Lender Luminaries: New American Funding
In the first edition of our Lender Luminaries series, we are excited to spotlight New American Funding (NAF), a first-class national mortgage lender that has faced unpredictable market challenges head-on, driving clarity, speed, and confidence for its loan officers.
Today's mortgage environment is squeezing lenders from every direction. With origination opportunities drying up and rates remaining high, the competition on per unit deals is fiercer than ever. Reliability, speed, and convenience are now make-or-break factors in the mortgage process... qualities legacy pricing engines simply cannot deliver. They cling to outdated, fragmented solutions that may have sustained the industry more than 20 years ago, but are now buckling under this added pressure and new technology advancements. Instead of offering relief, these legacy vendors are the only ones benefiting from the broken model, charging more while delivering less, slow to respond and seemingly indifferent to the strain lenders are under.
For loan officers, strategic pricing is a competitive edge
When solutions can't keep up with rate volatility, loan officers lose borrower trust. When manual input and backend complexity eat into their day, they lose the time, flexibility, and accuracy they need to work best. And when lock desk agents are required to be heavily hands-on with processing requests, loan officers lose potential high-touch support to help them close deals.
At Polly, we have refused to accept this as the status quo, and we're collaborating nonstop with our customer partners like NAF to do things differently.
We don't just aim to be a reliable partner; we're here to help lenders and their teams navigate challenging markets and capitalize on strong ones. We understand the transformative impact of equipping loan officers with cutting-edge technology and automation that actually delivers convenience and certainty. It's simple: with the right technology and tooling, loan officers can move faster, price more accurately, outperform competition, and better serve their borrowers.
As Kristin Ankeny Bickenbach, EVP of Secondary Marketing at NAF, said in a recent Leading Lenders episode with HousingWire: "We are very closely partnered with Polly to make sure that from a pricing strategy, we can offer our loan officers and borrowers the absolute best option to suit their financial needs."
Tech that enhances the human touch
Innovation doesn't mean removing people from the mortgage process. It means giving them better tools to maximize efficiency.
NAF is transforming its loan officers' interactions with the lock desk, secondary markets, customer service, and other areas of business. By automating and optimizing workflows with Polly's enterprise tech, NAF has freed up its lock desk to function as a high-skill, high-impact support team for its regions. And with complete confidence in their pricing engine, NAF's loan officers can explore more competitive offers at the point-of-sale, assess eligibility in real time, and interact with pricing tools more intuitively, even while away from their desks.
A partnership designed for progress
Polly and NAF's collaboration is a testament to what is possible when innovation and true partnership meet: the support to scale operations without compromising service or core values. "We are absolutely a people-come-first company, and we haven't lost that, no matter how large we've grown," explains Bickenbach to HousingWire.
Stay tuned for the next Lender Luminaries spotlights to hear from our other amazing customer partners that are setting a new standard in mortgage capital markets.
