Market Pulse, Global Headlines & Behind the Scenes of the Optimal Blue Hackathon | Optimal Insights | June 23, 2025

Jim (: 00:18

Welcome to Optimal Insights, your weekly source for timely market analysis and expert commentary from Optimal Blue. I'm your host, Jim Glennon, Vice President of Hedging and Trading Client Services at Optimal Blue. Our clients and industry partners have long relied on Optimal Blue for trusted insights and commentary, and these podcasts are an evolution of our commitment to keeping the industry informed. Let's dive into today's episode. All right, welcome everybody. Thanks for being with us here today on June the 23rd. A lot to talk about.

in the interest of keeping you all informed. We're going to try to keep it really current in terms of events that are going on in the market and also some geopolitical subjects to tackle today. So great show. We'll do the market update here in a minute. We'll talk a bit about going on with the conflict unfolding in the Middle East up to today. And then later on, we're going to talk with Sivar Suleiman, CTO, about our hackathon that we had a couple of weeks ago. So if you've ever wondered what is a hackathon,

or how you could even have your own hackathon, stay tuned. We'll talk through that here in a few minutes. just in the way of data, the OB-MMI is still 6.8. We've been there for like five months, so not a lot of news there. But we'll talk through what happened at the Fed meeting and some of the commentary that came after that later on with Alex and Jeff. Volume is still good. We're still seeing of eerily high, even with rates at 6.8. We see volume above.

where it was on average in: 2019

Jim (: 02:09

Okay, gentlemen, a lot to tackle today. Where to begin? Alex, just in the way of data last week, before we even get into the FOMC meeting, what happened last week?

Alex Hebner (: 02:21

Yeah, relatively quiet week as the third week of the month typically is. Jobless claims, I think, was probably the number one thing, at least I was keeping an eye on. It remained elevated, but floating, just shy of over week. So we're definitely still seeing that weakening that we've been talking about in the labor market. But again, once we're well north of 250, I think that's when we really want to be concerned. 250 is kind of that cutoff between a good and a bad market.

to see there week over week. It's nice we get that data point each week just to kind of keep our finger on the pulse of where the labor market's at, which I think is more and more as tariffs have kind of moved to the sidelines for the moment, where people are keeping their eyes on in gauging the health of the economy.

Jim (: 03:05

Yeah, and that number for the longest time was around 200. So we are starting to see that consistently high, like you said, around 250. And that's going to be a leading indicator above the non-farm number that's going to be at to be roughly weeks old, right? And it's more of a survey number versus an actual unemployment benefits data point.

Jeff McCarty (: 03:24

But just like so many of these data points, it's like a slightly weak number, right? We still can't get into a full blown trend in one direction,

Alex Hebner (: 03:24

Yep, yeah.

Jim (: 03:36

Yeah, still, I mean, the unemployment rate is still, you know, below well below four and a half, which is four and a half being that cutoff that we would look for for the Fed potentially acting based on data and cutting rates. speaking of which, let's just get into it. There's been some, some rhetoric since Wednesday. Wednesday was, was kind of an uneventful Fed meeting. everyone knew that rates were going to be held steady, but some of the language that came out was a little bit.

Alex Hebner (: 03:37

Yeah.

Jim (: 04:01

stirred the pot a little bit, I would say, with the administration where Jerome Powell said implicated the tariff drama in at least part of their decision making process, where typically the Fed's going to look straight at the data and they're going to say it's all going to be data driven. And they're still saying that going forward, but they're kind of anticipating that the data may be impacted by tariffs. So maybe it's semantics, but they basically said what? They said the effects of tariffs have yet to show themselves in the inflation data.

So they're kind of acting a little bit more cautious moving forward and maybe leaning towards keeping rates where they are because they feel like they may see inflation reignite, even though it hasn't happened. I inflation is tamer than it's been the pandemic, right?

