Optimal Blue Launches Ai-powered Forecasting Tool For Mortgage Capital Markets

Optimal Blue on Tuesday announced the launch of Virtual Economist, an artificial intelligence-powered forecasting tool designed for leaders in mortgage capital markets. The company unveiled the tool along with several other recent advancements at its 2026 Summit in Arizona.

Executives at Optimal Blue said that Virtual Economist is the “centerpiece” of nine platform improvements that aim to improve profitability for capital markets firms. The tool combines forecasting, pricing, hedging, benchmarking and workplace execution within a single end-to-end platform.

“The future of mortgage capital markets belongs to platforms that don’t just respond to volatility, but anticipate it,” Joe Tyrrell, CEO of Optimal Blue, said in a statement. “Optimal Blue is building and continuously innovating an intelligent, connected and comprehensive ecosystem that gives lenders clarity and confidence from origination to secondary marketing, and back again.”

“Virtual Economist was built to address a real challenge our lender clients face — the disconnect between economic insight and day-to-day execution,” chief product officer Erin Wester said. “By uniting public economic indicators with Optimal Blue’s proprietary lock volume data and applying AI/ML-driven forecasting, teams can test assumptions and prepare immediately through conversational and visual scenario modeling.”

The company described the Virtual Economist as capable of giving lenders “on-demand predictions without the lag, labor or subjectivity of traditional approaches.” It can deliver real-time rate and volume predictions and instant scenario analysis for strategic planning. Users can interact with the tool by voice or text, and forecasts are presented visually to enhance clarity and decision-making.

Among other innovations announced Tuesday, Optimal Blue introduced a Profitability Center dashboard for use across its products. A company press release explained that the “central landing experience includes access to an economic calendar and predictive insights to anticipate market movement and plan hedging or pricing actions accordingly.”

Competitive Data License Plus looks to expand Optimal Blue’s benchmarking capabilities by adding anonymized hedging and trading data to its existing lock and pricing dataset. It offers deeper visibility into pull-through performance, margin from lock to sale, investor turn times and best-efforts versus mandatory execution spreads.

Agency Direct in CompassEdge modernizes workflows for institutions delivering loans to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Home Loan Banks. It replaces manual spreadsheet-based tracking with a centralized environment for loan imports, coverage modeling and commitment management in CompassEdge.

Ratesheet Pricing Insights connects pricing from the Optimal Blue PPE with CompassEdge margin management, reducing the lag and manual processes that can separate pricing decisions from published rates. By syncing margin updates directly between systems and embedding market and competitive context into the workflow, it surfaces competitive insights before rate sheets are published and helps ensure rates reflect current conditions while improving margin discipline.

Enhanced administrative experiences for the Optimal Blue PPE and CompassEdge hedging and trading platform aim to give users faster, more intuitive ways to configure pricing and manage investors.

Optimal Blue also built a new connection between its Loansifter PPE for mortgage brokers and Comergence, its counterparty oversight solution. It links promotional pricing visibility with counterparty engagement data, allowing investors insights into a broker’s interactions and marketing effectiveness. The goal is to enable investors to better capture qualified leads and accelerate growth across the third-party originator (TPO) channel.

Optimal Blue said some of the announced innovations are live today, with others entering beta or phased rollout throughout 2026.