Is your Product and Pricing Engine (PPE) working for you?

In our recent blog, we explored key factors to consider when selecting a Product and Pricing Engine. But beyond foundational capabilities, how do you know if your current PPE is working for you?

As the mortgage industry evolves and lenders face increasing pressure to scale efficiently while managing risk, your PPE should be more than just a tool for running scenarios and locking rates. It should adapt to your needs, eliminate bottlenecks and actively support your growth.

The right PPE provider becomes a strategic partner in your growth. The relationship should deliver value through industry expertise, proactive guidance and insights drawn from working with diverse lending organizations facing similar challenges.

Here are ways your PPE should be working for you.

While basic PPE functionality is table stakes, advanced features that leverage automation can significantly reduce manual oversight and accelerate your workflow, but only if they're easy for your team to actually use.

Consider automation capabilities like a rate lock comparison tool that monitors and tracks material data changes impacting loan eligibility and pricing. Rather than manually checking each loan for changes, the system can identify modifications, be configured to automatically rerun pricing and even relock loans based on rules you define.

Another valuable automation feature your PPE should provide is worst-case pricing that loan officers can run independently. Instead, constantly involving secondary and lock desk teams for worst-case scenarios, LOs can run these calculations themselves within guardrails set by your organization; reducing bottlenecks and delays.

But advanced features are only valuable if your team can navigate them efficiently. An intuitive user interface with streamlined workflows (rather than an overwhelming array of tabs and nested menus) ensures that powerful capabilities translate into actual productivity gains.

Your organization has unique workflow preferences and operational requirements. Your PPE should accommodate these differences through administrative control that enables quick responses to changing business needs.

Consider your company’s business strategy, risk appetite, and policies and how your PPE aligns. Does your system enable you to customize your UI for these specific needs? Are you able to easily display and manage how preferred programs appear in a search or manage and restrict the fields accessed by the different roles within your organization?

Customizing your interface ensures you are configuring the view to align to your goals and strategies, reducing navigation time and accelerating decision-making. When you have the tools to make these adjustments independently, your organization maintains agility without dependency on vendor support cycles or development resources.

In an industry where precision and compliance are paramount, your PPE should help you avoid costly mistakes and maintain regulatory compliance.

Data integrity should be foundational. When your PPE integrates natively with your LOS with real-time synchronization, you eliminate discrepancies that lead to pricing errors and costly rework.

Proactive risk planning protects your operations before problems occur. Strategic configuration of field-level access based on user roles creates protective boundaries around sensitive borrower information. By determining in advance who can view or modify critical data elements, you build risk controls directly into daily operations rather than discovering vulnerabilities during audits. The ROI of these built-in safeguards becomes evident when you avoid compliance penalties, reduce audit findings and maintain investor confidence.

The mortgage industry is constantly changing, and your technology and partners should be evolving with it too. A responsive PPE provider uses customer feedback to continuously refine their platform, ensuring it scales with your business and offers access to an experienced support team that understands your system and provides guidance when you need it.

Look for providers who demonstrate this commitment through ongoing engagement opportunities: customer advisory groups, feedback opportunities to inform product roadmaps, regular reviews and discussions to assess system performance and ways to connect directly with product development teams to share feedback and learn about upcoming features.

If your current PPE isn't delivering on these expectations, it may be time to explore alternatives.

ICE PPE offers a product and pricing solution designed specifically to elevate the Encompass experience. Built with continuous customer input through monthly office hours, advisory groups and health checks, ICE PPE delivers features that address real-world lending challenges.

As the only PPE native to Encompass, ICE PPE enables you to price, lock and relock without leaving your LOS. This seamless integration eliminates the complexity of managing multiple systems and reduces errors from manual data entry. ICE PPE also integrates with ICE Surefire, Encompass Consumer Connect and other popular POS and CRM systems. Key capabilities include:

Advanced automation: ICE PPE's rate lock comparison tool was the first in Encompass to deliver automated monitoring and tracking of material data changes that impact loan eligibility and pricing. Worst-case pricing automation enables loan officers to run scenarios independently while maintaining organizational controls.

Self-service customization: Administrators can add custom fields and rules, configure search page layouts through drag-and-drop and enable or disable fields based on loan type, all without professional services or development resources.

Comprehensive product access: Access to product and pricing information for thousands of programs across leading investors, lenders, and state housing authorities, including FHA, VA, USDA, Jumbo, non-QM, portfolio loans, HELOCs and specialized products.

Risk management and compliance: Real-time data synchronization between Encompass and ICE PPE eliminates discrepancies. Direct access to program-specific guidelines through AllRegs® simplifies compliance and assists clients in meeting investor requirements.

Simple and competitive pricing: Unlimited user seats and access to your integrated lenders and investors with clear, consistent pricing and no separate integration fees.

Angela Bornt, Vice President at Owner's Choice Funding, a mortgage banker serving credit unions throughout New York and the Northeast summarizes the overall value:

"What I appreciate about using a product and pricing engine native to our LOS is its direct integration and alignment with our workflows, as well as the support it offers. She goes on to say, “I would recommend it to any Encompass client seeking a simple, user-friendly way to monitor and manage their pipeline, from portfolio products to secondary market deliveries. It truly is a one stop shop solution."

ICE continues to invest in product and pricing innovation by introducing enhanced features and capabilities to ICE PPE that help Encompass customers reach new levels of operational excellence. With seamless native integration, advanced automation, self-service customization, and active customer collaboration, mortgage professionals are equipped to achieve efficiency, accuracy and long-term profitability.