- 7 hours ago
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 sits 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.
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.
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00:06From Las Vegas, Nevada, I'm Allison LaForgia, and I am sitting with Total Expert CEO and
00:12founder Joe Weilu. Joe, thank you for joining me today.
00:15Hey, thanks, Allison. Great to be in Vegas.
00:16I am glad to have you here, and I'm excited to dig into AI with you. It is moving past
00:24experimentation into real business impact. But from your perspective, Joe, where does the
00:31mortgage industry stand today as far as adoption is actually concerned?
00:36Great question. What I would tell you is if you look at over the last year,
00:40there's really two types of companies. There's the companies that I would say are moving from
00:47experimentation and pilots into full scale. Let's transform the business. Let's build the future.
00:55And they're really committed. And then there are the companies that I would say are still
01:01treading lightly and cautiously and are maybe figuring out, buy, build, partner, what's the right
01:08formula for their organization to really adopt it. What I see broadly, though, is there's an extreme
01:16bifurcation happening in really every business right now. The power of AI and what is possible.
01:23It's hard to overstate the impact that it's going to have on every industry. And we just see that
01:31there's not going to be this middle anymore. There's going to be very clear winners, the people
01:36that are getting ahead of it. And so the adoption that we see on the people that have made it
01:40strategically
01:41and mandated these priorities are really winning and getting a lot of ROI and impact. And they're
01:46moving much more quickly. And then there's the other cohort of companies that are certainly falling
01:50behind, in my opinion. Now, Total Expert has, I feel, a very unique approach to AI. And in conversations
01:57with you about this, you've mentioned that lenders need intelligence that fuels action. What makes
02:04deeper customer insight such an important advantage? Well, if you think about it in its basic form,
02:11AI and AI agents specifically, and the AI agent is so interesting for business, because it actually
02:20can do the task. It can call the customer, it can send the note, complete something that a human would
02:27have had to complete, or maybe didn't want to complete. So these AI agents are very, very powerful.
02:33The challenge with that power is that you're only going to get the outcomes that you want
02:41if you have the right insight, intelligence, and more importantly, context that is feeding those AI
02:48agents. And so for us, our approach has been always, we believe that combining these systems of
02:56intelligence directly with a system of action is really how you transform the outcomes you want in your
03:02business. And the AI is just a compounding effect on top of that, because AI gives you just this
03:09limitless ability, but it's only going to deliver those outcomes if you have the rich context around
03:19what's important to my customer, what have we talked about previously, where are they at in their financial
03:24journey, and the AI can understand that. And then the actions are really changed to meet those specific
03:33personal needs of that consumer. If you compare that to a lot of what we talked a little bit before
03:40on
03:40camera, the AI washing that's sort of happening everywhere, you have hundreds and thousands of
03:46companies that have AI products and solutions here, they are broadly spraying those things out there.
03:54And without the business enterprise context you need, it becomes more of a liability than it does
04:00an asset. And they become sort of weapons of mass destruction. If you don't have the right context
04:04and the right intelligence layer, powering the AI agents.
04:08Now you've mentioned that a large focus of customer IQ is understanding borrower intent.
04:15And you just spoke about that a little bit in your previous answer. How are you measuring intent?
04:21And how do better signals and timing change the way that LOs engage with customers?
04:28So it's a great question on intent. And I think about, if you think about the mission for most of
04:33the
04:33lenders that we know, banks, lenders, credit unions, they want to have a customer for life, right?
04:39And they want to serve every financial need that they have along that life journey.
04:45And as a lender, a bank, you want to be able to show up in the exact moments that really
04:51matter
04:51to your customer. And so the only way to do that is ultimately really look at
04:58an aggregation of all of the insights that you have. And within that intelligence,
05:02when I say intelligence, it's if you think about a customer record or a lead,
05:07customer IQ, which is our platform that opens up all this potential possibility to AI,
05:16is really bringing all of that intelligence together, getting insights from that,
05:22and then drawing context from all of that that says, what's important now?