Alex Hebner (: 04:46

mean, I agree with Palo's sentiment that, you know, keep an eye on tariffs. And but I also agree that we have yet to see any of bleed through to the general economy more or less, you know, there's certain, I think, like certain radio products that have been impacted quite a bit. by and large, you know, the average consumer really hasn't felt a pinch yet from tariffs. you know, long story short, they kept rates where they're at

right

four and a quarter, four and a half percent. yeah, during his press conference, and maybe he hasn't said this directly from the podium before, but he's definitely said we're in, we're in wait and see mode. And as you said, Jim, he kind of deferred from the data, the, backward looking data and said, you know, we're looking at the next three months here. ⁓ and, cutting rates into that the next three months, ⁓ he, he couldn't do that with good conscious.

Jeff McCarty (: 05:31

Yeah, he also noted just first quarter GDP numbers distorted by front loading imports by businesses to get ahead of the tariffs. So there's, still a lot of moving parts while we're kind of in the middle of all this analysis. so again, yeah, wait and see mode. then he, he noted also the declining sentiment, and uncertainty, that, households and businesses are, are noting as well as kind of, kind of forward looking indicators.

Jim (: 05:58

Mm-hmm. Yeah, there's still...

Alex Hebner (: 05:59

Yeah. And in the day since,

feels as if a couple of the members of the board have maybe hedged those bets. And again, I don't think anything Powell said was, you know, inflammatory, maybe, you know, a little bit different from the typical discourse you hear from that podium, but, Waller and Bowman both came out Friday and Monday respectively, and made comments that, there's a chance we could cut rates at the next meeting in July. You know, market participants still aren't showing that, but, you know, I definitely saw some hedging of bets there.

Jim (: 06:21

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, there's only maybe a 22 % right now in the CME, a 22 % chance that we get a cut in July, but that it ticked up a little bit, like you said, with Bowman and some of the other governors kind of backtracked a little bit and said, know, inflation still looks good in a month, month and a half, we're probably, you know, we're supportive of a cut. And then meanwhile, you know, again, maybe not directly aimed at the administration, Powell's comments, but there were some comments that came out of the administration that were relatively inflammatory.

There was some name calling then even Bill Pulte stepped up and basically said that the Fed is doing the country a great disservice, I think was the quote, not cutting rates. So you're kind of stuck. I'm kind of stuck, right? mean, there's no data that says there's like, where's the fire, right? Why do we need to cut rates right now? I get that it would be nice for short-term rates to be lower. think Bill Pulte specifically, you know, coming from a, you know, home building background, coming from the real estate business closer to what we all do.

speaking around mortgage rates. But I think as we know, and a lot of folks know, the Fed cutting rates doesn't necessarily mean we get better mortgage rates. In the short term, it may cause a little bit of a jump in MBS prices, which could cause rates to drop a little bit. I think, like we talked about last week and we've talked about on this podcast, ad nauseam with all the debt being dumped onto the market right now by our government and others and just in general, it's

Sort of unlikely, no matter what the Fed does, it's unlikely that mortgage rates are going to drop much in the short term unless we get some sort of extenuating circumstance like a market dislocation or if there's war that's going on in the Middle East, it's out of hand or something along those lines.

Jeff McCarty (: 08:06

Yeah. You know, a few other things worth noting that, that, that Poulty commented on, right? Joe Powell is trapping homeowners in low rate mortgages and choking off existing home sales directly fueling the housing supply crisis. He must lower rates. we've talked about before the dynamic, it's been a while, but we've talked about the dynamic of rates and affordability and

Low rates last time probably exacerbated the affordability crisis with a price appreciation of it. it is hard to put all these things together and say that lower rates will help affordability. Certainly increase supply, but also increase demand. So what does that dynamic look like together? I think just especially worth noting that Pulte was the most vocal credit.

within the administration last week talking about this, focusing on the housing sector in particular.

Alex Hebner (: 09:00

think he's

doing his part, you know, for the administration. The administration broadly wants to see lower rates as we've talked about, as Jim said ad non-sum on the podcast, you know, there's a lot of debt coming to market this year the administration beyond just the housing market, mortgage market, they're looking to see lower rates for refinancing activities, federal debt.

Jim (: 09:18

Right. Yeah. So we'll see. Yeah. The government would like lower rates for obvious, for their own purposes, but also for the consumer. would be better for everybody if rates were lower business wise, know, inflation's a real thing. Inflation, know, lower rates don't mean a lot. your, you know, inflation goes back to, you know, four or five, six plus percent and people's, you know, savings starts to erode again and our money is worth less than it was last year.

