Customer Intelligence

Customer Intelligence: How Equity Enrichment Changes the Game

5 mins read
October 3, 2023
By
Mike Waterston

Imagine a scenario where you can instantly identify all your customers with at least $100K of equity in their homes. Imagine annual customer check-ins that include a real-time look at how much equity they have—and how they can use it to strengthen their financial security.  

This is a golden opportunity for financial institutions: the perfect chance to reach out with the financial guidance we know people want so badly—and a rich source for driving additional revenue in the process.

If this scenario sounds like a dream, it’s because that’s exactly what it has been for so many financial institutions for so long. The challenge isn’t that they lack the data to identify equity-rich customers, it’s that they lack a reliable solution to surface that data when and where it’s most useful. The time and cost of manual equity reporting make it impractical for regular use at scale. Then there’s the challenge of putting that information in the hands of the right people—and hoping they know what to do with it.

Equity Enrichment provides up-to-date, actionable equity data directly in customer profiles

Equity Enrichment puts these golden opportunities in the hands of loan officers by constantly updating equity information in each customer’s profile within Total Expert. Now, loan officers can use that data to have more authentic and productive conversations about their customers’ financial wellness. Just as importantly, sales and marketing professionals can use Total Expert’s powerful segmentation tools to quickly identify customers above a certain equity level and leverage their information to deliver hyper-targeted and personalized messaging at scale.

Surfacing more than opportunities 

The truth is that many of your customers aren’t thinking about all the ways they could use their home equity to advance their financial goals. Most of them probably don’t even realize how much equity they currently have. Equity Enrichment allows you to deliver engaging, personalized, and informative content and offers around key home equity use cases:

  • Cash-Out Refinance: Educate customers on how a cash-out refinance works, and how they can use it to consolidate high-interest debt from credit cards and auto loans, help pay off growing student loan balances, or cover other unexpected expenses.  
  • Home Equity Products: Help customers see how a line of credit or home equity loan can put their home equity to work for home improvements, debt payoff, or other large purchases.
  • Reverse Mortgage: Segment customers above the age of 62 and with the right percentage of equity who could be empowered with additional income through a reverse mortgage.
  • Mortgage Insurance Removal: Make sure customers know if/when they’re eligible to remove primary mortgage insurance (PMI) so they can lower their monthly mortgage payments. This is a powerful and simple way to build trusted relationships and retain future business.
  • Annual Home Equity Check-Up: Automatically inform a customer how their home’s value has appreciated on a regular cadence—and begin the conversation around how they can use their equity to support other financial goals.

Building on proven value

Total Expert’s Customer Intelligence data is already giving financial institutions actionable insights that align customer needs with revenue-generating business opportunities. Since launching in 2022, Customer Intelligence has surfaced more than 1.9 million insights and triggered automated Journeys that led to over $10.9B in loan applications and $6.5B in funded loans. These results stem from a simple premise: leverage data to generate alerts based on specific customer actions or milestones that signal a customer’s need and a financial institution’s opportunity.

But Equity Enrichment moves Total Expert Customer Intelligence beyond individual alerts and institutes an always-on intelligence that continuously updates the customer record with the latest information—adding value to every customer conversation and helping teams across your organization deliver impact with every interaction. The next wave of Customer Intelligence gives your loan officers and your organization a continuous and holistic picture of each customer’s financial health, so you can continue building lifelong relationships and establish yourself as a trusted financial partner.

These always-on insights deliver real-time visibility into the “in-between” times—the vast majority of a customer’s life that’s spent between major life events and milestones. These are the times when they’re most hungry for guidance and education—and where financial institutions have the greatest untapped opportunity to build both trust and incremental revenue.  

Combining insights with action

The leading financial institutions that already use Total Expert know what sets it apart: It’s the only customer engagement platform purpose-built for financial institutions that seamlessly combines a system of intelligence with a system of action.

Equity Enrichment and the next wave of Customer Intelligence bring that Total Expert differentiator to a new level: Financial institutions don’t have to manually cobble together equity information from disparate data silos and systems—Equity Enrichment puts the data they need right where they need it—in each customer’s profile. And they don’t have to export those insights into a separate marketing automation tool—they’re immediately available in Total Expert to fuel purpose-built Journeys and execute at scale.

This all brings financial institutions closer to the holy grail of customer engagement: delivering the right message, to the right customer, at the right time—creating genuine personal connections at the moments that matter most.

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Change is the one constant in financial services, but the way we respond to it separates the leaders from the pack. The newly signed Homebuyer Privacy Protection Act (HPPA)—taking effect in March 2026—is a shift in how lenders can access and use consumer credit data. However, while some may view this as another regulatory headache, the reality is far more encouraging: it’s an opportunity to raise the bar on trust, transparency, and customer experience.  It’s another validation of our “Customer for Life” strategy.

