Loan Factory Partners With Pylon To Automate Originations And Bypass Wholesale

One of the nation’s largest mortgage brokerages, Loan Factory, Inc., has partnered with Pylon Lending to integrate Pylon’s AI-powered mortgage infrastructure and capital markets pricing into Tera, Loan Factory’s proprietary all-in-one platform for loan officers.

Loan Factory originates more than $5 billion annually through more than 2,500 loan officers licensed across 48 states. The partnership is designed to automate loan operations, speed up approvals, lower costs, and connect Loan Factory’s originators more directly to capital markets pricing — a move that could reduce the brokerage’s reliance on traditional wholesale lenders.

“We're excited to unlock massive growth and competitive advantage for Loan Factory as we simplify mortgages into an API call,” said Pylon CEO Trent Hedge.

An API, or application programming interface, allows different software systems to communicate with each other. In practice, Hedge said, Pylon is trying to turn mortgage origination into a programmable process that Loan Factory can plug into through Tera, rather than moving loans through a patchwork of separate portals, manual tasks, and vendor systems.

Through the partnership, Loan Factory expects to increase loan officer production across its core origination workflows by using Pylon’s infrastructure to reduce manual operations and improve pricing.

“Partnering with Pylon enables us to cut out the middlemen and deliver rates that our competitors can’t match,” said Loan Factory founder and CEO Thuan Nguyen. “It also allows us to deliver instant approvals and faster closings, all while lowering costs.”

Rather than functioning as a traditional loan origination system, point-of-sale system, or wholesale lender portal, Pylon says its platform vertically integrates the mortgage stack, beginning with capital markets and working backward through the origination process.

Nguyen said the partnership fits Loan Factory’s broader technology strategy. Loan Factory built Tera to replace the fragmented software stack many brokerages rely on. Pylon’s infrastructure will allow the company to build on that foundation while reducing its dependence on manual processes used by traditional wholesale lenders.

“We got very frustrated with all lenders out there — big and small,” Nguyen said. “They do not have the technology.”

Pylon describes itself as an autonomous mortgage infrastructure platform built to power digital mortgage origination. Through vertical integration, API-based infrastructure, and end-to-end automation, the company says it gives originators tools to reduce manual operations, lower origination costs, and access competitive capital markets pricing. Pylon is backed by investors including Peter Thiel, Conversion Capital, QED Investors, Citi, and Fifth Wall.

Pylon's Cost And Benefits

Hedge said Pylon’s model is built around lowering the cost structure behind mortgage lending, a problem Nguyen said has become increasingly difficult for lenders and brokers to ignore. Nguyen estimated the average cost to originate a loan is about $12,000, driven in part by manual processes and fragmented technology.

By replacing much of that manual infrastructure with software, Hedge said Pylon aims to reduce the operating costs that are typically built into mortgage pricing and pass those savings through to originators and borrowers.

He contrasted Pylon’s model with the traditional aggregator or wholesale lender model, where companies may carry large staffs, office space, and margin requirements on top of their base costs.

“If I’m an aggregator or a wholesale lender, I might have ten or twenty thousand people who are manually manufacturing these loans,” Hedge said. “I have 500,000 square feet of office space. And I have a margin that I need to make on every loan in addition to my cost basis.”

Ramon Walker, CEO and founder of Client Direct Mortgage, also partnered with Pylon and said the platform’s pricing and infrastructure could give his brokerage lender-level access without the full cost of building that system himself.
Walker said he compared Pylon’s pricing against Loan Sifter and found Pylon was 40 to 90 basis points better in certain pricing scenarios, depending on credit score and loan structure.

“If I’m talking 60 bips better on a $500,000 loan, that’s $3,000 on that one loan,” Walker said.

The platform’s monthly cost starts at $10,000, Walker said, but he argued brokers should measure that fee against the far higher cost of becoming a lender or gaining similar access to capital markets through traditional infrastructure.

“Meridian Link — I had that contract once upon a time — was $8,000 a month, and that’s just the software,” Walker said.

That cost, Walker said, does not include the investor relationships, capital markets access, fraud systems, compliance tools, reserves, audited financials, and other infrastructure needed to operate at that level.