05:27And so a lot of times intent, as an example, is going to be a series of things that are
05:33put together,
05:34that data is put together around a profile. And if you have a certain amount of equity,
05:39as an example, you're a certain demographic, there's a life event, maybe you're getting married,
05:45you're having children, or you're downsizing, whatever it is in your life. And so it's stacking all
05:49of those signals, and then drawing conclusions. And you can use AI, not the AI agents we talk a lot
05:56about in the voice AI solution that we brought to market, but ultimately, other applications for
06:02machine learning and AI, you can really get in smart at leveraging all of that insight to then say,
06:09what is this customer really caring about at this moment? And then how can we show up for them
06:16in that precise moment that really matters to them, with the voice, the empathy, the education on,
06:23hey, here's how to create wealth with homeownership, or whatever it is?
06:28Meeting them where, meeting the borrower where they're at is absolutely table stakes. It is
06:34increasingly the conversation that we are having as an industry to better serve the borrower. So I
06:42have to ask you in about outcomes of some of the AI implementation that you've seen,
06:47and what insights you've gained about how consumers want to interact with lenders today?
06:54Yeah. So it's a really fascinating topic, and so many key learnings. We're on pace this year
07:04to do over 130 million voice AI agents. We have an AI sales assistant. That AI sales assistant is on
07:13pace to do over 130 million calls this year. And so it gives you a unique perspective as to
07:20what consumers want from their lender. And here's what we see. We have witnessed the ability for
07:28AI agents to come in and have really high quality conversations, listen. They actually, as it turns
07:36out, maybe not shocking, listen better than our average salespeople. They have perfect memory. So they
07:44always remember the last conversation. And so you can really do a lot of that upfront sort of Q&A
07:51and
07:52really qualifying if that person is at the moment where they need advice. So the outcomes that we're
07:58getting is really just this limitless scalability. If you think about how we had rates drop here a very
08:04short time ago, and it went back up a bit. But when rates drop like that, there's large sections of
08:09consumers
08:10that will financially benefit from doing a refinance, right? And so if you think about the
08:18limitations of a normal organization, I have a team full of call centers or retail loan officers,
08:24and I'm now going to rely on all those human beings to make as many phone calls, as many text
08:29messages
08:30as humanly possible in two or three or four days while that window is open for rates. And so if
08:37you look
08:37at the outcomes we're getting today with AI, the market moves, I have infinite ability, I can call
08:44100,000 people in a day, two days, three days, if I have a portfolio that's that large. And then
08:51I can
08:51just go through the exact consumers that really need the help or want the help. And then I can put
08:58them
08:58right over to the human. So it's AI and the human coming together perfectly. And the consumer, they don't
09:04get a lot of their time wasted, they have a better quality front end experience, because if they're
09:10not ready, the AI is super respectful, they'll have the patience to where in a really fast paced
09:16environment where rates are moving. If you ever have been on the floor of a call center, it's very
09:21transactional. And I'm like, Oh my gosh, it's a race, I've got to get through, I've got a list of
09:261000
09:26people I've got to get to. And then I don't really have a lot of time to talk to you
09:31and listen to
09:32maybe the fact that you're thinking of doing something in nine months when your kids graduate.
09:37The AI agents can do that. They can have that empathy, they can have that conversation without
09:41feeling really transactional, without feeling transactional. And the consumers really
09:48have just overwhelmingly voiced positive from how they're feeling about that experience.
09:55And then we're elevating if you think of the outcome. So not only is it the consumer getting
10:00the help and advice they need, but the outcome is I'm putting my highly, hopefully highly qualified,
10:07highly trained advisor, loan officer in that precise scenario where they want to be,
10:13which is I'm going to give advice to that consumer in the moment they need it. And it helps them
10:19do that
10:19and do that more than if you think about how they would spend their day historically,
10:24it may be doing a bunch of those things that are not just giving high quality advice to consumers.
