The Next Evolution of Total Expert “2.0” with Dan Catinella of Total Expert

[David] Folks, I’m excited about today’s podcast because we’re gonna be talking about some tools that you can use that can make a huge difference in your origination life in 2026. Joining me today is my good friend Dan Catinella. It’s good to have him here with Total Expert. Dan, good to have you back, friend.

[Dan] Thank you, David. Always a pleasure jumping on with you, my friend.

[David] Always a pleasure to have you.

[Dan] And you look even better today in that. Beautiful.

[David] I know. I got a total expert.

[Dan] Total Expert shirt.

[Dan] Yeah. I love this one. It’s one. I’ve wore this in so many places. You guys got some great merch. So people, if you’re, and if you go to any of your conferences, you can get the merch there, those stocky hats you handled out, handed out in at the Mile High City.

[Dan] Hey, everybody likes the swag, man.

[David] Yeah, the swag is good stuff. You guys really got quality stuff. I’m gonna, in fact, I’m going to Belize, I’m gonna be wearing from a couple years ago when we were in San Diego, there was a hoodie pull over that I’m wearing that in Belize. It was perfect beach wear, so wearing that one. We’ll be talking about you. But anyway, it’s good to have you with us friend. I really wanna talk about some things. When you and I are talking the other day, you were talking about a recent study that really reveals how much follow up is necessary. I wanna get into that, but I wanna talk a little bit about the evolution of CRM at Total Expert, how is the fundamental differential, that’s differentiation that’s been happening from traditional lenders and loan officers that have been using it for years? There’s been a transition, Dan.

[Dan] Yeah I think the easiest way that I frame it is if you’re still thinking of your CRM as this static rolodex of contacts you are totally missing the boat and you’re living in like the stone age. Everything now, we actually believe Total Expert has evolved to be a customer operating system. And that means really a living, breathing, fundamentally data enriched contacts that if I bring up David in my database, I don’t expect to just see David when, in his profile when I transacted with you three years ago. I expect these days with data intelligence to understand, Hey, what’s David’s credit profile look like today? What’s the tappable equity he has in home? What’s the interest rate I could potentially offer him on a rate and term refinance? Did he have just, recent significant life events and changes in his life? Really powering your ability to understand who to contact, when to contact, what the next potential opportunity is, so that you can leverage the automation to really engage every single consumer at a hyper-personalized and compliant way.

[David] There’s a lot in that when you’re talking about actual data, intelligent data and that’s what really we’re gonna be getting into. In this interview, ’cause you guys provide so much of that, you actually have developed the tools at Total Expert to be able to do just that. How is that version actually translating into today? on a day-to-day value for both lenders and individual loan officers on the front lines.

[Dan] Yeah, so our data product that’s natively integrated and threaded throughout our entire, customer operating system. We call customer IQ. And it’s really the brains and the context layer that can constantly, on a daily basis, think of it as refreshes your database and enriches every single consumer in your database so that you understand where they are today, not just from that previous transaction, that then powers the rest of our automation and orchestration engine. And now coupled with some of our agentic AI capabilities, we can even do human-like outreach to those consumers on behalf of the originators. So, think of about, outreaching to every single consumer in your database. Constantly and consistently at a scale that’s never before seen. When the market maybe dips by, a half of a point and half, what’re doing right now, the money for refinance, right? Yeah. Most originators will tell you, Hey Dan, it’s gonna take me 60 days to outreach to that pipeline of refi. And by the way, I don’t want distract myself from all my purchase business and the lifeblood of my referral partners. So this basically technology allows us to sit on top of every originator’s database and understand the propensity of every consumer’s ability to transact for their next purchase or refinance and then having these agentic AI capabilities that act on behalf of the originator to, outreach to their consumers, have a personalized conversation based off of what that next opportunity is. And then, It can do one of two things. It can then do a warm transfer to the originator and say, Hey, I got David on the phone. He’s interested in a refinance ’cause the market just moved. Do you wanna take this call? And David, you may say, you know what? I’m walking into my best agent’s office right now. I can’t take it right now. I’ll schedule a meeting so it’ll actually dip into your calendar. Understand your availability and place that meeting on your calendar based on your own availability. So, we have originators coming in today that may have three refinance opportunities on their calendar that they literally did nothing to obtain. But we know one thing, retail originators especially are fantastic at taking inbound opportunities and converting them into transactions. They’re what they’re not great at or they won’t do, can’t do consistently or can’t do at the scale that may be mandated to maximize those conversions is it’s all that prospecting, that follow up and all those types of activities that sometimes get lost in the shuffle.

