so that when you’re creating rules, like rules for underwriting… or pricing rules, usually you create rules using ‘if, then’ logic. What we do is we actually made it easier,” Alimi noted.
“We said, ‘what if you can just copy a loan-level price adjustment from a rate sheet, paste it inside our system, or type out the rule in natural language?’”
IBM describes NLP as a form of artificial intelligence that helps machines understand and respond to text or voice data.
Lender Price’s system also uses a modern tech stack, with components such as Angular – an open-source JavaScript software stack designed to help build web sites and applications. The components also come with a microservices architecture, which Alimi said helps Lender Price operate more dynamically than “monolithic” legacy systems.
“Because our system is built on a microservices architecture, and it’s vertically [and horizontally] scalable…. It means that the application is divided up in several different services and several different micro-applications,” Alimi explained. “If one piece of the application is down, the entire application is not down.”
Laser focused
According to Alimi, Lender Price’s main market competitor was Optimal Blue, a provider of secondary mortgage market products and services as well as actionable data services. Black Knight, Inc., a maker of software, data and analytics for the mortgage, consumer loan, real estate and capital markets, acquired the company in late 2020.
Similarly, Alimi acknowledged that his company has been eyed as a possible acquisition target by others in recent months.
“We had six attempts to acquire us in the last year and a half, and one merger [pitch], and we’ve turned them all down,” Alimi said.
Instead, Lender Price is looking for possible acquisitions of its own down the line, entities that would be complementary and perhaps “augment and enhance” its own products.
“We do have plans on acquiring other companies [but] just haven’t found one that [would be] a good company to acquire,” Alimi said. “We are on the hunt.”
More immediately, Lender Price is spending its time on hiring and building its business.
“Right now, we’re really laser-focused on growth,” Alimi said.
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