Technology

Getting the Most Out of Your Technology Stack – Fast

5 mins read
July 16, 2018
By
Total Expert

Lenders, banks and financial services organizations seem to be in a perpetual state of either implementing ortrying to get the most out of their technology solutions. Making sure you fully realize the value of your technology – quickly – is critical to growing sales and powering your organization.  

How can you get the most of out of your technology stack – in record time?

Start With “Why”

Simon Sinek has it right: Start with why.  

Today, it is increasingly difficult for loan officers to stay front and center with their clients. According to digital marketing experts cited in Forbes, the average consumer is exposed to 10,000 marketing messages per day. Cutting through the noise is hard. Building a meaningful relationship with your customers to the point where they come back to you years later for their next home purchase is even harder.

Create Your Project Team

From the very start of the project, ensure you have the right stakeholders involved. Oftentimes, projects get too far down the line before realizing that critical voices are missing from the conversation, inevitably delaying the project, creating frustration or re-work and costing money. When it comes to marketing and sales technology, there are the usual suspects, including Sales, Marketing, Compliance and Technology, but think outside these boxes too.  

It’s also critical to identify project champions or super users who can promote the initiative within your organization to their peers. It’s much more effective to implement technology from the trenches using champions within the organization, instead of forcing adoption from the top down.

Set Your Sights on an MVP (Minimum Viable Product)

Start small and aim to deliver an MVP, and then adjust, tweak and reiterate from there.  

Everyone wants the coolest capabilities and functionalities right out of the gate, but it’s important to have a plan in place for how you’ll get there – and make sure everyone is aligned to this roadmap. And, understand that some of these really cool feature functionalities likely won’t be in version one.  

As you roll out the technology solution to your organization, focus on attaining early and ongoing adoption, which will only grow as new capabilities are made available.

Leverage Your Implementation Team

Every technology solution you implement will have some sort of implementation resource to help you through your onboarding. Make full use of this person or team to understand how to best implement their technology, as well as any resources or training available to you to educate your team and encourage adoption.  

While you aren’t in the business of implementing technology solutions, your technology partners are, particularly their technology solution. Leverage their knowledge and best practices of how you can make the most of their technology solution at all levels of your organization. This will help you avoid the most common pitfalls, overcome specific challenges and get you on the fastest path to success.

Don’t Inadvertently Handcuff Your Future Integration Capabilities

With the pace of innovation, we can’t predict what the best-of-breed tools will be in six months or three years. Look for partners with an open API so as not to inadvertently put handcuffs around what you can and can’t do in the future with your technology stack.

Don’t Forget Internal Communications…

Once you’ve defined your why, make sure everyone – from the C-Suite to your end users – buys into your why. It’s critical everyone in the organization understands the financial why, the cultural why and the brand why – and what’s in it for them, in particular. Be sure to think about and define the value proposition for each affected group of people and clearly communicate this in order to get buy-in and adoption.

Review Your Results

Review your project results on an ongoing basis through the lens of your why. Is the data saying you are accomplishing the goal you set out to meet, or not? Continue to revisit your goals and ROI over the life of your engagement with this technology partner.  

Just like “digital transformation,” technology implementation is not one and done. Be sure to continually revisit your why to ensure your technology stack is meeting your ever-evolving needs as an organization.

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AI is no longer a future state—it’s already here, embedded in everything from ride-sharing apps and food service to factories and farms. In the world of financial services, though, this ubiquity comes with pressure to integrate AI fast, appear innovative, and keep up with competitors—all while being mindful of evolving federal and state compliance requirements. Moving fast without a plan or awareness of up and downstream implications often leads to AI-enabled solutions that either underdeliver or don’t deliver at all.

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Where enterprise AI goes wrong

Too many financial services leaders have experienced what I call “AI failure to launch (and scale).” They’ve rushed to try unintegrated AI-enable offerings and bolt on AI tools—often generalist chatbots, white-labeled versions of generative tools, and/or hooking up to MCP servers—without a clear sense of how these tools will solve their business problems or add potential risk. The result? The occasional value-add result. However, what we see more is poor user adoption, wasted spend, and limited impact.

This is the same trap we saw with “digital transformation” a decade ago, or the original horizontal SaaS applications that evolved or were replaced by vertical-specific solutions. AI-enabled solutions offer tremendous, generational promise but they risk becoming vanity-first, value-later tools. We are focused on the former.

AI that thinks and adapts: Welcome to agentic AI

Let’s make one thing clear: not all AI is created equal.  

