Polly CEO Adam Carmel on his mission: cutting costs for lenders

Editor-in-chief Sarah Wheeler spoke with Adam Carmel, founder and CEO of Pollyto share his thoughts on solving customer problems and why reducing costs for lenders is paramount. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Sarah Wheeler: What sets Polly’s technology apart?

Adam Carmel: The technology is only as good as the people building it and their propensity to really push the boundaries and think through all the pain points that have existed due to over twenty years of outdated, outdated systems and approaches. So our team is hyper-focused not only on solving the problems of the past, but also on thinking about how and where this industry is evolving and leading the way over time. And so it starts with our culture, our team.

Then it starts with our customer partners and collecting their feedback: getting to know all their pain points and understanding what they experience. We don’t just want to solve a problem. We want to reinvent the way it’s done and be 10x better than everything else, feature by feature. This goes further than just taking a card and we will get to work on it. No, we want to execute. And we have the strongest sense of urgency to build things as quickly as possible in partnership with them.

When it comes to the technology, we use state-of-the-art architecture and backend, which we built from scratch, allowing us to build with an unlimited amount of flexibility, configurability and granularity. That back end and that architecture allows us to build anything we want, whenever we want, and that’s a real advantage.

Next year we will double our technology spend and we will continue to do so. We’re going to go harder and faster than ever before, and it’s all in the spirit of being hyper-focused and super-concentrated on making our customers successful, happy and giving them a competitive advantage.

SW: How do you use AI?

AC: We use AI in many different vectors and dimensions. AI is only as good as the data you feed it and the way you design it. We’re making sure we’re solving real problems and driving real use cases and not just creating little solutions, gimmicky things that aren’t really AI to begin with. If we do something, it has to reduce costs to the customer, it has to increase revenue, or it has to provide a phenomenal experience for the loan officer or someone else within the organization, or we’re not going to do it.

SW: What are some of those use cases that drive ROI?

AC: 25 or 30 years ago, mortgage companies had to price loans via faxes, which were then converted into interest rates. That still works, but the loan officer has to do numerous things to find the right price. With Polly, loan officers can now not only find out and compare prices for the number of products they want to compare, but the AI ​​can also inform them about why loans are ineligible and, if possible, make a recommendation on how you can qualify for that loan.

SW: Many fintech founders come from the technology side and had a bad experience buying a house, which drives them to start a company that solves that problem. You come from the lending side. How does that influence what you do every day at Polly?

AC: I was fortunate enough to work at a very large mortgage company early in my career, and then I left and started my own mortgage company. We were using these outdated systems and I couldn’t do what I wanted to do to move the company forward. I couldn’t get the granularity and flexibility within constructing the margins, the analytics were atrocious and not in real time. There was no automation. And every time I asked for something, half the time they ignored me and the other half was lip service. When it came to extra time, I was actually bullied. So my experience was very acute and very painful.

Before I started Polly, I went into the industry and asked other people if their experience was similar to mine, and it was. So I became hyper-motivated to change the paradigm of the industry: we want it to be incredible for the consumer and incredible for the lender. Our job is to remove as much waste and costs from the system as possible and bring all of these basis points back into the transaction between the loan officer and the consumer. We will fight for every inch to make that possible.

SW: The mortgage industry has had a pretty tough two years. What do you see for 2025?

AC: In the housing market, I suspect it will be better than 2024, but perhaps not as good as everyone thought a few months ago. But that doesn’t matter to us, because ultimately our job is to bring these costs down no matter what. Our job is to grow revenue for our client partners and dig deep into the innovation roadmap we have.

A lot of exciting things await us next year and we are relentlessly focused on our mission. If we stay true to this, we prove the value not only of our products, but also of the partnership approach we take with our customers. We feel we can continue to help drive change in the industry because it needs change. It’s time for change.