All right. Let's ⁓ shift gears a little bit. I think everybody knows at this point, but there's a rapidly escalating issue in the Middle East where the Israelis Iran. took out some military officials, some scientists, some sites, and then the ⁓ US engaged in our own bombing campaign on Saturday.

potentially sites that were softened up by the Israeli army. And then now it's kind of a standstill, but an eerie standstill, right? The markets don't seem to be reacting very much other than oil, which you would expect, potential disruptions there with over 100, I think it's 100 tankers a day running Straits that run south of Iran. But otherwise, stock market's pretty flat today.

MBS is pretty flat, not a big market reaction. So not a lot to talk about here in terms of what to expect in the mortgage industry, I suppose. But obviously a situation to keep an eye on, wouldn't expect. Sometimes when these things happen, you get a flight to safety, they call it, or a flight to quality. And that tends to drop rates. You see treasuries booming.

Jeff McCarty (: 10:58

We

do see rates, speaking of treasuries, we do see the tenure down a little bit. We're to So probably a little bit more action there than other parts of the market right now.

Jim (: 11:12

Mm-hmm.

Alex Hebner (: 11:13

Yeah, I think the markets have responded as you'd expect them to, like you said, oil up, flight to safety, treasuries down. But I think it's the lack of how big those moves have been, ⁓ how muted those moves have been that have kind of caught people off guard. Like you said, I agree. think a lot of people are in very much so wait and see mode, see what, how the Iranians respond to this because they will have to at some point.

Jeff McCarty (: 11:24

Yeah.

Alex Hebner (: 11:38

it very much feels as if diplomacy is kind of something that's out the window at a certain point, at least a ⁓ strike of some sort, even if it's just for pictures, has to be made at this point to protect the legitimacy of their regime. speaking of the regime, think that's still not out of the question on if we're interested in regime change. It seems like administration officials themselves aren't even quite sure if they're.

Jim (: 11:48

Mm-hmm.

Alex Hebner (: 12:03

They want to commit to that quite yet and what that would mean. I think regime change would quite obviously this would be a far broader conflict if that were to.

Jim (: 12:04

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, we've seen what can happen. We've seen what's happened before in conflicts that we've been involved in and not been involved in when there's change or any sort vacuum, right, which could certainly happen if you topple the government of ⁓ a country as large as Iran, is, you know, over 100 million people.

Alex Hebner (: 12:33

And as modern history in the 21st century should teach us, we should ⁓ be cautious of what could fill that black hole, ⁓ should you know. Yeah, tread lightly, absolutely.

Jim (: 12:40

tread lightly for sure

Jeff McCarty (: 12:44

back to your point at the beginning of this, Alex, you think just the magnitude is, because the lower magnitude on all these moves is just nobody's surprised by anything at this point, or there's so much going on it's hard to figure out what to focus on, or little bit of all that.

Alex Hebner (: 13:00

Yeah, yeah, it's, I personally would have expected a greater magnitude, know? Iran has been one of those countries that we've with since, know, 79, since the hostage crisis and the revolution. And this is the first time since 79 that there's actually been military conflict directly between the US and Iran. And so it feels a little bit anticlimactic, I guess you could say. yeah, like I said, I'm not.

you know, on these energy dust trading oil, but for whatever reason they think cooler heads will prevail or whatever damage that will be done will be minimal.

Jim (: 13:36

Yeah. mean, geopolitically, it's a bad situation, right? But yeah, it does seem like the markets have kind of shrugged it off. And part of it is, I believe that there's a general floor on rates right now because there's this, the debt boom that we've talked about here. Like even if there's a flight to quality, the yields are still going to have to be pretty attractive folks to dump a bunch of money into bonds. And hopefully we get a little bit of a drop like we saw in treasuries. Maybe we get that in mortgages here.

in the short term, but right now we're still, you know, high sixes and unless there's some big surprise, which it feels like there's almost has to be at some point not to jinx it, but something to really freak people out. You might, you might see a little bit of a dip in the short term, but long term, it just feels like rates still have a, just have an upward, there's upward pressure.

