00:12From Chicago, I'm Alison LaForgia, and I am sitting with founder and CEO of Poly, Adam.
00:19Adam, thank you for joining me today.
00:20Thanks for having me.
00:21Now, Adam, we spoke right as Poly launched Poly OS, and since then, your team has not
00:27skipped a beat.
00:29Now, we're all boots on the ground at MBA in Chicago at MBA Annual, one of the biggest
00:35stages for the industry.
00:37Following that launch, what kind of feedback and response have you been hearing from the
00:41floor, and what milestones are you most excited to chase over this week?
00:47Yeah, so it's been obviously a very exciting time for us.
00:52I think the feedback has been a mix of surprising and unsurprising.
00:58You know, leading up to this, we had worked with so many of our industry partners and existing
01:03customer partners that we kind of knew what we were building would be really game-changing
01:09for the industry.
01:10And now that it's in the market, we've announced it.
01:14For the folks that we have not spoken to, there's just a tremendous amount of excitement.
01:19We've had a ton of inbound inquiry around it.
01:24I think the thing that resonates the most for me over the last week or so is that we've
01:29had a lot of lenders and banks say, oh my gosh, like if I don't do this, I am at
01:34a competitive
01:35disadvantage in terms of having low-level attribution, real-time accounting entry, like
01:42the whole deal.
01:43And so that's been really, really cool.
01:45And then for MBA, we'll fire it up.
01:49We've got a whole team here.
01:50We want to meet with as many people as possible just to share the vision, understand their
01:56pain points with their existing systems, understand what they're looking to achieve next year
02:01strategically, and we'll see where it takes us.
02:04Now, as a fast follow to the hedge announcement, Poly announced a new partnership with F9 Advisors.
02:10How does that partnership help fulfill Poly's core mission of democratizing capital markets
02:16for every lender rather than just the big ones?
02:21You know, really, actually, everything we do is about our people.
02:26And so whether it's this partnership with F9 or the products and the systems we build,
02:33it always starts with the people that work at Poly or now that we've partnered with.
02:39And so we're very, very, very, very fortunate to have partnered with and gotten advice from
02:45people like Rob Kessel or Gary Malice on the product and then, you know, kind of how we're
02:51thinking about F9 as being a different type of partnership and go-to-market strategy.
02:58And then, of course, Brandon Story, who was the chief investment officer at Mr. Cooper.
03:02So we basically have said, hey, can we take the best of the best, you know, the team,
03:09the built Compass and scaled Compass analytics, executives from Mr. Cooper, which their success
03:16is unbelievable, obviously.
03:21Bring these teams together, partner with them.
03:25We're very, very, very excited about this relationship.
03:27And then delivering to the market.
03:31So going to the democratization question, there's very, very few lenders, like five maybe or so,
03:37that are able to drive the granularity, the flexibility, the analysis and so forth that
03:46Poly's system is able to do.
03:49And then you layer that in with this incredible expertise over at F9 with Brandon and Virgil.
03:56It's really a dream team.
03:58We're really, really excited to be having this relationship with them.
04:02It's clear that Poly has grown significantly.
04:05A lot has changed since you came into market in 2019.
04:08But one pillar the company has always held with deep conviction is collaboration with your customers.
04:13You actually call them customer partners between them and other SMEs that you've brought in to help shape what comes
04:21next.
04:21Take a step back and paint that picture for me.
04:24How has working with Rob Kessel, Virgil and Brandon Story and the prominent lenders that Poly has on your truly
04:31impressive customer roster
04:33influenced your personal thinking about the future of capital markets?
04:36Well, it started with, you know, I was a mortgage banker myself for, I don't know, 15, maybe 13 years
04:46or so prior to starting Poly.
04:48And so my experience working with vendors, the legacy, same incumbent vendors was, you know, grind me, charge me more,
05:02only care about me when they need to care about me, not listen to my, you know, my feedback and
05:07the whole thing.
05:08Frankly, had they done that, I wouldn't, we wouldn't have built our own proprietary pricing engine at this company, mortgage
05:14company I'd started, probably wouldn't exist.
05:15So it's actually a great thing that that occurred.
