Joe Welu runs Total Expert, the Minnesota fintech he started in 2012 and still leads today as founder and CEO. The company builds customer engagement and CRM software purpose-built for banks, credit unions, and mortgage lenders - an industry that, for years, had been trying to force generic sales tools to fit a business they were never designed for. Welu's bet was simple and, at the time, contrarian: financial institutions could compete on relationships rather than rates, if they had the right technology behind them.
That bet has aged well. Total Expert now serves more than 200 financial institutions, including 15 of the top 25 U.S. banks and lenders. Its software touches roughly a quarter of all U.S. mortgage production. STRATMOR Group named it the #1 CRM platform in its category, and the company has landed on both the Inc. 5000 and the HousingWire Tech100 lists. What began with a handful of programmers hired off Craigslist has grown into a team of nearly 300.
Ask Welu what the company is really about and he pushes past the software. His current focus is on what he calls human-first banking - using data not to replace the relationship between a customer and their bank, but to make it personal again at scale. He often points to the same statistic: a large majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. His argument is that financial institutions have both a role and a business incentive in helping change that, and that the right engagement tools are what make it possible.
The AI chapter
Welu's recent work has centered on artificial intelligence, and he is notably careful about how he frames it. Rather than pitching AI as a way to cut staff, he describes it as a co-worker for the loan officer - a system that surfaces the right customer at the right moment and handles the busywork so people can spend more time on the relationship. In 2025 he put out a run of talks and interviews drawing a sharp line between genuine AI for mortgage professionals and the marketing hype that had flooded the category. It is a familiar posture for him: skeptical of shortcuts, insistent that technology should amplify people rather than paper over them.
Total Expert, by the numbers
Where it started
The origin of Total Expert is not a boardroom story. Welu grew up close to the consequences of finance. When he was five, a bank foreclosed on his family's farm - a loss that stayed with him. Years later, he watched the other side of the same industry: a local banker, someone his grandfather had built a relationship with over time, helped his parents buy a home. The gap between those two experiences, one cold and one deeply human, is the thing Welu returns to when he explains why he does this work.
His path into technology ran through real estate first. For about a decade, Welu co-founded and led one of the top-selling residential real estate teams in the country, crossing more than $1 billion in sales volume. That front-row seat is where he saw the problem clearly: lenders were drowning in industry-specific challenges that no existing CRM or off-the-shelf tool would solve. He decided to build the fix himself.
So in 2012 he set up in the basement of a real estate office, posted for developers on Craigslist, and started building. There was no venture pedigree, no Silicon Valley address - just a specific problem he understood better than most and the stubbornness to keep going. Momentum built slowly through the middle of the decade, and by 2019 the company had raised a $52 million Series C, part of roughly $75 million in total funding that helped it scale nationally.
The operator's temperament
People who describe Welu tend to land on the same words: mission-driven, customer-obsessed, people-first. His leadership philosophy is not complicated, and he does not pretend it is. He credits the company's growth to the team rather than to any single strategy, and the line he repeats - through amazing people, anything is possible - functions less as a slogan than as an operating principle. A company that started with Craigslist hires and grew to nearly 300 people is, in his telling, mostly a story about the people who showed up.
In May 2024 he brought that message to the New York Stock Exchange, appearing on an episode of Taking Stock with Trinity Chavez to talk about purpose-built customer engagement. It was a long way from the basement, but the pitch had not changed much: banking, done right, is a relationship business, and technology should serve that rather than flatten it. Welu holds a B.S. in Business from Kansas State University and sits on the Forbes Technology Council. The company he built remains headquartered in Saint Louis Park, Minnesota, not far from where the whole thing began.