Alex Hebner (: 14:23

Yeah. And I know I called it a sidelined issue at the top of the show, but terrorists, are two weeks away from that 7th deadline when they need to have trade deals done. And last I checked, I believe we have a trade deal done with Israel and the UK. ⁓ So there's still a lot of work on that front to be done. Don't let that slip from your mind and your outlook.

Jim (: 14:37

Yes.

Yeah, more updates on that here in the next couple of podcasts for sure. Cause the other clock has taken, we're getting out of the wire.

coming out this week? A little bit of consumer sentiment and confidence.

Alex Hebner (: 14:58

Yep. Yeah. Yeah. We got consumer confidence is Tuesdays and tomorrow. If you're listening to this on the day, the podcast releases and consumer sentiment on Friday. I'm a little more interested in consumer confidence time around just, when you look at the weightings and how they're, how they're conducting these surveys, consumer confidence, emphasizes labor conditions a little bit more. like I was talking about earlier with the jobless claims, you know, you could see that beginning to feed through to consumer confidence as folks, you know, reassess their labor conditions and how, how employed they currently are.

Jim (: 15:27

Right. All right. Looking forward to that. then, yeah, next week's a short one. It's kind hard to believe. Independence Day is coming up week from Friday.

Alex Hebner (: 15:36

Yep, will be getting early employment figures on that half day, July 3rd, and then head right into the long weekend.

Jim (: 15:44

Nice. Good. We'll update you all on that next week on Monday. All right. Let's wrap it up. Thanks fellas. Good conversation.

Alex Hebner (: 15:51

Beautiful. Thanks guys.

Jeff McCarty (: 15:52

Thanks.

Jim (: 15:53

All right. As promised, welcome Sivir Suleman, CTO of Optimal Blue and whether he agrees with me or not, accomplished golfer, as you can see in the background there with a couple of his trophies. Sivir. Thanks for being with us today. want to talk a little bit with you about the hackathon. So Sivir runs all things software development for Optimal Blue. And two weeks ago we had a hackathon.

Seever Sulaiman (: 16:08

Thank you.

Jim (: 16:21

at our headquarters in Plano, Texas. I was honored to be one of the judges. So was down there with another group of folks who judged it. And then we had a whole room of people, product people, dev folks, just folks that were interested in witnessing and being part of the hackathon. And I was just blown away by the quality of the ideas, the actual implementation. Cause as you'll see here in a minute, when we explain what a hackathon actually is, there's actually like a product that gets partially built.

by a ⁓ group of like the idea people and the product people and some actual developers. So anyhow, let's kick this thing off with just an overview of what is a hackathon,

Seever Sulaiman (: 17:03

Yeah, great question, Jim. And I have to say you were, I think you were a fair judge. So you did a great job. Thank you for participating in that. A hackathon, I mean, there are multiple definitions of it, but for me, a hackathon is anytime you rally a group of people, normally technologists, to build something new build something that you've always wanted to build and you just didn't have time. But you want to build something new in a short period of time. And most of the time using new tech, using new technology.

And we'll talk about some of them, like our first hackathon that we did, how we used some new tech. We used AI and hackathon where it was a little different. But that's how I look at, that's my definition of a hackathon.

Kevin Foley (: 17:47

Yeah, I think that's helpful for folks to understand when we say hackathon. is it that exactly that we're talking about? Right. Yeah. No illegal activity happening. No.

Jim (: 17:53

And what are we, are we actually hacking something? Are we trying to break into a bank or are we, but no, it's really, yes, no illegal

activity, but definitely.

Seever Sulaiman (: 18:02

Exactly.

Yeah. The hacking part comes from, know, when you're trying new technologies, right? You're trying to do a, like you said, partially built product. So sort of a proof of concept or what we call a POC. And you're trying to either learn new technology or you want to use this new tech that you've learned into building something new use it for something existing, an existing problem that you wanted to solve.

But it usually doing something new and that's where the hacking comes in. You don't kind of know what you're doing, you know what you're doing, but you don't know what you're doing and you're trying to learn through the hackathon.

Kevin Foley (: 18:42

Yeah, yeah, for sure. It's like, you know, tip of the spear sort of development, you know, you're right, right on sort of the cutting edge of, you know, what the ideas, the technology you're using and things like that, which it was really cool. mean, you know, Jim and I were both, we're both a part of it and it was really cool for me to experience. know, I helped some teams around some ideas and topics and

Jim (: 18:42

Right.