This isn’t about dodging restrictions. It’s about recognizing that the playbook for winning customers is evolving—and those who embrace that evolution will come out stronger.

What’s changing?

Under the HPPA, credit bureaus can no longer sell a consumer’s credit file unless the lender meets one of a few narrow conditions:

  • Originated the consumer's current mortgage
  • Service the consumer's current mortgage
  • Obtained clear, documented consent from the consumer
  • As a bank or credit union, maintain an active account for that consumer

There’s even a GAO study on the way, examining how trigger-lead solicitations via text messaging impact consumers—a clear sign regulators are watching the fine line between engagement and harassment.

For lenders who have long relied on trigger leads, this represents a fundamental shift. But for institutions that have invested in building relationships the right way, this is good news.

What this means for lenders

The HPPA shuts the door on spray-and-pray solicitation tactics. But it opens the door wider for lenders who want to compete on trust and relationship strength. Specifically, it creates new opportunities to:

  • Deepen existing customer relationships with proactive, personalized engagement.
  • Capture consent earlier in the journey, before borrowers get lost in a flood of noise.
  • Differentiate in a less crowded, more consumer-friendly marketplace where trust is a true competitive advantage.

The lenders who lean in here will win—not because they shouted the loudest, but because they earned the right to stay connected.

Why this isn’t just another regulatory headache

Consumers have been saying it for years: the barrage of calls, texts, and emails after a mortgage application is exhausting. Some borrowers receive 100+ solicitations within 24 hours. That doesn’t build confidence—it erodes it. And we know this is not how our TE customers run their business.

HPPA represents a rare alignment of regulators, consumer advocates, and lenders themselves. It clears away predatory noise, improves the homebuying experience, and rewards lenders who put relationships at the center of their strategy.

As our Founder & CEO Joe Welu often reminds us, “Trust is the currency of modern financial services.” This law is an accelerant for lenders who understand that principle.

How we're going to help you thrive in a post-HPPA world

We’re not sitting on the sidelines waiting to see how this plays out. Our platform was purpose-built to help lenders engage customers in a way that’s personal, compliant, and built to last. Here’s how we’re making sure you’re ready for March 2026:

  • Proactive guidance: Our mortgage and tech experts are already helping lenders adjust monitoring practices, so they stay compliant without losing momentum.
  • Expand Customer Intelligence: We’re finalizing new capabilities to drive increased awareness and enrichment of your relationships, including expanding CI to all three bureaus, and streamlining our credit improvement alert.
  • Investments in consent: Upgraded features coming soon to capture and respect consumer consent in clear, frictionless ways—including through our ecosystem partnerships.

This isn’t a band-aid or a reaction; it’s an evolution of how modern lenders build sustainable engagement to develop customers for life.

Bottom line: this isn’t a roadblock—it’s an opportunity

Every regulatory change comes with friction. But HPPA isn’t just about compliance—it’s about clarity. It’s about stripping away noise and giving lenders who prioritize relationships a stage to shine.

The lenders who thrive in this new environment won’t be the ones chasing trigger leads. They’ll be the ones investing in trusted, personalized engagement—from first touch through every financial milestone.

And that’s exactly what Total Expert was built to help you do: navigate the shifts, build lifelong trust, and continue winning customers for life.

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Authenticity at Scale: Using AI to Deliver Genuine Customer Experiences

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AI has surged from curious novelty to critical business driver faster than any other technology in the digital age. With AI capabilities evolving faster than most financial institutions (FIs) and marketing teams can train for, it’s easy to understand how leveraging AI tools and enterprise solutions effectively can become a frustrating experience for both leadership and marketing pros.

While every organization’s challenges are unique, one common thread is that most FIs lack a clearly defined strategy or framework for selecting, implementing, and using their AI solutions.

Here are three foundational elements to help marketing leaders accelerate AI-enabled customer engagement without losing control of authentic, on-brand customer experiences.

Focus on using AI to scale—not replace—your team

The AI revolution arrives with ironic timing for FIs: We’ve spent the last decade talking about how to bring back the human touch in a digital-first world. On the surface, it’s easy to think that AI will push us in the opposite direction—breeding more generic, cold, impersonal experiences.

But like other tech tools, the most immediate and significant value will come in using AI as a tool to scale your team’s capabilities. What does that look like in practice?

