Mortgage veteran Joe Tyrrell will succeed Scott Smith as CEO of Optimal Blue, the company announced Monday. Tyrrell has more than 25 years of experience in mortgage, finance and technology, serving as president of ICE Mortgage Technology for three years after ICE bought Ellie Mae in 2020. For the past 18 months he has served as the CEO of Medallia, a customer and employee experience company.
“I have always been attracted to companies that make their clients’ success their top priority, and that is especially true with Optimal Blue, the clear market leader in secondary marketing technology,” Tyrrell said. “For the past year and a half, I have been delivering innovation and real generative AI capabilities to the largest and most trusted consumer, health care, hospitality, financial services, and technology brands in the world, and I am excited to now bring those capabilities to Optimal Blue’s lenders and partners in an industry that I love.”
Optimal Blue was acquired by Constellation Software after the merger of Intercontinental Exchange and Black Knight in 2023. Constellation Software acquires, manages and builds industry-specific software businesses and their Perseus group includes Dark Matter Technologies and ReverseVision as well as Optimal Blue. Scott Smith, the president of the Andromeda group at Perseus, has served as interim CEO of Optimal Blue.
“It was a priority to identify the right leader to support our investment in Optimal Blue and the long-term success of the business,” said Smith. “We’ve found that and more with Joe Tyrrell, who is passionate about client relationships and innovation – two tenets that have been core to Optimal Blue’s culture throughout its decades as a market leader. Joe’s extensive experience in this industry affords him a fundamental understanding of the needs and challenges lenders face and ways innovative technology and real-time data can solve them. Along with the other leaders within the Andromeda portfolio of Constellation Software, I look forward to continuing to support the success of Optimal Blue under Joe’s leadership.”
Tyrrell was in leadership at Ellie Mae for more than 10 years and served as COO before the company was acquired in 2020.
Optimal Blue provides secondary market solutions and actionable data services, facilitating more than $1.1 trillion in mortgage locking and trading transactions per year. The company’s solutions are used by more than 3,500 mortgage lenders , accounting for roughly 40% of all mortgage locks completed nationwide every year, according to the company.