Seever Sulaiman (: 18:52

God bless

Kevin Foley (: 19:06

There's some really impressive work that was done overall, but Seever how would you the hackathon that we did? You did so much work orchestrating it, organizing behind the scenes. What are your thoughts or takeaways from the hackathon overall?

Jim (: 19:22

without ruining any surprises of features that are gonna come out soon, right? We wanna just kind of, what's the high level, what was fun about it?

Kevin Foley (: 19:26

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Seever Sulaiman (: 19:26

Good day, good day.

Yeah, no.

Of course, yeah. So this recent one, mean, the organization, anything you do at that scale really takes a lot of coordination. And we have a fantastic team, as you know. So every hackathon, you can have a different format, by the way. The format of this recent one is we decided to open it up to the entire company. And we said, OK, what ideas do we have

It could be a product, could be a service, could be an internal tool. It could be like we mentioned, new technologies that we could use to improve an existing process. So we opened it up to all of Optimal Blue. And we had an amazing turnout response of over 50 ideas that came from just different functions, different skill sets of their organization, not just developers.

a few ideas themselves, the product team, client services. And we looked at all those ideas and we had to go through, we couldn't be working on 50, know, 54 ideas. So we had to screen them based on certain criteria. So we went through that effort and we selected a subset of those. And then we gave people really just six weeks to work on them. And part of this that was really fun is and painful for some people at the same time, fun.

is we had the idea owners just like an NFL draft, go build your own teams, right? We had people enroll in participating and working for the hackathon. By the way, we had 123 people that ended up participating in the hackathon, working on projects in 16 teams, but building those teams, the team formation, while it was a little stressful for some, it was kind of fun. It was like an NFL draft.

kind of trade resources because we had a maximum limit of the number of people you can have on a team. Also the maximum number of developers you can have on a team. I think what we also got out of it, not just the great ideas and the products that came out of it, but also people worked with members that they really didn't work with that closely before. And they got to experience kind of leadership and having to build your team.

and just working together on these new technologies or new ideas that people were just fascinated by. This sounds like a simple idea, but we never thought about implementing it. And now we have the time to actually spend on doing at least a proof of concept to it forward.

Kevin Foley (: 22:02

to circle back to the team formation phase because was actually a really fun like 24 hours because it was basically Hunger Games rules. It was just like everybody out for themselves and you're really just, selling everybody on the idea. We need someone to play this role, someone to play this role within the team. And so was really fun to sort of watch that come together. think that was really fun for who part of that.

Jim (: 22:11

I'm

Kevin Foley (: 22:27

as you mentioned, it sponsored some ideas and helped sort of organize some teams, was a lot of fun.

Seever Sulaiman (: 22:34

So when we opened up the enrollment phase, we also asked people what role do you want to play, to Kevin's point. So if you're a QA tester, you didn't have to be a tester in the hackathon. You could be a product manager, you could be the scrum master, you could even do development. So we opened it up so you can play different roles if you wanted to. And that's what Kevin was mentioning is you kind of look at everybody who enrolled in your idea.

and say, what role can they play? I could have a salesperson who participated that can do my presentations or validate the business idea, get data for it. So was really fun to let people play different roles as well.

Kevin Foley (: 23:19

sir.

Jim (: 23:20

Yeah, that was great. think just seeing, this is my first one, by the way. I don't think I mentioned that. My first one that I participated in and again, blown away by the ideas and then the team formation I thought was very interesting and cool. It was nice to see get together on a team who had never worked with each other before and maybe never even knew each other existed, right? I mean, we're a big, fairly big company, 450-ish people. So we had people even from like my desk in Denver, DC, San Francisco, we had some folks that...

submitted ideas and they ended up recruiting a couple of developers and a couple of product people and spending time together, kind like we did in college, right? Building a business case, but then actually building software. That was the part that was really amazing to me was each presentation culminated with a demo of a thing that actually worked. And a lot of it was super innovative to the point where it felt like we were even pushing some of the limits of what

Like AI is doing, for instance, there was a huge AI theme, as you might imagine, right? Like how can we use AI to make our system better, to make our processes better, whether internal or external or for the client. And we seem to be pushing even what Microsoft is capable of right now. I know we've had some interaction with them even during the hackathon process, right?