The companies said the partnership will help Loan Factory scale production without adding operations staff at the same pace as loan volume. Hedge said the goal is not necessarily to add processors, underwriters, and closers in proportion to growth, but to let companies scale up and down more efficiently.

Nguyen said he expects the partnership to help Loan Factory grow both its number of loan officers and the production of each loan officer.

“It’s a two-fold thing,” Nguyen said. “More loan officers, and more loans per loan officer.”

Wholesale Lender Disruption

Hedge said the company’s long-term goal is to make the platform available more broadly across the mortgage market. Currently, Pylon is focused on scaled originators, including brokers, non-delegated lenders, enterprise customers, and delegated IMBs in design-partner arrangements.

The partnership also comes as brokers continue to scrutinize wholesale lender pricing, technology, and channel politics. While Hedge said the company is not targeting wholesale lenders directly, its model is built around removing layers of cost between originators and capital markets — the same space traditional wholesale lenders occupy.

One of the platform’s major appeals, Walker said, is that it offers brokers a more uniform pricing model, rather than one he described as shaped by account executive relationships or lender favoritism.

“They aren’t playing favorites,” Walker said. “Everybody gets the same pricing. You might get different pricing depending on how much you’re committing to them from the outset. If you do more than $10,000, then you probably have more margin. Whether you give that margin to the consumer, or you put it in your pocket, that’s a business decision. But, as far as the platform, it’s the same for all of us.”

Hedge made a similar argument, saying the company wants to remove what he described as “games and nonsense” from wholesale pricing.

“We’ve actually seen this a lot recently,” Hedge said. “Different customers have different rate sheets from these wholesale lenders, depending on how much their AE likes them, or whether or not they go on trips and golf outings. And do any of those things actually benefit the consumer? I tend not to think so.”

Nguyen said Loan Factory’s decision is ultimately driven by what benefits its borrowers and loan officers.

“For me, this all comes down to my fiduciary duty to my clients and my loan officers,” Nguyen said. “If Pylon can offer us better process, better technology, and better pricing, why not work with Pylon?”

Consumer Data & Privacy Policies

Hedge also addressed rumors and misconceptions circulating among brokers on Facebook about how the company handles borrower data, including concerns about whether the platform could retain or use borrower information in ways that threaten broker-client relationships.

Jonathon Haddad, CEO of AI automation platform bevri.ai, posted a video on Facebook raising claims about how Pylon uses consumer information. The caption warned: "Read their privacy policy and look at how many different companies their founders and investors own. Your clients WILL be sold a numerous amount of different products."

Hedge rejected that interpretation, saying Pylon is a strictly business-to-business infrastructure company and does not cross-sell borrower information. 

Hedge responded to Haddad's video, saying "If you look at our privacy policy — which I think is what was being discussed there — it says that we may share your information. Particularly for purposes of credit reporting. When you pull a credit report, you have to share someone's social security number with the credit bureau to get a credit report. That's true for every mortgage company in the United States."

Hedge added that, overall, Pylon does not operate a retail mortgage business, employ loan officers, buy leads, or cross-sell borrowers into title, insurance, or other consumer products. Customers that license Pylon’s platform own their data, he said.

“We don’t have a retail mortgage business, we don’t have any loan officers, so we don’t compete with our customers,” Hedge said. “We don’t have any subsidiaries, we don’t have title businesses or insurance businesses, we don’t sell them other products. We’re purely an infrastructure company.”

 Walker also pushed back on the concern, saying he does not view Pylon as a threat to broker-client relationships. He compared the fear to broader concerns brokers already face around trigger leads and consumer-data marketing, arguing that loan officers are responsible for maintaining contact with their own borrowers.

“There’s no boogeyman,” Walker said. “It’s your responsibility as a loan officer to stay out in front of your client.”

For Pylon, the Loan Factory partnership represents a larger test of whether mortgage infrastructure can be rebuilt around automation and direct capital markets access. For brokers, it raises a more immediate question: whether the next competitive edge comes from adding more wholesale partners — or relying on fewer of them.

Pylon vs. Other Wholesale Lenders