[David] Yeah. And so much does get lost in the shuffle when you’re talking about the ability to connect with people with intelligent data where it’s, and it’s current. That’s the part that just blows me away.

[Dan] It’s gotta be current.

[David] It is being able to have it be so current. I’m getting remarried and you would have that information, I’m moving, based on all this information and that changes up the conversation all of a sudden, I feel like. You’re not just a distant partner. You’re somehow staying up on me. And does that, is that overall well received or does it carry like the from too much data too much information.

[Dan] I don’t know that there’s ever too much data. It’s data is a powerful tool. And it’s how do you use that data to build a relationship with the consumer and help you build stickiness because. You don’t want to, let’s just say I get a notification that David just went through a divorce. That’s not it. Hey, Sally, Sue, I, you really shouldn’t have gone down that path. The engagement strategy based on the data is really critical and mportant. But our whole goal is really about the simplicity of if we can connect more consumers in the moments that matter with their originators, we know that will always breed success.

[David] And the truth of the matter is, Dan, we’re all getting used to everybody knowing everything about us anyway. It’s all out there. Our phone calls get listened to, everything gets listened to, it seems. So it’s not, I think the barrier to having that much data available to loan originator is a good thing. And it’s expected in the day, this day and age. We talk about AI, it’s everywhere in Mortgage Tech right now. What makes Total Experts approach to AI meaningfully different, and where are customers already seeing an impact?

[Dan] Yeah. So garbage in, garbage out. Yeah. And it’s all about the data. We feel like we are extremely well positioned with the investments we made over the last several years because we were, for over four years now, we’ve been really focused on building out this customer IQ capability so that we build this foundation of data based on current information. You think about layering agentic AI on stale data, right? If I had somebody reach out to you, whether it’s starting a voice conversation or a text message conversation and start talking about something that was three years age, you would immediately get disengaged and turned off as a consumer, right? So our foundation is really built on the always updating. Most comprehensive financial picture of every single consumer that sits in your database. So if we ground on that, and then you layer on the agent AI capability. So now when I do that, orchestrate that outreach, whether that’s voice, text, message, email, I can now layer on personalized information based off of David today, not stale data from years past, that’s really where we’re focusing on is that orchestrating of that engagement. Voice is what we launched the furthest widespread through our customer base today. So we have what we call AI sales assistant, which is a human like voice conversation that can sit on top of your database, understands opportunities in your database, and then or automatically does the outreach on behalf of the originator to every single one of your consumers with that personalized conversation.

[David] Yeah, and it’s a conversation. That’s the part I wanna stress. That’s the part when, first of all, you guys put on one of the best conferences, the one that we you had at Denver, that it was just spectacular. Again…

[Dan] Accelerate was amazing. We have our events. People are just absolutely tremendous.

[David] They crush it every year, but it’s the content, but it’s also the innovation that you’re talking about. You’re not it’s the conversational part of it. AI sales assistant is one that interacts with you, but it converses intelligently imperceptive. It’s very difficult to discern that I’m not talking to Dan or Dan’s assistant.