Chatbots have been commonplace in financial services for a decade now, but remain rigid, rule-based tools that handle repetitive tasks.  I’ve worked with “AI” services for more than 15 years and each had their own place and potential when used properly. Herein lies the opportunity. Modern lenders that are focused on retaining and growing their customers in an ultra-competitive market need something more dynamic. Enter AI agents that can understand context, adapt on the fly, and speak in a human-like way. These agents are coachable, brand-aware, and learn from every interaction. They don’t follow scripts—they think in real time. And when built correctly, they become a seamless part of your customer experience.

This is the evolution from AI as a support function to AI as a trusted team member.

Total Expert recently launched an AI Sales Assistant that puts this principle into action. It functions as a scalable, intelligent teammate—able to engage leads, deliver personalized conversations, and identify high-potential opportunities—all while staying aligned with your brand voice and compliance requirements. It’s not a chatbot bolted onto a CRM—it’s a fully integrated AI-enabled solution, utilizing data, embedding within workflow orchestration, and playing nice with application logic because it has the necessary context to work within your lending ecosystem.

The real “why” behind AI adoption

Before choosing any AI solution, or any technology solution, financial services firms must ask themselves: What business problem are we solving?

For example, when mortgage rates dropped for a few weeks in September 2024, our customer intelligence capabilities identified nearly $2 billion in immediate refinance opportunities. But no team of loan officers could scale quickly enough to reach every qualified lead. That’s where AI tools prove invaluable—automating first-touch outreach at scale, surfacing the best opportunities, and empowering human teams to scale up execution to drive retention and growth.

Why embedded beats bolted-on

The types of AI-enabled solutions we are talking about can’t function effectively in isolation. Without access to timely and accurate customer data, and invoked within a specific workflow process, it can’t personalize interactions, anticipate needs, or drive conversions at the right time.

Picture an AI assistant offering a refinance to a customer, only to stall when asked for more details. If it doesn’t know the customer’s current rate or financial profile, the experience feels hollow. That’s not just ineffective—it damages trust.

By contrast, when AI-enabled solutions are embedded within a unified customer experience platform like Total Expert, it draws on a 360-degree view of the customer. It knows the data, understands the history, and delivers contextually rich conversations that convert.

This is why we’re designing our AI capabilities with a focus on the unique needs of financial services organizations. The same purpose-built approach has earned the Total Expert platform its unmatched reputation for usability and time to value.

Generalist AI offerings can be a gamble that increase costs—and time to value

Implementing AI that’s not purpose-built for financial services introduces two major risks:

1. Usability failure: Your team must spend months customizing and configuring a generalist AI tool to make it work for your specific needs—if it will ever work at all. For example, imagine you’re a loan officer and one of your referral partners introduces you to a borrower. Now, you have to choose the best way to approach the first conversation with this borrower. There are countless permutations of questions and answers which all require deep personalization, compliance awareness, and consistent representation of the sales processes and brand tone of the lender. Generalist AIs will quickly reach their limitations in these complex use cases.

An industry-focused AI offering will be trained on this specific use case and provided with the context needed to hold a dynamic conversation with the borrower. This type of AI learns and adapts with each interaction, performing the most time-consuming tasks so you don’t have to.    

2. Compliance risk: Without built-in industry guardrails, you’re gambling with regulatory violations and brand safety.  As we know, the compliance landscape for financial services is broad and evolving at the federal and state level.  Look for AI offerings that are regulatory aware and enable you to configure them based on your organization’s risk tolerance and interpretations.

Lenders don’t need more tools—they need the right tools—ones that work out of the box, understand industry nuances, and deliver immediate, compliant value.

Ask these questions before you commit to an AI offering  

To maximize the probability of success, here’s a quick checklist for vetting solutions:

  • Can it solve a real, high-value business problem, and how? Review specific examples and ask to speak with other organizations that have implemented the tool.
  • Does it function as a true AI agent, not a static bot?
  • Can it be deeply integrated into your core system(s), workflow orchestration, and data?
  • Does it include financial industry compliance and brand guardrails?
  • Can it scale without sacrificing quality or regulatory integrity?

Building the future with purpose-built AI

Total Expert has always designed technology with financial services in mind, and our approach to utilizing AI is no different. We’re not chasing hype. We’re solving problems.

Our focus on AI isn’t simply building standalone features—it’s about embedded, intelligent, and deeply integrated AI solutions. It’s helping lenders scale smarter, engage more meaningfully, and turn data into action. Our AI Sales Assistant is just the beginning—an example of how purpose-built, AI-enabled solutions can solve real problems and deliver tangible value. We are already testing and exploring other AI-enabled solutions and I could not be more excited about the current and potential value our clients and our market will achieve.

Because when AI works, it’s not just impressive—it’s indispensable.

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