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Release Notes - April 14, 2023
(Note: you can download the Release Notes PDF in Help Center)
For this release, we anticipate the following introductions in your environments. Major features are documented in the Blend Knowledge Base accessible at https://help.blend.com/
If that resource does not answer your question, please reach out to Blend Support
support@blend.com.
Announcements (3)
Maintenance Announcements (4)
Preview Environments (Test/Dev/Beta) (2)
Production Environments (Prod) (1)
Announcements
(New) Follow-up Icon Update
Starting next Tuesday, 4/18, W-2 follow-ups will be included in the list of follow-ups that have the Blend icon. The current list of follow-ups with Blend icons are:
Blend Public API v6.0.0 Release
Version 6.0.0 of the Blend Public API will be released to General Availability (GA) on April 14, 2023. As part of our API release cadence, v6.0.0 allows for the introduction of breaking
changes, but does not introduce any changes to previous versions of the API.
Starting with v6.0.0, Blend will be changing the release cadence for our Public API. From now on, API versions will be released every six months, in April and October. Additionally, all API releases will be major releases, allowing for the introduction of breaking changes.
Previous major versions of the Blend Public API remain available and supported after the
release of v6.0.0. The primary impact of the GA release of v6.0.0 is that we will not introduce new breaking changes to v6.0.0 after April 15.
Some highlights of v6.0.0 of the Blend Public API include:
The full change log for v6.0.0 of the Blend Public API can be found at:
https://developers.blend.com/blend/v6.0.0/changelog/v600
HELOC Brochure Update
The CFPB issued an update to the “What you should know about home equity lines of credit” brochure (HELOC Brochure) in December 2022. If the HELOC Brochure has not been updated in your HELOC product, please request this update. A Blend representative can assist you.
Maintenance Announcements (4)
MSK Config Update
Description: Blend will be conducting maintenance on our MSK clusters to make several
configuration updates for the events platform. Platform events might get delayed for up to
30 minutes.
Borrowers may experience some slowness when using the application during this window.
Lenders may experience some delays in export. There will be no downtime.
Affected Period:
Beta: April 19 11:59pm - 2am (Wednesday night - Thursday morning)
Prod: April 26 11:59pm - 2am (Wednesday night - Thursday morning)
Database Maintenance
Description: Blend will be conducting maintenance on our shared database cluster to
upgrade the engine version to the latest.
What products or services will be affected during the maintenance window (platforms, applications, integrations, n/a, etc.):
All of Blend Platform will be impacted
Will this impact the borrower experience?
Yes
Will this impact the lender experience?
Yes
Affected Period:
Kubernetes Spot Instance Maintenance
Description: Blend will be conducting maintenance on our Kubernetes clusters to replace a
number of nodes with Spot instances
There is no expected disruption to products or services. This will not impact the borrower or
lender experience.
Affected Period:
Mongo Database Maintenance
Description:
Blend will be conducting maintenance on our mongo database cluster to improve scalability
and reliability.
What products or services will be affected during the maintenance window
(platforms, applications, integrations, n/a, etc.):
All of Blend Platform will be impacted.
Will this impact the borrower experience?
Yes
Will this impact the lender experience?
Yes
Affected Period:
Beta: April 13th, 12am - 2am
Beta: April 14th, 12am - 2am
Beta: April 18th, 12am - 2am (backup)
Prod: April 25th, 12am - 2am
Prod: April 26th, 12am - 2am
Prod: April 27th, 12am - 2am
Prod: April 28th, 12am - 2am (backup)
Preview Environments (Test/Dev/Beta)
(New) Allow for negative self-employment income
Date Available: Beta 4/18, Prod 5/16
Which customers are impacted?:
Any lenders that use the Blend lender application to input or edit borrower income.
How to turn on:
This feature will automatically be turned on for all customers on the dates listed above.
