Polly Partners with F9 Advisors to Deliver Institutional Capital Markets Execution for Mortgage Lenders

Polly and F9 Advisors, LLC have entered a strategic partnership to provide mortgage lenders with institutional-grade capital markets execution and advisory services. By integrating F9’s expert traders directly into the PollyOS environment, the collaboration aims to help lenders capture higher margins through mandatory execution without the traditional requirement of maintaining a fully staffed, in-house capital markets desk.

What was announced

The partnership introduces a "desk-as-a-service" model where F9 Advisors operates within a lender's existing PollyOS infrastructure. This arrangement allows mortgage lenders to access sophisticated pipeline hedging, best execution analysis, and loan sales capabilities from day one. Historically, mandatory execution—which typically captures more margin than best-efforts delivery—has been reserved for larger institutions with the capital to support dedicated internal teams. This partnership seeks to bridge that gap by providing the necessary human expertise to run the technology.

F9’s service suite is designed to scale alongside a lender's operational growth. The core offering includes pipeline hedging, whole loan trading, and agency pooling and securitization. Beyond these standard functions, the engagement can include specialized services such as Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) sourcing and execution, enterprise-level margin management, and product strategy. For lenders that already possess an internal desk, F9 provides contingency coverage to ensure business continuity during transitions or high-growth periods, alongside audit readiness and configuration advisory.

Operationally, the partnership ensures that F9 traders and analysts work with the same real-time data that the lender’s leadership sees. This includes daily operational monitoring, mark-to-market calculations, margin call handling, and automated reporting and alerting. Lenders maintain their own investor and dealer relationships, ensuring the capital markets function remains an internal asset while F9 provides the execution rigor. The companies will showcase these integrated capabilities at the 2026 MBA Annual Convention and Expo in Chicago, taking place from October 11 to October 14.

"Polly is unwavering in its commitment to democratize pricing so that every lender can price with the precision of the largest institutions. F9 extends that shared principle to execution. The desk runs inside the lender's own environment, and it grows as their strategy evolves. Whether a lender wants F9 running execution for the long term or building toward a team of their own, our interests are the same as theirs. That is a partnership the industry has not had before."

Brandon Story, President of F9 Advisors.

The companies involved

Polly is an AI-native, vertically integrated mortgage capital markets operating system. The company provides a platform designed to modernize the mortgage process through high-performance pricing engines and data-driven workflow automation. By focusing on a cloud-native architecture, Polly offers lenders a single point of truth for pricing and execution data, moving away from legacy systems that often rely on fragmented data exports.

F9 Advisors, LLC is a newly created capital markets execution and advisory firm. The firm is led by President Brandon Story and Chief Operating Officer Virgil Caselli Jr. Caselli brings significant industry experience to the role, having previously served as Managing Director and Partner at Compass Analytics. The firm also benefits from the expertise of Rob Kessel, who serves as an advisor through Panoramic Capital Academy and Consulting. Kessel is a multi-decade veteran of the mortgage capital markets and was the founder and former CEO of Compass Analytics. F9 operates as an independent company, contracting directly with each client to provide institutional-grade execution services. The leadership team has spent decades building and managing hedging platforms, and they have selected PollyOS as the foundational technology for their advisory operations.

What this means

This partnership signals a significant shift in how mid-market mortgage lenders can compete with Tier-1 banks. By decoupling the expertise of a capital markets desk from the fixed overhead of a full-time department, Polly and F9 are effectively commoditizing "mandatory execution." This move puts traditional advisory firms under pressure; those that rely on manual data transfers or external spreadsheets may struggle to compete with a model that operates in real-time inside the lender's own operating system. As mortgage margins continue to be a primary concern for the sector, the ability to switch between best-efforts and mandatory delivery with minimal friction becomes a critical competitive advantage. The industry is moving toward a more fluid, software-plus-service model where infrastructure is no longer the primary barrier to sophisticated financial strategies.