The 2026 Connections Award Winners Are …

In this very challenging market, the companies that are thinking strategically, will win the day. How? By making the right connections. And we at PROGRESS in Lending believe that those connections deserve recognition. Every day companies are embarking on groundbreaking partnerships, integrations, and acquisitions to improve this space, but they are going unrecognized until now.  The 2026 Connections Award Winners in alphabetical order are:

Argyle & The Big Point of Sale

The integration between Argyle and The BIG Point of Sale reflects a partnership designed to simplify how mortgage lenders complete income and employment verification within the loan application process. Delivered through ICE Mortgage Technology’s Encompass Partner Connect framework; the integration embeds verification of income and employment (VOIE) directly into the point-of-sale experience lenders already use to originate loans. Through the integration, loan officers can initiate VOIE requests from The BIG Point of Sale on any device during or after the application process. Borrowers receive a text message prompting them to securely connect their payroll account from a mobile device, eliminating the need to upload paystubs, W-2s or other income documents manually. Once authorized, verification data — including verification of income and employment reports, paystubs and W-2s — is returned in real time and automatically posted to the Encompass eFolder through native Encompass Partner Connect functionality and workflow automation rules. Because the information flows directly between systems, lenders avoid manual document collection, repeated borrower follow-ups, and duplicate data entry.

The integration also incorporates support for GSE-eligible verification data and reference IDs within the same workflow. Argyle is an authorized report supplier for Fannie Mae’s Desktop Underwriter® validation service and an approved service provider for Freddie Mac’s Loan Product Advisor® asset and income modeler (AIM). Through The BIG Point of Sale, lenders can access verified data and associated GSE reference IDs without leaving the point-of-sale environment or reordering verification through separate systems. Support for verification of assets (VOA) is coming soon, extending the same embedded experience to asset data alongside income and employment. What makes the partnership particularly notable is how fully verification is embedded into the origination workflow itself. Instead of functioning as a standalone vendor process layered onto mortgage operations, the integration allows verification to occur as a natural extension of the borrower application experience while maintaining direct connectivity with Encompass throughout the process.

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Blue Sage Solutions & Movement Mortgage

The partnership between Blue Sage Solutions and Movement Mortgage deserves recognition for successfully executing one of the mortgage industry’s most ambitious large-scale LOS replatforming initiatives in recent years. In 2025, Movement Mortgage announced the completion of a three-year technology transformation project, culminating in the launch of its new loan origination platform, MORE LOS, powered by Blue Sage. The initiative replaced a fragmented collection of legacy systems with a modern, fully integrated lending ecosystem designed to support loan officers, operations teams and borrowers through a unified workflow. What makes this partnership particularly noteworthy is not simply the implementation of a new LOS, but the scale, speed and strategic execution of the transformation.

Movement funded its first loans on the Blue Sage platform within nine months of kickoff and completed a nationwide rollout in approximately 13 months. For a lender of Movement’s size and national footprint, this represented a significant operational and technological achievement. The integration extended beyond core LOS functionality. Blue Sage became the central foundation connecting Movement’s broader technology stack, including its CRM, PPE, document management system and other critical applications. The result was a tightly connected digital lending environment built around data integrity, automation, scalability and future AI enablement. Rather than approaching modernization as a simple software replacement, Blue Sage and Movement Mortgage worked collaboratively to redesign the lender’s operational infrastructure around a more streamlined and intelligent lending experience. The partnership demonstrates how lenders and technology providers can work together strategically to execute enterprise-scale transformation without disrupting production or borrower experience.

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DocMagic & Truliant Federal Credit Union

The partnership between Truliant Federal Credit Union and DocMagic represents a sustained, multi-year collaboration focused on advancing fully digital mortgage lending. Within the past 12 months, the organizations achieved the industry’s first-ever electronic Home Equity Line of Credit (eHELOC) registration with the MERS® eRegistry, marking a major milestone in the evolution of eMortgages. This milestone is the result of a long-standing, hands-on partnership. Truliant has worked closely with DocMagic to build its digital closing capabilities from the ground up, beginning with one of the industry’s earliest full eClosings in 2020 and continuing with a pioneering eNote transfer to the Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta that paves the way for member financial institutions to pledge eNotes to the bank system in the future. While many lenders begin with partial digital closings that still rely on paper documents and wet signatures, Truliant moved directly to fully digital closings with eNotes and eNotarization. That strategy was made possible by DocMagic’s ability to deliver document generation, eSignature, eVault, and delivery capabilities within a single, integrated platform.

Over the past year, the partnership extended those capabilities to a new frontier. Together, DocMagic and Truliant designed and executed a process that enables HELOCs to be originated, executed, stored, and registered as fully digital, legally compliant assets. DocMagic’s SmartSAFE™ eVault and MISMO SMART Doc® format provided the technical foundation, while Truliant implemented and validated the process in a live lending environment. Supported by the North Carolina Secretary of State’s office, this collaboration reflects a coordinated effort across lender, technology provider, and regulator. The result is not just a single achievement, but a blueprint for how digital lending innovation can be developed, tested, and brought to market through close partnership.

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Friday Harbor & NewFed Mortgage

NewFed Mortgage partnered with Friday Harbor to deploy AI pre-underwriting across NewFed’s 20-state origination and fulfillment operations. What began as an early conversation between NewFed Chief Operating Officer Rob Jewett and Friday Harbor Founder and CEO Theo Ellis evolved into a close working partnership focused on solving a shared operational challenge: how to scale mortgage production without scaling inefficiency alongside it. As an early design partner, NewFed worked directly with the Friday Harbor team throughout implementation, providing feedback on real loan files, edge cases, lender-specific overlays, and production workflows that helped shape how the platform was refined for real-world mortgage operations.