05:17So, so a lot has been informed by that experience.
05:21And, and when, when, when, when we started Poly, that it was really a thing of, can we just be
05:28as students?
05:29Can we listen?
05:30Can we learn?
05:31Not just from, you know, back then it was zero customer partners.
05:35And so it was listen and learn to, you know, to anyone.
05:38And now it's the same thing.
05:39We want to listen and learn to everyone, not just our customer partners, but other folks within the industry.
05:46To learn where their problems are, what they're looking to achieve, you know, how they're thinking about things.
05:52Of course, everyone wants to drive the cost of origination down.
05:55We're going to, we're going to do our part in that.
05:57But they also, there's cost of capital, there's understanding attribution, understanding how to maximize the margin on every loan and
06:04everything else.
06:05And so, you know, we are so committed to this.
06:10It's just a cultural, it's like one of the five things that we just talk about over and over and
06:14over again internally.
06:15And I think it's one of those unique things that we not only value, but then we go execute on.
06:21And so we're, that's informed everything we've done.
06:25I want to go back for a second to something that you mentioned in your first question.
06:30And that is talking about what this next chapter unlocks for lenders as they go from reacting to historical data
06:39to being able to optimize every single basis point in real time.
06:44Yeah, I would synthesize this down to historically, the lending communities had to guess what their attribution is.
06:55They've had to guess what their profitability is up until the very end at the month end cutoffs when the
07:04books are closed.
07:04And they're still guessing because you're just looking at kind of like everything on an aggregate basis between the value
07:10of the IRLC and the value of the fair market value of the hedge.
07:14So we wanted to say, okay, let's not guess.
07:18We want truth.
07:19We want truth every day.
07:21We want our customer partners to understand what is the value of that loan?
07:26What is the value of that loan day over day?
07:29What decisions can you make now that you have access to that information that you've never been able to have
07:35before because of system limitations that would help inform profitability, would help inform how you manage your pipeline or your
07:44employees, you name it.
07:46And so, you know, it's like anything else.
07:49When you have a vacuum of information, you can't make decisions or you make bad decisions or you make decisions
07:54based on assumptions.
07:55If you have access to information and the information is true and correct and it's daily, then you can make
08:03really great decisions as you go forward.
08:07And it doesn't always have to be so retroactive.
08:09You can actually be proactive in how you think about things.
08:12And I think that that's an industry paradigm that we're really excited about.
08:17I think there's going to be a, even for me, when we started thinking about this, I was putting myself
08:23in the shoes of myself 10 years ago.
08:26Boy, if I had this system available to me, how would I operate differently?
08:29And even when I was going through that exercise mentally, I was like, boy, I would really need to rethink,
08:36you know, how I operate the training of the system, the whole deal.
08:42It's not so just, it's not so simple of like, hey, here's this game changing thing.
08:46Go install it.
08:46And it just, it's magical.
08:48We hope it is, but there's still going to be an adoption and learning curve.
08:52Adam, I'm going to ask you to close this out and I want to end with what the biggest lessons
08:59you've learned about leadership along the way are.
09:01And really what excites you the most about the talent and the potential that PolyOS is bringing into its next
09:09chapter?
09:10You know, when Poly started, I was, well, younger than I was today, obviously.
09:16So, I mean, a lot has been learned.
09:19I would say certainly the team has evolved.
09:23We've got a world-class team.
09:25We're really, really excited about the folks that are on the team.
09:29And this year we've been so fortunate to welcome a new engineering leader and sales leader.
09:37And, of course, someone, you know, Brandon who runs strategy and so forth.
09:42So, we are, I would say that continue to listen, continue to learn, be a student, surround yourself with people
09:54that are 10 times better than you and don't get in their way.
09:57And so, and now at the pace we're moving and the breadth and depth that we operate now versus just
10:06a few years ago, I've had to rethink, you know, my approach both internally and externally and really lean on
10:15them to run the business.
10:18And I just get to help them solve problems along the way.
10:22It's been very, very exciting.
10:24Adam, congratulations again on the launch of PolyOS and the partnership with F9 Advisors.
10:30I can't wait to see what Poly does in its next chapter.
10:32Thank you for having me.
