Technology

Digital Transformation is Redefining Marketing in Financial Services

5 mins read
August 2, 2018
By
Total Expert

Marketing technology is taking center stage in the mortgage industry’s race to catch up to consumers’ expectations for doing business. Lenders that embrace digital transformation will be rewarded – and those that don’t adapt will continue to see their market share shrink.

Your marketing tech stack should remove friction and give your loan officers a better way of doing business. Technology should enhance what your loan officers are already doing – not bog them down.

To position your salespeople for success – and your company for growth – they need the right tools. The Total Expert Marketing Operating System(MOS) is built for the future of lending and made up of the tools and systems you need to execute on your marketing strategy at the right time and place.

Critical Components of Your Marketing Tech Stack

As Simon Sinek says, start with why. There are many considerations when assessing and building your marketing tech stack, but two critical “whys” that top the list are centralization and integrations.

Centralization

It is critical to centralize your marketing activities into one system. By centralizing the deployment of social, print and digital marketing, you have the ability to track and report on all marketing activities through all channels. In doing so, your teams will be able to go to market and execute marketing activities more quickly.

At a time when cultivating customers for life and gaining new customers is critical, having a single system of delivery for your brand and communications ensures that existing, new and future customers feel personally communicated to and connected with.  

Mitch Kider, Managing Partner at Weiner, Brodsky, Kider PC says the “very best practice” in regards to marketing compliance is that you centralize your compliance review of all marketing materials, including co-marketing, social media, web advertising, print media – all things marketing.

Integrations

Today’s technology landscape is optimized when you can assemble best-of-breed tools. Given the pace of innovation, that set of tools will evolve – as will the needs of your business. As you build your system, don’t inadvertently put handcuffs around what you can and can’t do, especially from an integrations standpoint.

A modern, open API will empower you to centralize your organization’s core systems in one place – creating efficiencies across the organization.

Power Your Digital Transformation with a Marketing Operating System

Technology has evolved. Lenders have a massive amount of data to manage and protect and consumers expect to be communicated with across all channels. The speed of change is rapid and the expectations are growing. Your organization needs to adjust and pivot on the fly. You need a marketing technology solution that will enhance your marketing efforts, not an antiquated solution that will slow you down.

An MOS is an ecosystem housing your marketing, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and the associated intelligent automation to make it all work together seamlessly.

An MOS enables you to control your organization’s marketing activities from a centralized environment and empowers you to execute on your marketing and sales strategy, while having full confidence that you’re staying compliant with complex regulations. The financial services industry is complex and heavily regulated, making it critical to have an MOS that will help you stay compliant and support you in case of an audit with on-demand reporting.

Data is a key piece of your marketing strategy. An open API allows you to connect and leverage data from your corporate applications, lead capture services, consumer lending applications, wealth management applications, your auxiliary CRMs and reporting updates – and pull data out as well.

As the MOS brings in data from a variety of sources, you’ll have the knowledge of how your customers and prospects are interacting with your marketing to help you make intelligent decisions about how to market to them in the future. An MOS’s intelligence-driven automation empowers smarter marketing across all channels, including email, print, social media, landing pages, digital and text messaging. In addition, an MOS allows for the integration of other best-of-breed technology solutions so you can use them in conjunction with your MOS instead of as separate and disjointed solutions.

Digital transformation isn’t optional. But many Marketing teams at financial services organizations are using a haphazardly assembled set of tools and systems to get the job done. As the pace of change continues to accelerate, this will become more unwieldy and frustrating.

Stop trying to take your marketing and sales efforts to the next level using antiquated tools. There is a better way.

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Navigating the HPPA Shift: Why It’s a Win for Lenders Who Put Customers First

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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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