  • Automating or offloading the tedious and repetitive work your team does: Think about AI agents cold-calling for lead gen, doing time-consuming data analysis, or handling the orchestration of complicated, multi-touch, multi-channel, anything-but-linear customer journeys.
  • Unlocking deeper insights, faster: AI can dive into your customer data to find new kinds of intent signals in real time. Imagine identifying those key periods of transition or change in peoples’ lives—graduating, getting married, starting a family, changing careers, retiring—so your team can show up for customers at these critical moments.
  • Freeing up more time for human connections: At the simplest level, AI applied well will allow your team to do more with less—and that will give them more time to focus on where and how to provide that human touch and make those genuine one-to-one engagements. This is what we’ve been doing at Total Expert for more than a decade now through better analytics and smarter automation. AI just turbocharges everything.

Choose the right AI—and connect it to your core systems

Not even three years after ChatGPT opened this AI era, there are thousands of AI tools on the market—including hundreds of marketing-specific AI solutions. Don’t be fooled by the “they’re all the same under the hood” line—the packaging is critical to the usability and time-to-value with these tools, especially when it comes to delivering authentic experiences.

It’s really a classic Goldilocks problem: On one side of the spectrum, the big-name generalist AI platforms that claim to do everything produce generic experiences for your customers. They’re not built for the highly regulated, highly sensitive kinds of engagement and conversations that FIs have with their customers. Plus, it takes a lot of work—and time and money—to get them to work like you need them to.

On the other side of the spectrum are hyper-specialized AI apps built to do one very specific task right out of the box—but lacking the broader capabilities to connect with your core systems and orchestrate entire experiences. This kind of extremely focused functionality ends up creating maddening experiences for customers when they hit the limitations of the tools’ knowledge and capabilities. FIs need AI tools built with enterprise-grade, enterprise-wide capabilities—able to tie into your marketing system of record so they can see and orchestrate the full customer journey.

If you can solve that Goldilocks problem — finding an AI solution built for financial services and connecting it at the core of your CX — you can realize the full efficiencies and, more importantly, deliver a more genuine, helpful, brand-authentic experience.

Give your AI the inputs that set it up for success

Using GenAI to create content — copy, design, video, etc. — really can feel like magic. But the reality is that it’s inherently derivative. In other words, the outputs are only as good as the inputs — like the classic analytics adage: garbage in, garbage out.

If you want to maintain brand authenticity, create reliably compliant outputs, and deliver consistent experiences that feel seamless for your customers, you need to help the AI fully understands your brand, your engagement strategy, and your acute and big-picture objectives.

Best practices for prompt engineering is an article—or an entire book—in itself. But the point is, as incredible as AI is, it’s still a tool — and a tool requires a skilled, intentional user. Cultivating these skills also takes intention. Workers in any role can feel naturally hesitant to be open about their AI use and experimentation; they don’t want to risk looking lazy or replaceable. But to move forward effectively with AI, FIs need to build a culture that encourages that experimentation and sharing of new use cases and best practices.

AI as an engine for authenticity

There’s little doubt that AI will lead to a surge in impersonal, generic banking experiences. That’s not a condemnation of AI; it will be the result of FIs using generic AI tools and generic AI strategies.

That also means that genuine, personalized experiences will become even more differentiated in this incredibly competitive industry. The key is to focus on how to use AI to amplify what we’ve always strived to do in this industry: make real connections and build authentic relationships based on trust.

By focusing on these three principles — using AI to help your team focus on scaling human connections, choosing the right tool and integrating it deeply, and giving your AI the best possible inputs — you’re building a strategy that makes AI an engine for authenticity. The reward isn't just increased efficiency; it's the ability to deliver authentic, brand-consistent experiences at a scale never before possible.

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[Lykken on Lending podcast] Supercharging Mortgage Lending with AI

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The mortgage industry is in the midst of a historic transformation—and artificial intelligence is leading the way. Our Founder & CEO, Joe Welu, joined David Lykken for an episode of the Lykken on Lending podcast to discuss how Total Expert’s AI solutions will reshape the customer journey for lenders.

From incubating leads and mining databases to nurturing post-close relationships, Joe shares how voice AI is giving loan officers “superpowers” that help scale productivity, improve retention, and focus on delivering the high-value advice consumers need most. With compliance guardrails built in and multiple AI agents on the horizon, this episode offers an inside look at the future of mortgage lending and why early adopters of AI will hold a major competitive edge.

Joe also explains why the human element remains central to homeownership, and how AI is designed not to replace loan officers, but to free them up for more meaningful conversations that strengthen customer trust and drive long-term loyalty.

Catch the conversation to hear how AI is revolutionizing lending and why Joe believes those who embrace it will be tomorrow’s market leaders.

Supercharging Mortgage Lending with AI

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