More than a decade later, that basement project has become one of the defining pieces of software in American consumer lending. Total Expert now describes itself as a purpose-built customer engagement platform for modern financial institutions, and the customer list backs up the claim: more than 200 banks, credit unions and lenders use it, including 15 of the 25 largest banks and mortgage lenders in the United States.
The company sits in Saint Louis Park, a suburb on the west edge of Minneapolis - about as far from Silicon Valley's gravity as fintech gets. That distance is part of the story. Total Expert hires people who have actually worked inside banks and credit unions, and it has stayed narrowly, almost stubbornly, focused on financial services while other software companies chased every vertical they could reach.
What Total Expert sells is not a single app but a system: customer relationship management, marketing automation, and - increasingly - artificial intelligence that reads the signals a borrower gives off and tells a loan officer what to do next. The pitch is simple to state and hard to build. Know your customer well enough, and early enough, that you are already there when their next financial milestone arrives.
It is a business that has raised more than $75 million, earned the top ranking among lender CRMs from the STRATMOR Group, and repeatedly landed on the Inc. 5000 and HousingWire's Tech100. And it is a business built almost entirely around a single, unglamorous conviction: that keeping a customer is worth more than winning one.
