Five Key Themes from Financial Brand Forum 2024

Meet the Partner: Tiff's Treats

Tiff’s Treats is a specialty dessert delivery company known for bringing warm, freshly baked cookies straight from the oven to your customers’ doors. Founded on the idea of creating moments of joy through simple, thoughtful gestures, they’ve built a reputation for high-quality treats and fast, reliable delivery. With a focus on celebration and connection, Tiff’s Treats helps turn every occasion into memorable experiences. Whether it’s a milestone moment or a spontaneous surprise, their deliveries are designed to delight.

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Whether it’s a first-time homebuyer collecting the keys to a dream, a homeowner refinancing to lighten their monthly expenses, or a high-equity homeowner leveraging a HELOC to access funds at a lower rate—closing day is special. And as their focus shifts to moving, decorating, and new plans for the future, too many lenders immediately shift their focus to the next customer, the next loan, and allow a perfect opportunity to build lasting loyalty to slip through their hands.

During the mortgage process, engagement is high. There are daily or weekly conversations, timely updates, and a strong sense of partnership. But once the ink is dry, that cadence often disappears. What was once a high-touch relationship quickly becomes no-touch at all.

But it doesn’t have to.

The post-close drop-off problem

No lender wants to lose touch with their customers. The challenges are often time, resources, and execution.

Loan officers are focused on the next deal. Marketing teams are stretched thin. And without a scalable system to maintain meaningful, timely outreach, post-close engagement becomes inconsistent at best and completely forgotten at worst. That can quickly make what once felt like a truly personal relationship feel like a cold, impersonal transaction.

That gap matters. Because when it comes to referrals and repeat business, success isn’t driven by who provided the lowest rate. It’s driven by the emotional connections, trust, and rapport built along the way.  

If you’re not staying present in your customers’ lives, you’re not just losing visibility—you’re losing relevance.

Why traditional outreach falls flat

Email campaigns, newsletters, and postcards all have their place but let’s be honest: most of them get lost in the noise of crowded inboxes and junk mail.

They’re easy to ignore, easy to delete, and easy to forget. That’s because they don’t stand out. They don’t have a presence. And they don’t make an impact. People don’t remember generic marketing; they remember experiences.

Enter Tiff’s Treats: turning a moment into a memory

That’s where Tiff’s Treats comes in. They help lenders transform closing day and mortgage milestones into memorable experiences by delivering warm, freshly baked cookies straight to your customers’ doors.

Think about the moments that matter most in a homeowner’s journey:

• Closing on a new home  

• Celebrating a home anniversary  

• Completing a refinance  

• Cashing out

• Leveraging a HELOC

• Even SELLING their home

What might be another day at the office for you is a deeply emotional and personal experience for them. So, when you show up in those moments with something tangible—something thoughtful—you create a connection that goes far beyond a templated text or email.  

It creates surprise. It creates delight. And most importantly, it creates a memory your customer will remember—and a story for them to share.

From good intentions to consistent execution

Here’s the reality: most lenders already know they should be doing this. They just struggle with consistency as they juggle new leads and active deals. If the choice is between picking up the phone to engage a motivated borrower and coordinating a gift to a past customer, 99 times out of 100 a loan officer will choose the phone call. That’s why automated gifting is so powerful.

Instead of relying on a manual process that pulls you away from opportunities to close deals, lenders can ensure that key milestones are acknowledged, and past relationships don’t fade away. That consistency keeps you connected in a way that feels natural, not forced.

And over time, those small, thoughtful touches compound into something much bigger:

• Stronger customer loyalty  

• More referral conversations  

• Higher lifetime value  

It’s not about one big gesture. It’s about showing up—consistently—in the moments that matter.

Seamless access through the expert partner network

What makes this even more powerful for Total Expert customers is how easy it is to execute.

Through the Expert Partner Network, lenders can access Tiff’s Treats’ services directly within the Total Expert ecosystem—making it simple to incorporate experiential gifting into their existing customer Journeys. Instead of adding another tool or process, gifting becomes part of the workflow:

• Trigger deliveries at key lifecycle moments  

• Align outreach with customer data and milestones  

• Scale personalized experiences across teams and branches  

Turn small moments into long-term growth

Winning in today’s market isn’t just about acquiring new customers, it’s about keeping the ones you have. The lenders who stand out are the ones who understand that retention is built on relationships. When you consistently demonstrate that you have their needs in mind, something powerful happens:

Customers remember you, trust you, refer you, and come back to you the next time they have a mortgage need. That’s how you turn a single closed loan into a customer for life.

