It's no secret that the mortgage technology providers Calyx Software and Ellie Mae are fierce competitors.
It's not uncommon for the two vendors to battle for the same lender's loan origination system business and the companies have a long and complicated history, including a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Calyx that settled out of court by Ellie paying Calyx an "undisclosed sum" in late 2005.
So when each company recently purchased a product and pricing engine vendor — Calyx acquiring Loan-Score Decisioning Systems on Dec. 22 and Ellie picking up Mortgage Pricing Systems, developer of Loan Eligibility and Pricing, or LEAP, on Jan. 4 — it was unclear how long Loan-Score's customers using Ellie's Encompass360 LOS and Mortgage Pricing Systems' customers using Calyx's Point LOS would be able to use both products.
"That will be a function of Calyx Point," Jonathan Corr, Ellie Mae's chief strategy officer, said in a January interview about the Mortgage Pricing Systems acquisition. "It's totally their decision. I have every intention of operating with all customers, but my hands are tied when it comes to certain vendors and it depends on their decision."
Ellie and Calyx have companion platforms — which technologists call a collaborative network services platform — that connect myriad third-party mortgage fulfillment and underwriting software products to their respective LOS. Before the acquisitions, Loan-Score had an interface to Encompass360 through the Ellie Mae network and LEAP was accessible to Point users through the Calyx network.
It's been three months and both the Loan-Score interface with the Ellie Mae network and Encompass Product and Pricing Service (LEAP's new brand) into the Calyx network are still up and running, sources said last week. The companies were even rumored to have had a face-to-face meeting during the Mortgage Bankers Association's national technology in mortgage banking conference last week in Hollywood, Fla.
Sources familiar with the meeting said the topic was how the companies could preserve the collaborative network service platform interfaces while both LOS vendors work to integrate their new PPEs deeper into their own systems.
To each company's credit, at the time of the acquisitions, Ellie and Calyx said they were committed to maintaining their PPE's interfaces with other LOS platforms as well as maintaining integrations of third-party PPEs into their LOS.
Given recent events, the new conciliatory tone is refreshing, industry participants attending the conference said. After Ellie acquired the compliance engine Mavent in January 2010, its integration with Point ceased. And Ellie's acquisition of Online Documents led to an ongoing lawsuit with the competing document provider DocMagic.
Industry observers said they believe Ellie and Calyx realize not working together would be extremely detrimental to their now mutual customers — a risk neither company is willing to take given the number of other PPE vendors in the market ready to jump in and take away customers turned off by any disruption in service.
