According to HousingWire, the consulting firm Milliman has purchased Blue Water's mortgage servicing rights valuation and hedging business from Apex Analytics. The deal brings together Blue Water's hedge analytics capabilities, trading platform, and quantitative team with Milliman's existing mortgage solutions practice. While financial details weren't made public, the transaction represents Milliman's second major acquisition in this space in less than a year, following their purchase of MorVest Capital back in December.
Brett Ludden, who leads Milliman's mortgage solutions unit, explained that Blue Water's expertise in MSR hedge analytics pairs well with their existing mortgage advisory work. The acquisition is designed to strengthen Milliman's ability to help clients with MSR advisory services and risk management across the board. By bringing in Blue Water's trading and quantitative professionals, Milliman is essentially combining their mortgage behavior modeling and analytics capabilities with Blue Water's hedging platform and software development strengths.
For Apex Analytics, which was formerly known as Voxtur Analytics, selling off the Blue Water business allows them to refocus their resources on what they consider their core strength: property intelligence and assessment technology. CEO Ryan Marshall stated that by streamlining their portfolio this way, they can put more energy into developing their mass appraisal systems, geospatial tools, and AI-enabled assessment platforms for government agencies and assessors.
Milliman's strategy here is pretty clear. They're building out a comprehensive mortgage solutions practice that can handle everything from MSR valuation and financing to hedging and advisory work. The firm, which was founded back in 1947 as an actuarial and consulting company, has been intentionally hiring and acquiring talent to expand deeper into residential mortgages over the past year.
What I am seeing locally in the Bay Area is that these kinds of consolidations in the mortgage servicing space are creating more sophisticated tools and services that ultimately benefit servicers and lenders managing complex portfolios. For our East Bay and Fremont markets, where property values can be volatile, having better hedging analytics and risk management capabilities available to the institutions lending on those properties creates more stability in the lending environment.
