HousingWire Editor in Chief Sarah Wheeler sat down with Adam Carmel, founder and CEO of Polly, to talk about his thought process for solving customer problems and why cutting costs for mortgage lenders is paramount. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Sarah Wheeler: What differentiates Polly’s technology?
Adam Carmel: The technology is only as good as the people building it, and their propensity to really push the envelope and think through all of the pain points that have existed through 20-plus years of legacy, antiquated systems and approaches. So, our team is hyperfocused on not only solving the problems of the past but thinking through how and where this industry is evolving over time and being on the very cutting edge. And so, it starts with our culture in our team.
Then it starts with our customer partners and gathering their feedback — learning all of their pain points and understanding what they’re experiencing. We don’t want to just solve a problem. We want to reinvent the way it’s done and be 10 times better than anything else out there, feature by feature. This goes beyond just taking a ticket and we’ll get to it. No — we want to execute. And we have the strongest sense of urgency to build things as quickly as we possibly can in partnership with them.
When it comes to the technology, we use the most modern architecture and back end, which we built on a proprietary basis, that allows us to build using an unlimited amount of flexibility, configurability and granularity. That back end and that architecture allows us to build anything we want, anytime we want, and that’s a real advantage.
We’re doubling our technology spend next year and we’re just going to keep on going. We’re going to go harder and faster than we’ve ever gone, and it’s all in the spirit of being hyperfocused and super concentrated on making our customers be successful and happy and giving them a competitive advantage.
SW: How are you leveraging artificial intelligence?
AC: We’re leveraging AI across a lot of different vectors and dimensions. AI is only as good as the data that you’re feeding it and the way in which you’ve architected it. We are making sure that we are solving real problems and driving real use cases, and not just creating little-point solutions, gimmicky things that aren’t really AI to start with.
When we do something, it needs to drive costs down for the customer, it needs to drive revenue up, or it needs to deliver a phenomenal experience to the loan officer or someone else within the organization, otherwise we’re not going to do it.
SW: What are some of the use cases that drive return on investment?
AC: Twenty-five or 30 years ago, mortgage companies had to price loans off faxes and then those were made into rate sheets. That still works, but the loan officer has to go do a bazillion things just to find the right price.
Now, with Polly, loan officers can not only get to the price and compare the price across however many products they want to compare to, but the AI can also inform them on why loans are ineligible, and if it’s possible, make a recommendation on how to make that loan eligible.
SW: A lot of fintech founders come from the technology side and had a bad experience buying a house, which is what prompted them to start a company to solve that problem. You come from the lending side. How does that inform what you do at Polly every day?
AC: I had the good fortune of working at a very large mortgage company at the beginning of my career, and then I went off and started my own mortgage company. We were using these legacy systems and I could not get done what I wanted to get done to drive the business forward.
I could not get the granularity and flexibility within constructing the margins; the analytics were horrific and not in real time. There was no automation. And every time I asked for anything, they ignored me half the time, and the other half was a lot of lip service. When it came down to the renewal, I was basically bullied. So, my experience was very acute and it was very painful.
Before I started Polly, I went around to the industry and asked other people if their experience was like mine, and it was. So I got hyper-motivated to change the industry’s paradigm — we want it to be unbelievable for the consumer and unbelievable for the loan officer. Our job is to extract as much waste and cost out of the system as possible, and bring all of those basis points back to the transaction between the loan officer and the consumer. We’re going to fight for every inch to make that happen.
SW: The mortgage industry has been through a pretty rough two years. What do you see for 2025?
AC: On the housing market, my guess is that it’s going to be better than 2024 but maybe not as good as everyone thought just a few months ago. But that doesn’t matter to us because at the end of the day, our job is to drive these costs down no matter what. Our job is to increase our customer partners’ revenue and drive deeply into the innovation road map we’ve got.
We’ve got a lot of really exciting things coming next year and we are relentlessly focused on our mission. As we stay true to that, we prove out the value of not only our products but also the partnership approach we take with our customers. We feel like we can continue to help advance and change the change the industry, because it’s in need of change. It’s time for change.
