Total Expert will use its new $20 million venture capital investment — led by Emergence Capital — to build out its Marketing Operating System, designed for the future of financial services.
The fintech software company, specifically focused on mortgage lenders and bankers, already has a 10% foothold in the industry, specializing in customer relationship management and revenue growth. Technology built for one particular industry might seem too narrow a purview, but that intent focus helps in these situations.
"For customers today, personalization is key. Being able to personalize and automate the experiences the customer has throughout their entire lifecycle, from lead to close to post-close to customer-for-life, is extremely critical for these lenders," Joe Welu founder and CEO at Total Expert, said in an interview with NMN.
"If you talk to lenders right now, they're very much focused on becoming more profitable and increasing productivity. One of the big opportunities is improving that customer experience and facilitating that customer-for-life," Welu continued. "We're moving from an environment where people don't want to be sold a five-year ARM, they want to know how they can accomplish their dreams and buy their first home."
Total Expert will put its new investment toward where the industry is going in the next 18-24 months. The technology within the industry evolves at such an accelerated pace, that big banks and lenders have trouble addressing a vertically focused software problem with horizontal answers.
"We're in no means coming out and saying, 'Hey, we're gonna compete and replace SalesForce.' Not the case. If it's a big bank, we'll integrate with them. You can add our Marketing Operating System in and we'll allow them flexibility on communicating to their customers, providing collateral, third-party data integrations, campaigns and automation around those customer-for-life types," said Welu. "The problems with big corporate CRMs are the workflows, visibility and reporting in the industry-specific data they need access to. None of that is able to be integrated because it's not set up for the industry."
The vertical "silos" are where technology growth, and with it, profit are headed, so the round of venture capital backing makes sense.
"We only do one thing and we do it really, really well. We invest in enterprise cloud companies," Joe Floyd, partner at Emergence Capital, said in an interview with NMN. "This investment falls squarely in a core thesis of ours: The idea is that a company that focuses deeply on one specific industry will outperform horizontal players that are trying to fill every industry."
