Polly, the San Francisco mortgage capital markets software company, launched PollyOS on 6 October 2026 by adding a new hedging system, Polly Hedge, to its pricing engine and its Loan Trading Exchange. According to the company’s release, PollyOS prices, hedges and sells each loan from a single record, and attributes every basis point of margin from rate lock to settlement.

What PollyOS does

A mortgage lender’s capital markets desk does three jobs. It sets rates through a product, pricing and eligibility engine, it hedges the interest-rate risk on loans it has locked but not yet sold, and it sells those loans to investors. At most lenders these run on separate systems that exchange files, often overnight. PollyOS puts all three on one engine, so a lock, a hedge position and a loan sale update the same record as they happen.

Polly says that means no exports, imports or reconciliation. When a loan funds, cancels or changes status during the day, the hedged pipeline reflects it straight away. Polly also says PollyOS reports gain and loss using the same calculations accounting already uses, so the month-to-date profit a chief executive sees halfway through the month is the number that ties to GAAP at close.

Polly Hedge took more than two years to build, according to the release. Polly developed it with Gary Malis, a partner at Paramount Residential Mortgage Group who leads its strategy and capital markets work, and Rob Kessel, who founded Compass Analytics and now runs Panoramic Capital Academy. Brandon Story, Polly’s senior vice president of strategy, was previously chief investment officer at Mr. Cooper.

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Why PollyOS is aimed at the margin question

Polly’s founder and chief executive, Adam Carmel, framed the launch around one question lenders struggle to answer: “How much money did we actually make on that loan?” Lenders know their realised margin falls short of the target. Pull-through, rate moves between lock and sale, hedge slippage and pricing exceptions all eat into it. On separate systems, that loss can only be estimated after the fact and in aggregate.

This is where the PollyOS pitch is strongest, because a lender that can see, loan by loan, whether margin disappeared in pricing, hedging or execution can fix the specific cause, such as a loan officer granting too many concessions or a hedge ratio set too loosely for one product. Story put the operational point plainly, saying that on most desks hedging judgment “lives with one or two people.” Writing that knowledge into the system reduces key-person risk, which matters at mid-sized lenders.

Why switching is the hard part

Lenders tend to run pricing, hedging and secondary marketing on established vendors, Optimal Blue among the best known, and capital markets teams are cautious about changing systems that touch every locked loan. Polly’s answer is that incumbents grew through acquisitions and carry different data models that no integration fully joins up. That is a fair criticism, but a lender has to trust Polly with its whole pipeline to test it.

The release also leaves out the evidence that would help that decision. It says the first group of customer partners has been onboarded, without naming them or giving loan volumes. Malis and Kessel helped build Hedge, but the release does not say PRMG runs PollyOS in production. For context on how much lenders depend on long-term platform contracts, Fintechbits covered the ICE and Wells Fargo MSP renewal, and newer AI-first entrants such as Elio Mortgage are approaching the market from the origination side.

What to Watch Next on PollyOS

The next test is the MBA Annual Convention in Chicago, 11 to 14 October 2026, after which Polly says PollyOS will become more widely available. Look for named lenders, the loan volume running through the system and before-and-after margin figures from a customer. If a top-50 independent lender moves its hedging from an incumbent to PollyOS in 2027, the single-engine argument will have proved itself.

Questions and answers

What is PollyOS?

PollyOS is Polly’s mortgage capital markets system, launched on 6 October 2026. It runs pricing, hedging through the new Polly Hedge module, and loan sales on one engine and one loan record.

What does Polly mean by loan-level margin attribution?

Polly says PollyOS can show where each basis point of a loan’s margin went between rate lock and settlement. Lenders would no longer have to estimate margin loss after the fact and in aggregate.

When will PollyOS be widely available?

Polly says its first group of customer partners has been onboarded, and that broader availability follows the MBA Annual Convention in Chicago, 11 to 14 October 2026.