Meet the Partner: CredEvolv

CredEvolv connects low-credit/high-debt consumers, mortgage lenders, and HUD-certified nonprofit credit counselors in a unified ecosystem. 1 in 3 Americans lack the credit score to qualify for a mortgage. CredEvolv works to change that by providing a structured path to help credit-challenged borrowers improve their scores—and debt load—and become loan-ready in as little as three months. For mortgage lenders specifically, CredEvolv closes a common gap in the lending process and turns declined applicants into future qualified borrowers rather than lost opportunities.

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For mortgage lenders, credit challenges represent one of the most persistent and overlooked barriers to growth.

Every year, roughly 1.4 million mortgage applications are declined because of credit or debt-related issues, representing more than $300 billion in unrealized lending opportunities. But many of these borrowers are closer to qualifying for a loan than lenders realize. With the right guidance, many can improve their credit profile, reduce debt pressure, and return to the market application ready.  

That reality creates a major challenge for lenders.

Too often, once a borrower falls outside current underwriting requirements, the relationship hits a dead end. The loan officer may know the borrower could qualify in the future, but there is rarely a structured, scalable way to stay engaged, provide the right education, and track progress without creating workflow friction. As a result, these borrowers slip out of sight and often into the hands of competitors or third-party credit repair services.

This is exactly the kind of untapped opportunity that Total Expert and CredEvolv help lenders act on.

Turning yesterday’s denial into tomorrow’s approval

CredEvolv is a fintech platform that connects credit- or debt-challenged consumers with HUD-certified nonprofit credit counselors to help them improve their credit scores and become loan-ready, while keeping them engaged with lenders. The value here isn't just the counseling itself. It’s the ability to keep those borrowers connected to the lender’s relationship and communication strategy instead of pushing them out of the pipeline entirely.  

Historically, lenders have had limited options for supporting borrowers who are close to qualifying but need time and guidance. Many solutions in the market operate outside the lender’s main workflow, creating friction for teams and confusion for consumers. That can break continuity with the loan officer, limit visibility into borrower progress, and make follow-up inconsistent. CredEvolv was built to solve that problem by helping transform a declined or delayed loan into a managed pipeline opportunity.  

Because CredEvolv integrates directly into Total Expert, those opportunities become easier to operationalize at scale.

Bringing credit improvement into the main workflow

The real power of the CredEvolv and Total Expert partnership is that it helps lenders move credit-improvement communications and nurturing into the same system where they already manage customer engagement.

Instead of treating credit-challenged borrowers as exceptions that sit outside normal sales and marketing motions, lenders can identify those borrowers, connect them to trusted nonprofit counseling, and continue relevant communication inside their existing workflow. That means fewer handoff gaps, better visibility, and a more consistent borrower experience.  

For lenders, this is important at three critical moments:

• Before an application begins, when early conversations suggest credit or debt may become an obstacle.

• After a soft credit pull, when signs of qualification challenges become more visible.

• After a HMDA-recorded decline, when many borrowers may still be closer to qualifying than they appear.  

In each of these moments, the opportunity is the same: keep the borrower engaged, educated, and moving forward with a clear plan.

That aligns directly with Total Expert’s broader approach to customer engagement—using intelligence and workflow orchestration to help lenders show up in the moments that matter and prevent opportunities from slipping through the cracks. Total Expert Customer Intelligence includes Credit Improvement Alerts that identify when a borrower who initially didn’t qualify now meets your organization’s required credit criteria. From January-June 2025, credit improvement was one of the most monitored signals helping lenders uncover new application and funded-loan opportunities through Total Expert.

Why early engagement matters

When lenders identify warning signs early, the conversation with the borrower changes.

Instead of ending with “you’re not approved,” it can become: “here’s what needs to happen to get you there.”  

Some of the most common indicators include high credit utilization, recent late payments, thin or unstable credit history, rising debt-to-income pressure, and scores near underwriting cutoffs. These are not always signs that a borrower is out of reach. More often, they are signals that the borrower needs education, accountability, and a structured path forward.  

That is where CredEvolv plays a critical role. Through its network of nonprofit counseling partners, borrowers receive realistic guidance tailored to their situation.  

• Consumers who work with CredEvolv’s nonprofit counseling agencies reach their goals in an average of three to five months, often improving their credit scores by 40 to 100+ points while reducing utilization and resolving delinquent accounts that were preventing approval.  