[Dan] Yeah. The quality we, what we constantly get because there are a lot of. AI voice solutions out there on the market. Yeah. I feel like I talk to another one every four days that wants to integrate with us. But the quality of the conversations is so dramatically different. Anybody can build a AI voice agent right in a few days nowadays with the tools that are available. But to build one that’s gonna have such a personalized conversation and the quality of the conversations. Doesn’t have a lot of latency in those conversations. So you’re not waiting for AI agent to respond back to me when I correspond with it is all super critically important. We have less than 10% of consumers that are engaged with this technology that even understand that it’s AI or ask that it’s AI. So in most cases, they just think it’s a virtual assistant for their loan originator.

[Dan] Yeah. I remember I’m hearing recently a story. About an agent that was working, an AI agent that was working on behalf and completed the whole transaction. It took it so far down the road and the customer was so impressed. They had to come in and meet the person that was represented and the staff said she’s at lunch. And they go, oh, she’s at lunch. Oh we’ll wait. ’cause we’re so impressed. We just gotta say thank you. We’ve got this transaction done because of her, and they go. She’s gonna be a long lunch. Ah, we just got a phone. They were delaying Finally, they had to come out because they were so persistent and said you were talking to a computer. I hate to say it, but it was, I think I was like, you’re kidding me? That was so real. And they weren’t offended. They weren’t put back. They were just blown away with the quality of it. But it’s just so true. One of the things that in our last conversation that we had prepping for this podcast interview is you recently commissioned a study on one of your major lenders. We won’t mention the name of the lender. Yeah. But it was really interesting that you, if I recall correctly, it made 50,000 calls and there was 6,000 consumers engaged as a result of this. Talk about this, it was amazing.

[Dan] One of our customers, a top 10 lender we won’t mention their name. We launched a early adopter program inside their organization. So they have over 2,000 originators. We launched an early adopter program with some of their producers that wanted to opt in and be part of this program. So we launched that with 65 of their 2000 loan officers, so pretty consolidated, early adopter program. In the first 45 days. We layered this on top of their database. We plugged in.

[David] When you say layered it, explain what you mean by layered.

[Dan] Yeah, so as part of our journey automation. We can basically say at different points in the loan process or different data triggers, we can automatically orchestrate this voice AI agent to call on behalf of the originator. So we basically sit, sat it on top of our customer IQ capabilities, and we looked at credit inquiries. So somebody gets their credit pulled by another lender, refinance opportunities, so somebody’s in the money for refinance based off of estimated monthly savings. And we also have what we call periodic mortgage review. So most originators don’t follow up with their past customers. We know that’s like an all time thing, right? I’ve been in front of thousands and thousands of originators, and I ask a simple question, how many are reaching out to your past customers at least twice a year. Not a single hand raises David.

[David] Isn’t that amazing?

[Dan] It’s amazing. But, so those three use cases, so I’m gonna call your customers twice a year. I’m gonna, understand if somebody’s in the money for refinance, I’m gonna immediately rack when the market moves to those. And then if somebody, gets their credit pulled by another lender within milliseconds, I’m outreach into those customers to try to bring them back into your funnel. So for those three use cases over a 45 day period we initiated over 50,000 calls for those 65 LOs. So remember there’s a lot of follow up that go on. There’s voicemail’s, voicemails that we drop.

[David] What does that work out? I’d have to do the math. 50,000 on six. That’s six about.

[Dan] Yeah. 6,000 consumers we’ve engaged. So it was, this was in December timeframe, so there was some positive market movement in our favor. So a lot of good refinance opportunities. 70% of those 6,000 consumers engaged were transferred to an originator, either a live transfer.

[David] What percentage?

[Dan] 17% of those? 6,000.

[David] Wow. 17%. Yeah. Wow.

[Dan] Either they were either transferred via a live transfer or we scheduled a meeting on and put, placed them on their calendar. And already in that 45 day timeframe, we saw over 30 million in attributed application volume, about 130 units for that 65 loan officers. The interesting stat is out that 70% that got transferred, 30% of those transfers happen after seven or more follow up attempts.