Purpose of Update and Benefit:
Blend currently does not support entering negative values for income. This makes it difficult to account for incomes of self-employed borrowers who may have business losses. With this change, loan team members will be able to input negative income for current self-employment for primary and co-borrowers on a loan. This change is only applicable to the lender application.
Current Behavior:
The lender application only accepts positive values for borrower incomes. If loan teams attempt to enter negative values, they will see a message below each field instructing them to enter an amount greater than 0 and will be unable to save the loan.
New Behavior:
When enabled, loan teams can enter negative values for all income fields for primary and
co-borrowers when all of the following criteria are met:
- Employer status = Current
- Employment type = Business / Self-Employment
- Ownership percent = > 25%
- When ownership is < 25%, Blend treats this as employment and NOT
self-employment, per GSE rules.
This change is only applicable to the lender application.
If the Employer status is not Current OR the Employment type is not Business /
Self-Employment, loan teams will see a message below the field prompting to enter an
amount greater than 0. Loan teams will also be unable to save the loan.
If the Ownership percent is < 25%, loan teams will see a message below the income field(s)
where any negative values were entered indicating that the ownership is less than 25% and
prompting them to enter an amount greater than 0. Loan teams will also be unable to save the loan.
While DU and LPA both accept negative income for self-employment for individual employment items, submitting a loan where the monthly income is negative will result in errors in the output files and the indicators in the AUS results page.
Link REO paid off status
Date Available: Beta 3/28, Prod 4/25
Which customers are impacted?: Any customer that uses loan structuring and links REOs.
How to turn on: This feature will automatically be turned on for all customers on the dates
listed above.
Purpose of Update and Benefit:
There are two ways that loan team members can indicate that an existing REO mortgage
payment will be paid off. One is via the “Omit/Paid” option in the Monthly Debt page.
The other is through the “Will be paid at close” toggle in the Mortgage payments subsection in the REO section.
Currently, these two indicators need to be set separately and do not reflect each other. With this release, we are linking these two indicators so that making the selection in one place will update it in the other.
Current Behavior:
While you can currently link liabilities, the paid off status is not linked.
New Behavior:
When enabled, if a loan team member links a liability on the Monthly Debt page to an REO and indicates that the liability will be paid at close, then the “Will be paid at close” toggle in the REO section will flip to "Yes" for the linked REO. Accordingly, if a loan team member flips the toggle to“Yes” on the REO and then links the liability, the liability will automatically show as “Will be paid off” on the monthly debt page.
Production Environments (Prod) (1)
Logo Indicator added to Follow-Ups Search UI in Lender UI
Date Available: Beta 3/28, Prod 4/11
Which customers are impacted?: Customers using follow-ups in Blend. Only lender users will see this change to the UI.
How to turn on: This feature will automatically be turned on for all customers on the dates
listed above.
Purpose of Update and Benefit:
Blend is making a small change to the lender-side Follow-ups search UI to better delineate
between Blend Intelligence follow-ups, custom follow-ups and regular follow-ups. When this
change is implemented, lender users will see a Blend logo next to any Blend Intelligence
follow-ups, the lender’s own logo next to their own custom follow-ups, and no logo if it is a
regular follow-up.
The logo that is pulled for the lender’s custom follow-ups will be the “Square Logo” option within the Branding section of the Setup pages (see Help Center article for additional info on branding: https://help.blend.com/hc/en-us/articles/360028760131). The logos will only be visible to the lender users accessing the Follow-ups search page.
New Behavior:
next to Blend Intelligence follow-ups.
When enabled, lender users will see a Blend logo
Lender users will see the Square Logo configured in their environments (instructions on how to configure this are outlined here) for any of their own custom templated follow-ups. See example below of how both could appear in the follow-ups list.
Note: Green flag is used as an example configured square branding logo - your
environment will be specific to your configuration.
If the environment does not have the Square Logo configured, a link will appear in place of the logo.
For regular follow-ups, neither a logo nor a link will appear next to it in the search modal.
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