10:30And so you're, they end up getting a very much higher level of job satisfaction, better outcome
10:35for them. And of course, better outcome for the consumer. Now, this has to be one of those technology
10:40pieces where once people see it, adoption is just really, really quick. But while we look at quick
10:47or high levels of adoption for AI specifically, we have to talk about compliance and trust because
10:52they are critical when looking at AI technologies. How are you balancing innovation and compliance?
10:59Yeah. So first of all, for us, compliance is not optional. If you follow the history of,
11:07if you follow the history of Total Expert to our beginning, a very dear friend of mine,
11:11Mitch Kider has been one of our compliance attorneys, really our lead advisor on a lot of the compliance
11:16things since the very beginning of our company. And everything we've ever built and designed to
11:23help innovate with our customers has been compliance is built in day one. And we're thinking about that
11:30framework, that infrastructure that has to happen. Because if you don't do those things,
11:35maybe it will feel good to the lender that buys the brand new shiny AI tool right off the shelf
11:42that,
11:43you know, the 23 year olds out of Silicon Valley, they built it last weekend and it's cool
11:47and it's moving fast. The problem is rarely have they went deep enough to think through
11:57TCPA and all of the data governance things that are really necessary to have enterprise grade
12:05technologies. Just because it's AI doesn't mean you bypass the governance and the compliance. And so
12:12for us, it's always been build it in foundationally. Everything that we build and innovate should
12:17have that framework. And then our customers, the reason so many of the large organizations trust
12:24Total Expert as a partner is because of how seriously we take that compliance component
12:30when we're innovating. So Joe, as we end today's conversation, looking ahead, if you look into your
12:36crystal ball, where do you see AI playing a role in the future of the customer journey? It is hard
12:45to
12:48overstate the impact that AI is going to make. And if you think about, first of all, just the world
12:54in
12:54general, but if you limit that to the customer journey as a lender, a bank, and you think about
13:00the ability to unlock just this potential that you never had before, right before this meeting,
13:07was in our meeting room with the head of one of the largest banks in the country,
13:11in how they are thinking about the fact that, hey, we haven't been able to really deeply personally
13:18engage in a highly empathetic human-like way with every customer at scale ever before.
13:25We've had to email them. We've had to maybe text them, maybe send some mailings. That's been the
13:32channels. And maybe if we're lucky, we have our people in a branch or our loan officers,
13:38we'll call and check in every six months with those consumers to see if their financial needs
13:44are changed. And so now how it transforms the customer journey, if you think about what we have
13:49done and are doing alongside our amazing customers, we've brought customer IQ, which is this intelligence
13:56layer that has all this context, connecting that to the AI. And at every moment in the customer journey,
14:02you have the ability to unlock those AI-powered capabilities, whether it be an AI voice assistant,
14:09AI text messaging, AI chat, personalization in emails that can be done with AI. So it really
14:17impacts every part of the customer journey. And I think if you do it right, it's just an incredible
14:22transformation that's going to happen in our space. So you're enabling the lender and organizations to
14:28meet the borrower where they're at throughout the whole journey. Yeah, their whole life, really,
14:33right? If you think about a customer for life and the essence of that, from the first moment I meet
14:39that consumer, that family, that household, I want to go along that journey with them, be able to offer
14:45them financial products and services that meet their goal, help them meet and accomplish their goals
14:51at all those moments along the way. Well, to do that, I've got to really understand what's going on in
14:58their world, which is where customer IQ comes in. And I've got to take all that knowledge. I got to
15:04democratize it inside my organization so that my people have access to it. But then all the AI
15:09capability that I build in my organization should be able to tap into that. And when you can do that,
15:16I believe you really get the best of both things, meaning AI plus humans are going to really redefine what
15:24perfect customer journey is. And I think it's just going to raise the bar. Well, Joe, thank you for
15:30sitting down with me today. I feel like total expert has already come out with several iterations of
15:35this. It's great to hear how customer IQ is doing. And I can't wait to see what's next. Thank you.
15:39We're
15:39very grateful for the opportunity and incredibly excited every day to dig in and work alongside our
15:44customers. And more to come soon.
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