[David] See that’s the thing that seven, or we’re talking seven or more. Yeah. How many originators are following up on refinance? Many doing follow up. And it took seven to get it to, to get to that 70%. This is technology in a tool that is gonna start revolutionizing companies. There’s gonna be companies that have this and prosper and those that don’t and fail. It’s just pretty clear that’s, to that extent. Am I wrong?

[Dan] Is it gonna become the new norm? For sure. Yeah. But the key to unlocking the success is really around the data. If you don’t understand David deeply today, your profile, what the next best way to engage you, how to frame the conversation based off of previous conversations how much tappable equity you have, what’s your credit position, what’s the interest rate that I could offer you today? You really can’t get to that high conversion rate of that conversation.

[David] One of the recent podcasts we recorded was with Mike and Jessica from Assurance. She gave story after story of how this is making a huge difference in their company. So you have just commissioned this one study, but it’s not a unique thing. Jessica came on and just really saying the praises of Total Expert about what a difference it’s making in their company. And they launched it company wide.

[Dan] Yeah. Yeah. So the, the interesting thing about insurance is they have a decent sized servicing per. So anybody that has servicing portfolios is in a incredible advantage because you don’t necessarily need consent from the consumer to leverage this technology. So you have an established business relationship with that consumer. So you can really set this off in the wild, some of the IMBS that we work with that do not retain servicing. We have some strategies to obtain consent from the consumer so that you can leverage this, but that is, it is gonna be definitely a differentiator in the future is the lenders that have consent and can maintain ongoing consent for a consumer are really gonna set, and leverage this capability to the next level for sure.

[David] In the support that we stress that because there is a consent that is required with the new laws that are coming in March next month. And we’re really gonna be seeing a dramatic requirement that has to be made and, but that’s not insurmountable. That’s the thing I love about what you guys, when you partner with your customers at Total Expert, you’re really helping them understand the rules. Now you’re not giving legal advice. I know you guys would be very careful.

[Dan] Guidance. We try to guide them based off of all the opportunity we have to see different people doing different things in the market. So yeah, it’s more just sharing some of the best practices and things that we have the opportunity to see.

[David] Yeah. When you look ahead, how do you see the role of a loan officer evolving as Total Expert becomes more intelligent and AI takes on more and more of the operational engagement, the workload?

[Dan] So in my opinion, in probably the next three years, I think where you’re gonna see the modern originator to the future is being able to focus on the things that they do best, which is providing strategic advice, deepening relationships, and embedding themselves in the, in their local community. So think of them as evolving to business development specialists that are licensed can talk product and price, can do all the things that a licensed originator does and are typically really good at. Where they’re gonna not have to spend as much time as all of the prospecting, the follow up task completions, sending SMS messages consistently, outreaching on phone calls, getting meetings scheduled. All of that minutiae will go away and be handled by AI agents of the future. For sure.

[David] Yeah. And when you start thinking about those that have Total Expert and are using these tools, have and employed these tools that Total Expert offers, it’s a significant recruiting. Advantage when it comes to, we’re already seeing.

[Dan] So, we have over 25 customers fully live on this capability that we just talked about already, really with our AI sales assistant a lot at full scale across their whole organizations and we’re already seeing them and hearing them use this at, in the recruiting efforts for sure. Yeah, it’s amazing. I was just talking to our good mutual, good friend Greg Sher and he was saying how this has just revolutionized their business and how they’re going after both recruiting and just building the production.

[Dan] Absolutely. Yeah.

[David] Yeah. Dan, it’s so good to have you back on. It’s exciting. As I look to the future, it’s good to see that we have a Total Expert as driving this forward. And you’re a Minnesota based company. My homeland. I love that.

[Dan] Yeah. We are Minnesota based. Not so great this time of year, how frigid it is, but man, we like it in the summer better.

[David] Yeah, we do. Except for those mosquitoes. It’s so good to have you on, Dan. Kudos to everyone there at Total Expert on your success and continuing to do. The innovation and bringing the innovation to the market such as you are.

[Dan] Thank you, David. Appreciate you having me on.