Smaller Lenders, Bigger Impact: Using Data to Deepen Personal Relationships

Total Expert’s Director of Product Integrations and Innovation, Mike Russell, recently joined Dark Matter Technologies’ Product Evangelist, Craig Rebmann, for an episode of Spotlight Backstage. Their conversation went behind the scenes of the mortgage ecosystem to show how lenders can drive real results by connecting the right people, processes, and technology to create a network of partners and integrations that streamline operations and create better borrower experiences.

From insights on how lenders are optimizing the technology they already use and adopting best practices to finding new ways to improve efficiency without sacrificing service, the key theme was clear: success comes from building a connected ecosystem where your tools talk to each other and your teams have the right support. If you want to see what’s possible when technology and partnerships align, this is the perfect place to start.

Catch the full conversation on Dark Matter Technologies' website >

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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.

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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