Black Knight LOS Targets Regional, Mid-Market Lenders

Black Knight Financial Services, Jacksonville, Fla., said it will launch a new version of its loan origination system aimed at enabling regional and mid-market lenders, as well as independent mortgage bankers.

The LoanSphere Empower Now! platform is designed to allow small and mid-market lenders to deploy a version of its LoanSphere Empower LOS, which is primarily targeted at larger lenders, on a scalable basis. It allows them to implement capabilities of Empower in less time, at a lower cost and in a more streamlined process. The scalability allows lenders to convert to more sophisticated versions as their business grows.

Lenders can add configurations and additional feature functionality, which will allow them to remain on the same system as their business grows, and to adjust system parameters to meet their specific compliance needs.

“Historically, regional and mid-market lenders have selected an LOS to meet their immediate needs, knowing that they may eventually need a different solution to accommodate future growth,” said Jerry Halbrook, president of Black Knight’s Origination Technologies division. “Then, as they expanded, these lenders had to migrate to a new system to meet the more robust requirements of their growing business and scalability needs. With Empower Now!, lenders that are on a growth track can add new features and business channels without having to implement a new system.”

Halbrook said development of Empower Now! enables Black Knight to target smaller lenders with the same technology it deploys with larger lenders.

“Lots of smaller lenders, as they grow, they have to find other platforms,” Halbrook said. “That leads to a substantial project for implementation, which can be very costly for an LOS project. By deploying Empower Now! in a preconfigured manner, as they grow in size and scale, they can grow with it and use the same platform for many years and scale up to large capabilities without going through a new implementation of the platform. We believe we are bringing far superior functionality to that market with a fast and relatively inexpensive implementation.”

Halbrook said development of Empower Now! resulted from discussions with mid-tier customers who were interested in the Empower product but were “scared off” by its implementation costs. “Many already do business with us in other capacities,” he said. “It presented us with an opportunity to take that same technology and make it available to smaller lender. A lot of it was being driven by client interaction.

Halbrook added that Black Knight sought to expand its business as well. “We have been successful in the top 40 market,” he said. “When you get to 30 percent of that market, we were looking at how to expand that share.”

Black Knight said many of its value-added offerings are included in Empower Now! Lenders can gain access to Black Knight’s Data Hub and Motivity products, which provide business intelligence and access to information from multiple data sources to help forecast and monitor performance. Empower Now! also includes e-delivery and e-signing capabilities, as well as integrations to LoanSphere Exchange, public records and borrower asset and income information and digital technology, without the need for toolkits.