Seever Sulaiman (: 24:38

Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned Microsoft. mean, we so we have a very deep partnership with Microsoft and the six week period, as you mentioned, so just kind of the process, right? So we had six weeks working on those ideas. That's after team formation, by the way. That's after the fun 24 hours that Kevin talked about. So we had six weeks of people working on these, you know, kind of following the normal scrum ceremonies, but not, you you didn't have

Jim (: 24:56

Right. The draft.

Seever Sulaiman (: 25:06

full six weeks, we had to give them one day per week to work on it. But that culminated in a two day, full two day, we call it e-hackathon. Microsoft, our partners, brought in 15 cloud solution architects, because we had 16 teams. had 15 cloud solution architects that were dedicated to each team, some overlapped, of course, that had these virtual breakout rooms using teams, by the way.

that the team, our development team and the QA team and the business analysts and sales team, those tech teams were working on their projects, they had Microsoft available in those breakout rooms so they could ask them questions. And we had a couple of machine learning ideas. We have some AI ideas, as you mentioned. All of those we had Microsoft on. So very deep, engagement from Microsoft that honestly,

some of these ideas we couldn't move forward without their help and partnership. But to your other point, when we asked Microsoft, how are we, like if you compared us to the industry or what they see, not our industry, but Microsoft sees in terms of utilization of AI and where we are with that, they said we're at the very top 5 % of the utilization as far as how we've been taking advantage of some of these new tools, AI tools for

for not only in our products, but also for productivity as developer tools, and now kind of getting into the data part. So we're pretty excited about how we've been able to sort of keep up with AI development. And by the way, for the record, we'll always be behind, right? As we speak, new technologies are being built, new tools are coming out in AI. So we'll never catch up. You just have to kind of look at the last sort of known trusted version to use because you don't want to...

experiment too much with that were kind of just, you know, at the forefront of being able to use some new technologies. And honestly, these hackathons enabled us to be able to kind of prove out these technologies in a fun kind of free fashion where you're not impacting products, you're not impacting production, but you're allowing the team, you're allowing everyone to experiment and have fun.

which will also help us prove our these new tech.

Kevin Foley (: 27:25

I want to circle back to something you just said there, because I think that's really important. I think also just helpful for our audience to know, you know, Microsoft, you know, considering optimal blue as part of the top five, percent of enterprises and how we're adopting the most advanced technology, you know, consuming the latest tools and capabilities. And I think honestly, that speaks to a lot of work, you know, see where that you've done and on the tech team and, like you mentioned, we have this, this really

deep partnership with Microsoft and constantly coming out with new things. think they're actually really well positioned based on everything that I've seen to sort of take advantage and help enterprises through the next wave of AI enhancements and capabilities that are out there. Even when we were doing the hackathon between when we started and when we finished, they were rolling out new AI capabilities and things within Copilot.

ow, even between the start of: 2025

Seever Sulaiman (: 28:46

It's incredible. mean, it's a new tech company, new patrons, right? I mean, it's not just the initial LLM, you the large language model that is being built is all the tools that are built on top of it and how, example, Claude, you know, Claude saw that they have perfected, shouldn't say perfected, they have really modified, they built their own version of an LLM that focuses on developer productivity on coding.

we're seeing like these niche markets, if you will, are being built, which ultimately helps us. It helps the consumer, helps the user of those tools. So for us, really, it's just making sure, we stay on track with what's out there just to help us, but also, we utilize some of the new technology, the new AI tools or models to continue to focus on not just to use AI, but also

really what problems are we able to solve for our customers that you couldn't do without AI, right? So in our case, the way we've used generative AI have been in areas where we truly are able to add value to our products and our features and add value to our customers who use our products. And that we will continue do that. And we'll also continue to

but also cautious about not just use that new, you know, the new shiny object the new shiny tool that came out We always evaluate where we look at the risks. We look at you know, what? What happens if we implement this new stool? What kind of risks of security of content that comes with it? we'll continue to do it that way