Today, Friday Harbor evaluates NewFed’s loan files against AUS findings, investor guidelines, and NewFed’s own overlays before files reach an underwriter. The platform classifies borrower documents, extracts key data as files evolve, anticipates underwriting conditions, generates actionable resolution recommendations, and maintains a real-time borrower needs list that updates as file requirements change. Friday Harbor’s integration with the Encompass® loan origination system from ICE Mortgage Technology keeps findings and calculations up-to-date as the loan file evolves. Through its partnership with Friday Harbor, NewFed has deployed a pre-underwriting process that gives each role the bandwidth to contribute at its highest value: loan officers advising borrowers, processors driving file completion, and underwriters applying their judgment to credit decisions.

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MortgageFlex & Paymentus

The partnership between MortgageFlex Loan Servicing and Paymentus connects a modern, lender-configurable servicing platform with an enterprise-grade billing and digital payments network, purpose-built for mortgage servicers. In practical terms, the relationship brings Paymentus’ omnichannel payment and engagement capabilities—such as web and mobile payments, AutoPay, pay-by-text, IVR-assisted payments, real-time notifications, and support for multiple payment types (e.g., ACH/eCheck, debit, and digital wallets)—into the MortgageFlex servicing ecosystem so servicers can deliver a more seamless “borrower payment experience” without standing up and maintaining multiple disconnected tools.

As mortgage servicing teams balance rising consumer expectations with strict compliance and security requirements, this type of partnership matters: it pairs MortgageFlex’s servicing workflow and account management strengths with Paymentus’ purpose-built payments infrastructure, configurable deployment options (hosted experiences and APIs/SDKs), and payment controls. The result is a connective layer that helps servicers launch and scale digital payment options faster, standardize borrower-facing payment journeys across channels, and gain clearer visibility into payment activity—while continuing to operate within core servicing systems.

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Optimal Blue & Uplist

Capture for Originators is a refinance lead generation and recapture solution created through a partnership between Optimal Blue and Uplist. The integration combines data from Optimal Blue’s product, pricing, and eligibility (PPE) engine with Uplist’s Recapture™ portfolio monitoring technology to create a unified workflow for identifying and evaluating refinance opportunities within existing loan portfolios. The partnership brings together two technologies that historically operated separately within the mortgage ecosystem. Through its modern technology, proven performance and deep expertise, Optimal Blue powers more than 35% of all mortgages locked nationwide and facilitated approximately $1.4 trillion in loan transactions last year. Its PPE provides lenders with real-time pricing, product eligibility and margin management across more than 150 investors. Uplist contributes a purpose-built automation platform that monitors more than $250 billion in active loans and surfaces as much as $10 billion in refinance opportunities during a 30-day period. Together, the companies developed a fully integrated workflow that automates refinance opportunity analysis using live market data and lender-specific pricing logic.

Each month, Capture for Originators evaluates an originator’s closed-loan portfolio using the existing note rate, automated valuation models (AVMs), county records, deed records, dynamic closing-cost calculations and live pricing from the Optimal Blue PPE. The integration applies current product eligibility, lender margins and originator concessions directly within the refinance analysis so that every opportunity reflects real lending conditions rather than estimated pricing. Qualified opportunities appear directly within the originator’s dashboard alongside a borrower-ready refinance presentation and a pre-filled outreach email linked to the lender’s point-of-sale or borrower intake workflow. The platform also supports new referral opportunities by allowing loan officers to enter borrower information directly into the interface and generate the same live pricing analysis for prospective clients. An integrated activity log centralizes outreach tracking and follow-up activity within the same workflow. What makes the partnership particularly notable is the depth of the integration itself. Live PPE pricing, eligibility logic, AVMs, county records and closing-cost modeling are embedded into a single experience at launch. Existing Optimal Blue PPE customers do not need to build custom integrations, subscribe to separate data providers or implement new infrastructure to activate the solution. Rather than functioning as a standalone marketing tool layered on top of existing systems, Capture for Originators integrates directly into the pricing and origination workflows lenders already use every day.

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TrustEngine & ICE Mortgage Technology

The enhanced integration between TrustEngine and ICE Mortgage Technology deserves recognition for fundamentally transforming how borrower advice is delivered within the mortgage origination process. By embedding TrustEngine’s MortgageCoach platform directly into ICE Mortgage Technology’s Encompass LOS, the partnership created a deeply connected workflow that automates one of the most important, and historically manual, parts of mortgage lending: helping borrowers understand and compare loan options. MortgageCoach has long been recognized as the mortgage industry’s leading borrower presentation platform, helping loan officers explain financing options through visual comparisons and personalized guidance.

The enhanced integration with Encompass takes that capability much further by embedding MortgageCoach directly into the LOS workflow using live Encompass loan data. Loan officers can now generate personalized borrower comparisons instantly within Encompass without rekeying information or toggling between systems. What makes this connection especially innovative is the move from disconnected presentation tools to a fully embedded “advice engine” within the LOS itself. Instead of manually building borrower scenarios, the integration now automates strategy generation for options such as down payment structures, points analysis and refinance term optimization. The enhanced integration also introduced AI-powered workflows directly into the lending process. Features include an embedded AI loan officer assistant, chat summaries that surface borrower insights and automated recommendations that help guide borrower conversations more effectively. Combined with real-time Encompass data connectivity, dynamic scenario updates and integrated presentation tools like video messaging and visual annotations, the partnership created a modern, highly connected borrower engagement experience that elevates both loan officer productivity and borrower understanding.