Recorded live from the Optimal Blue Summit 2026, this special bonus episode of Optimal Insights captures the energy, insights, and big ideas coming out of day one.
Jim Glennon and Vimi Vasudeva discuss the standout moments from the opening general session and training workshops – including new feature announcements, a live demo of Optimal Blue’s Virtual Economist, and some eye-opening industry stats.
Commentary included in the podcast shall not be construed as, nor is Optimal Insights providing, any legal, trading, hedging, or financial advice.
Transcripts
Optimal Blue (:
Here we are at the Optimal Blue Summit. We are just barely halfway through the first day. Really amazing sessions. mean, the opening general session is always super exciting. It's kind of the fanfare. kind of, think, Vimy, you said it was kind of like watching one of those old Apple...
announcements or even some of the new ones with the new CEO and had some brilliant feature announcements that came out today. Hopefully you'll all see those in some of the press releases. But we also wanted to talk about some of the things that have come up in our training sessions from yesterday, some of the general session discussion today and some of the mini sessions and some stats, some interesting stats that we observed. What was your favorite, you think, Nami?
Gosh, well, you make such a good point, Jim, that we're only not even a full day into this and there are already so many stats. So I have to think for a moment of what my favorite one might've been, but I'll go with two. One is about recapture. And of course I'm going to talk about recapture because every time I'm on the podcast, I talk about recapture. And we actually just talked about it on yesterday's and then really interesting stat that the NBA just produced is that industry wide recapture is at about 20 % right now.
versus a 12 % from last year. So again, very hot topic. We obviously know why it's such a big deal with all of the M &A as we discussed yesterday. So that was one. And then the other one, to your point about a lot of the exciting releases that we talked about in the general session today that yes, felt very Apple-like was our virtual economist. The virtual economist is predicting that the OBMMI will be less than 6 % for most of the year.
Which is pretty exciting for our industry. Yeah, just barely below 6 % for the whole year. And that was a wild presentation, I thought. We took a little bit of a risk, I think, having Kevin interact live. It was not a recorded thing. He was interacting with an avatar, basically, that was using machine learning to predict what rates looked like for the rest of the year. Obviously, it's based on kind of a baseline assumption that there's not.
a lot of changes and expectations for the Fed. There's not a lot of, there's no recession. There's no huge change in jobs numbers. So I kind of, I like to take a stance one way or the other. My stance is usually optimistic. So I feel like we're to go a little bit lower than what the avatar came up with. But yeah, I thought that was a super cool stat and a fun feature. And then back to the MSR thing. We were actually after the session talking with one of our friends and clients and he called Vimy the queen of MSR.
which I thought was pretty awesome. This is a side anecdote. I wish I had a crown for this episode reporting to play into that role.
But yes, thank you for that,
Virtual Economist was so fascinating to see and I agree, it was kind of risky. I don't know if any of you watched the morning show, but there was an episode in which they launched a generative AI assistant and it went very rogue. So I'm really glad that did not happen to us. But that kind of speaks to one of Joe's main points from this morning, that there is a lot of hesitation in adoption of technology and AI and that there really shouldn't be because there are so many benefits to adopting and
anyone who doesn't will really be left behind. Yeah, he likened it. It was interesting. He started off the session with as he tends to do with a narrative and a story and it was about New Year's resolutions, right? We're here in February and his stats were about how long people stick with their New Year's resolutions. And I believe it was like 25 % ish quit their New Year's resolution after the first week of January. And by end of January, 50 % of people quit. And he took that sort of graph.
of quitting resolutions and put it against a graph of a theory that's driven by adoption of technology, new technology especially. And those two graphs are identical, which I thought was super, is very enlightening and made a light bulb go off because Jeff, Tiffany and Brennan and I just had a session where we were talking about a new
Not necessarily new, but some new features coming to how you can manage margin and more actively manage your position in the market in terms of pricing for loan officers and borrowers. And we brought in some of what Joe said this morning into that session to say, listen, this is one of those processes that you have to be very disciplined about and you have to stick to. Otherwise you fall back into old habits. You fall back into less profitable, less competitive habits in terms of your pricing. So we kind of tied all that together and said, there's this cycle of
monitoring your position in the market, actively managing your margins, and then measuring that performance, and then starting that cycle over again and being consistent about maintaining it. anyway, just thought that that built into everything that we're going to be talking about for the next couple of days as well, because a lot of these new features and existing features that we're going to be schooling people on are the type of thing that you need to be diligent about and need to actually deliberately adopt. Otherwise, it just becomes another thing that you're paying for, but you're not using. Absolutely.
Yeah, and I just, love how Joe set the tone for the whole day. And as you said, Jim, every one of our sessions is really going to be focused on that same theme. And he just brought so much fantastic energy to this theme as he always does.
Yeah, and I mean, just a lot of great sessions so far. I my impressions have just been the energy here is great. And that's obvious when you get 500 people in a room that have similar goals and just learning a lot. And it can be overwhelming, but we're getting it all done here and happy to be here and having some fun. And I'm interested to see what the next couple of sessions look like here after lunch. Yeah, looking forward to it.