Kevin Foley (: 30:22

I think that's really well said. you know, as far as the hackathon goes, one of the biggest takeaways for me, which I thought, you know, sort of reinforced something that I've sort of come to appreciate, which is that good ideas can really come from anywhere and anybody, know, anybody within an organization, whether you're, in leadership, or you're on the ground doing the work, whether you're in product or dev or

you know, supporting our customers or in QA or marketing or anywhere. ideas come from anywhere. the, the value in the hackathon to me was, you know, all of these ideas came together, you know, every everyone's, competing and we sort of have, you know, the, wisdom of the crowd take over and, know, the best ideas bubble up to the top. know, we just get new value from, from new, you know,

areas of the company. I think that really speaks to folks at Optimal Blue who are passionate about the work that they do, who in every day and trying to add value in what it is that they're doing and add value for our again, good ideas can come from anywhere. And I think that something that's a big takeaway for me from the hackathon.

Jim (: 31:38

Yeah, let's use that as a segue, right? So we don't, again, don't want to spoil any surprises, but just high level, right? I mean, some of the ideas that I recall are some of what the themes You know, it was everywhere from automating some internal processes like coding, queries, by the way, like one of the, and this was this idea came from an engineer. my favorite name. It was a great idea, but my favorite name for the feature was called Querious George.

So I'll just leave that there. then we had, like I said, some folks from the desk who came up with some really good ideas around pull through. You might imagine some things that could be invented there and through machine learning and AI. And I don't know, those are a couple of the ideas that stuck in my head. What are some ideas that you really liked and some of the people that came up with them?

Seever Sulaiman (: 32:26

Yeah, Jim, what I really loved about it of what you said. mean, was like, if you look at a spectrum of what the ideas spectrum looked like, right, it was one. had ideas that were internal tools of how you would improve a very sort of tedious process or project that you have all the way to building a brand new product that is evolutionary and revolutionary. was so it went from like a simple

very actually, value-add idea to improve a process using technology, using AI, all the way to creating something big and new. And then in the middle was kind of product features, things that you can do to existing products or for tech team, like you mentioned in the QA organization or tech ops organization. How do we use some of these new tools?

It was a blend of everything, but just the way the presentations were made me, honestly, I mean, did it by the way, for the record, I did not see any of the presentations until that last day, the last two days that we did. So I was personally also blown away by the quality of how they took those ideas and really made them work, the way they presented them as well.

Jim (: 33:46

Agreed.

Kevin Foley (: 33:47

are some good takeaways. one idea that sort of stuck with me and I'll share this one since it's pretty generic in terms of, you know, what it's trying to solve. And it's something that we all know that AI can solve, which is, you know, we all have subject matter experts in our organizations who just, they, you know, know a lot of things. They just know everything. You know, the photographic memory type folks, right? We all know who they are.

And the idea is how can we scale those subject matter experts resources across the company and their knowledge base across the company. this is something that, again, if you're familiar with the capabilities of AI, you know that there's a potential to solve this. But the format of how that ends up happening was something that sat in on a lot of the debates. Is it going to be like

you know, like an AI agent where you go and interact and it's like, you're talking to the subject matter expert and then, you know, it's coming back or is it going to be more of like, you're going to compile their subject matter expertise and everyone else's. And then it just goes into this organizational, you know, repository and you just ask your questions and get the response back. There are all these different formats in which the problem could be solved, right? But one of those, one of those is going to.

ultimately win out over the other ones. there's all sorts of tricky things. Like you want to make sure that the private messages don't get incorporated into this repository of respecting privacy and things like that. does seem like this is something that is also on Microsoft's radar too. I wouldn't be super surprised if we end up seeing something more standardized that comes out maybe later this year that helps attack this problem in a more

concrete way just the copilot capabilities and things like that. that was a really interesting one for me because it's really like there's still so many avenues where this could end up and we just sort of need to keep playing with things to see which format ultimately wins out.

Seever Sulaiman (: 35:50

You're right and I think you're spot on about what Microsoft is going to do next. They're already kind of with Copilot and how Office 365 Copilot and how it can be your assistant for all of your office, whether it's Outlook, Word, Excel, et cetera. So I think you're spot on, Kevin, a lot of these, honestly, they're ideas that we had that were submitted. We looked at it, they were fantastic ideas, but we thought they shouldn't.