• Lenders that use CredEvolv’s recommended best practices also report seeing pull-through rates up to 50% on borrowers who enroll with a credit counselor.  

A better experience for borrowers and a better process for lenders

For borrowers, the experience is more supportive and less transactional. They’re not left to figure things out alone. They're shown a path forward, supported with education from a trusted source, and given a reason to stay connected to the lender that first engaged them.

For lenders, the advantage is operational. Rather than relying on manual follow-up, disconnected vendors, or inconsistent loan officer outreach, they can keep Credit Improvement Journeys closer to the core relationship strategy. That helps teams maintain visibility, reduce lost opportunities, and make sure borrowers working toward qualification don’t get left behind.  

This is especially valuable in an environment where lenders are under pressure to do more with the opportunities already in their database. Recovering even a fraction of borrowers who would otherwise be lost can create meaningful pipeline lift without relying solely on new lead acquisition.

From dead end to pipeline strategy

Credit-challenged borrowers should never be written off. For many lenders, they represent one of the most overlooked business growth opportunities.

Together, CredEvolv and Total Expert help lenders turn what used to be a dead end into a more structured recovery strategy: identify credit-challenged borrowers earlier, connect them with trusted counseling resources, keep communication active inside the lender’s main workflow, and re-engage them when they’re ready to move forward.  

That’s the difference between simply declining a borrower and building a process to win them back. And in a market where every opportunity matters, that difference can be significant. A small change in your organization’s mindset and workflow could be the life-changing support that a borrower needs, and that they won’t forget.

*This article was originally posted on HousingWire.com*

Artificial intelligence is rapidly moving beyond experimentation and into real business impact across the mortgage industry. In this executive conversation, Total Expert CEO and Founder Joe Welu sat down with Allison LaForgia to explore how lenders can turn AI from a buzzword into a competitive advantage.

Welu explains why understanding borrower intent is becoming one of the most powerful competitive advantages in lending. From millions of AI-powered conversations to the growing importance of trust and compliance, the discussion explores how lenders can use AI to create smarter, more personalized customer journeys.

“There’s really two types of companies,” Welu said. Some are “moving from experimentation and pilots into full scale. Let’s transform the business. Let’s build the future.”

Others, he said, are still “treading lightly and cautiously” as they try to determine “what’s the right formula for their organization to really adopt it.”

What is clear to Welu is that the stakes are rising fast. “There’s an extreme bifurcation happening in really every business right now,” he said. “There’s not going to be this middle anymore. There’s going to be very clear winners, the people that are getting ahead of it.”

In his view, lenders that make AI a strategic priority are already “getting a lot of ROI and impact,” while others are “certainly falling behind.”

Welu said Total Expert’s approach is different because it starts with intelligence and context, not just automation. “AI agents are very, very powerful,” he said, because “it actually can do the task, it can call the customer, it can send the note, complete something that a human would have had to complete.”

But that power only works if the underlying context is right. “You’re only going to get the outcomes that you want if you have the right insight, intelligence and, more importantly, context that is feeding those AI agents,” he said. “Combining these systems of intelligence directly with a system of action is really how you transform the outcomes you want in your business.”

That is where Customer IQ comes in. Welu described it as “this intelligence layer that has all this context,” helping lenders understand “what’s important now” for each borrower.

Intent, he said, is rarely one signal alone. Rather, it is “a series of things that are put together” like equity, demographics and life events like getting married, having children, or downsizing.

The goal is to understand “what is this customer really caring about at this moment” and then meet them there “with the voice, the empathy, the education.”

On the engagement side, Welu said Total Expert’s AI Sales Assistant is already providing scale and insight into how borrowers want to interact. “We’re on pace this year to do over 130 million voice AI agents,” he said.

Those conversations, he added, show that AI can often improve the front end of the experience. “They actually, as it turns out, maybe not shocking, listen better than our average sales people,” he said. “They have perfect memory, so they always remember the last conversation.”

When rate opportunities open, it creates “infinite ability” to reach borrowers quickly, while still handing off qualified consumers to human advisors at the right time.

For Welu, the future is not AI replacing people, but AI and humans working together throughout the borrower lifecycle. “The consumers really have just overwhelmingly voiced positive” feedback, he said, while loan officers gain more time to focus on advice instead of repetitive outreach. “

AI plus humans are going to really redefine what a perfect customer journey is,” Welu said. “I think it’s just going to raise the bar.”