Optimal Blue, a financial technology company that operates the nation’s largest digital mortgage marketplace, has acquired Resitrader, which operates a digital whole loan trading platform, for an undisclosed sum.
Optimal Blue says the deal creates the industry’s largest mortgage loan trading platform. The combined network will support $750 billion of transactions per year.
This includes nearly $600 billion of rate locks processed through Optimal Blue’s product and pricing engine and more than $150 billion of transactions through its hedging solution.
Since its founding in 2015, Resitrader has focused on bringing automation and transparency to the spot market for mortgage loans.
The firm’s interactive trading environment enables buyers, sellers and their advisors to transact in real time using an auction process and replaces the widely-used method of exchanging bid tapes via email.
Resitrader also helps traders optimize executions by supporting shadow-bidding, the posting of axes, chat-based communication, and color reports.
Resitrader has recorded a 400% increase in transactions in the past year.
“Two years ago, Optimal Blue set out to build a digital mortgage marketplace that facilitates transactions between originators, investors and the providers both use. This acquisition is another key step in that journey,” explains Scott Happ, CEO of Optimal Blue, in a release.
By integrating Resitrader’s platform with Optimal Blue’s hedging solution, Optimal Blue expects to substantially expand its capabilities in the bulk bid market, an execution widely used by lenders employing a mandatory delivery strategy.
More than 50 buyers are already active on the platform and more than 150 are expected by year end.
Additionally, Optimal Blue will seek to expand third party relationships with hedge advisors and whole loan traders needing access to the bulk market.
John Ardy, CEO of Resitrader and Seever Sulaiman, chief information officer, along with the rest of the Resitrader team, will join Optimal Blue upon close of the acquisition.
Happ says Ardy and Sulaiman “are proven innovators and bring considerable experience in building trading platforms to our team. There is no limit to what we can do together.”