They didn't make it to their working stage if you will and you know we found out a month later Microsoft You know came out with a a you know with a tool like it so it just the new tech is going to continue to To come up and rise and we just have to kind of be on the lookout for all of that

Jim (: 36:35

tons of good ideas. I'd say, you know, as teasers, we've put a bunch of them out there, but for customers, I'd say, you know, customer facing, would say expect more features that, you know, make your life easier, make some of the more complicated parts of this industry or our systems a lot simpler to communicate with and kind of help you accomplish what you're trying to do. also just some innovative stuff that's just going to, you know, continue to push the ball forward in terms of what any

know, Optimal Blue or any type of system in our industry is capable of.

Seever Sulaiman (: 37:07

Exactly. will just say one other thing about the hackathon wasn't just AI, right? So we opened it up to any type of idea. That's what we did. But just on the, Kevin, what you mentioned about ideas can come from everyone. I've always had, I had the belief of the ideas ideas can come from anyone, of course, and ideas is just a start. Right? What really matters after that is the execution and how you actually execute and build

on top of that idea. And that's what we did. We didn't just get the ideas from everyone. During the hackathon, we also built those. If you remember, last year we did a hackathon which was a little different format. We had very specific ideas that came from our product team and operations team as well. And we had a proof of using AI for those ideas. And as you know, three of those six made it to our summit.

Kevin Foley (: 37:44

Yeah.

Seever Sulaiman (: 38:03

last year. So we executed not only during the hackathon but also during our normal product development process. So we pride ourselves collectively as you know in our execution on ideas to build those features of those products for our customers. And that's really what it matters when you actually deliver and produce a working product for the customers.

Kevin Foley (: 38:23

Yeah.

Yeah, I think that that's a really good point because it's, you can't have one without the other. You can't have good idea and poor execution and also, you know, execution without the, you know, the good idea to start with. You really need kind of excellence in both of those areas to really do something transformative. And I do think that, you know, the teams that worked on the hackathon really hit both of those really well. So I think that's a great point.

Jim (: 38:53

Solid problem solving. That's what it takes, right? Just to execute on those ideas. can't just have a great idea. have to figure out how to articulate it, explain it to your team, and get it done.

All right, gentlemen, did we miss anything?

Kevin Foley (: 39:05

I don't think so. think that was a pretty thorough overview. really thought it would be great to just have more of a behind the scenes look, of how everything came together, how it all worked, and what are some of the snippets that came out of it. So I thought that was a good conversation.

Jim (: 39:21

Yeah, hopefully this is helpful to folks out there. I'd say no matter what, know, no matter the size of your business, this is the kind of thing you could do anywhere. You don't have to be a software business, honestly. Every business has their needs and everybody has these ideas and this lets you get them out in the open. And so, yeah, I'd say I would encourage everyone out there to look into this sort of thing and get it done. We're certainly going to do it again. This won't be the last hackathon that we do.

Seever Sulaiman (: 39:44

100

% 100 % next time is going to be a different format. We actually just sent out a survey for our team who participated to get feedback and you know, what should them the format of this one wasn't my idea. It was ⁓ ideas from a couple people who thought, you know, let's do this different from the first time, right? So it could could be any format and like I said, Jim, it does not have to be, know, AI doesn't have to be just tech.

You don't have to be a big company. Just do a hackathon and just get ideas. Really, it's just proving out new methods, proving out new concepts that you want to with.

Jim (: 40:25

Great, good advice. All right, gentlemen, great conversation. Seever, appreciate you being a guest. Kevin, as always, thanks for being here and we'll talk again soon.

Kevin Foley (: 40:32

Yeah, thanks, Sever.

Seever Sulaiman (: 40:32

My pleasure.

Thank you for having me.

Kevin Foley (: 40:37

Awesome,

thank you.

Jim (: 40:38

All right. Thank you so much everybody for joining today. Thank you, Alex. Thank you, Jeff. you, Seaver and Kevin. conversations, great interviews, good market update. That's it for today. Join us next week for another episode of Optimal Insights where we'll continue to provide you with the latest market analysis and insights to help you stay ahead. Check out our full videos on YouTube.

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