Optimal Blue announced Virtual Economist, the first on-demand forecasting tool for mortgage capital markets leaders powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (AI/ML), as the centerpiece of nine platform advancements unveiled at the company’s 2026 Summit. Together, the innovations further unify the capital market’s profitability experience by connecting forecasting, pricing, hedging, competitive benchmarking and workflow 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 at Optimal Blue, said in a release. “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. The innovations announced at our 2026 Optimal Blue Summit reflect our long-term commitment to redefining how the industry plans, prices and performs in any market environment.”
Erin Wester, chief product officer at Optimal Blue, said the Virtual Economist tackles a challenge that its lender clients are facing.
“(That challenge is) the disconnect between economic insight and day-to-day execution,” 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. That same data-driven approach extends across our 2026 innovations, creating a tighter feedback loop among pricing, margin management and hedge analytics so decisions are informed by real-time insight and reflected consistently across the platform.”