Tech All-Star: Seever Sulaiman-A Mortgage Tech Career Marked by Proud Moments
(Seever Sulaiman, courtesy of Optimal Blue)
When he looks back on the proudest moments of his career so far, Seever Sulaiman isn’t hurting for memories–ranging from his initial industry job where he helped build the first automated mortgage fraud detection platform in the country to in 2018 selling a company he cofounded, Resitrader, to Optimal Blue.
Sulaiman, an MBA NewsLink 2025 Tech All-Star Award recipient, is now Chief Technology Officer at Optimal Blue, headquartered in Plano, Texas. He sat down with MBA NewsLink to talk about his path in the industry, and some of those standout moments.
Sulaiman has been in the mortgage industry since 1997, beginning as a software developer for New City Asset Management.
That was where he worked on what became the first automated mortgage fraud detection software. It was a “very proud moment, when we built that software and people started using it,” Sulaiman recalled. “Knowing that I was part of it. I wasn’t a founder, but I was one of the first four or five people in the company.”
Looking back, Sulaiman is particularly thankful to the firm’s founder and CEO, Steve Halper, for giving him that opportunity shortly after Sulaiman immigrated to the U.S. “[Halper is] a true American entrepreneur with a vision. He hired an immigrant that had just come to the country, […] someone 23 years old, and he just took a chance. And luckily for both of us, it worked out.”
Sulaiman was with that firm for a number of years and accomplishments, including building an automated broker price opinion portal. After various changes and acquisitions, he eventually became Chief Technology Officer for a combined company, Interthinx.
In 2008, he took a job with Lender Processing Services, serving as the CTO for the applied analytics division. Then, he became CTO at Equator, where, among other accomplishments, he worked on an REO default servicing system and a new user interface for the company’s site.
It was there that Sulaiman met his future business partner — John Ardy. Ardy and Sulaiman founded Resitrader in 2015, with Sulaiman serving as Chief Information Officer.
“It was the first exchange at the time,” Sulaiman recalled. “So, we built that first exchange and portal for trading whole loan mortgages between sellers and buyers.”
“It was the hardest but the best experience of my career,” he said. “Probably my most proud moment was the day that we sold it to Optimal Blue.” That was in 2018; Resitrader now powers Optimal Blue’s CompassEdge hedging and loan trading platform and supports a number of automated, investor-connected workflows. With the sale, Sulaiman joined the team at Optimal Blue on the loan trading side, and in 2023, he became CTO.
Under Sulaiman’s leadership, Optimal Blue’s capital markets solutions currently power over 35% of all mortgages priced and locked in the U.S., about 40% of loans hedged and sold into the secondary market, and 70% of all MSR valuations–facilitating a total of $1.1 trillion in loan transactions annually. Resitrader processes $375 billion in digital loan trades every year.
Since moving to Optimal Blue, Sulaiman has also been on the front lines of one of the most pressing technology topics in the industry–how to best use artificial intelligence.
“When I joined as CTO, one of the first things that we focused on is, ‘how do we take advantage of this new thing?’ ” he remembered, pointing specifically to generative AI. He said Optimal Blue implemented it early on for its development organization and for productivity, and were able to soon afterwards embed generative AI tools in Optimal Blue’s applications. Sulaiman gave as examples the assistants built into the firm’s CompassEdge platform, and the Ask Obi standalone AI assistant.
Moreover, in the past year, Optimal Blue has introduced a series of no-cost AI-powered enhancements under Sulaiman’s guidance, including intelligent trade analytics that detect pricing anomalies and improve execution strategy, AI-enhanced document processing for streamlined trading workflows and predictive market insights to optimize hedge desk performance.
“We’re investing heavily in that field to ensure we can take advantage of the power and the capabilities it can give our clients,” he said. He doesn’t want to use AI “just to say we’re using AI,” but rather to figure out “what are some of the complex problems that our customers are having that we couldn’t solve without AI.”
There are surely more proud moments to come, too. Sulaiman said that at Optimal Blue, there are plenty of things in the works, including continuing to build on AI assistants, and products that will utilize other aspects of AI anticipated next year.
“There’s a very combined effort of everyone in the organization. Our CEO is an AI visionary, and he has rallied the entire organization around this type of innovation — and I’m very proud of that as well, and proud of our implementation of AI,” Sulaiman said.
Sulaiman also gives back to the industry as an active member of the Mortgage Bankers Association Mortgage Technology Vendor Working Group, where discussion of AI use has been significant.
Looking back on his nearly 30-year-career in the mortgage industry, Sulaiman says it’s a great place to work, and one that has an impact on so many Americans. “There’s a lot of processes and procedures–there’s so much room to continue to improve for technologists,” he said. “So, if you’re a technologist at heart, you want to solve problems. This is a really good place to do that.”
