Customer engagement platform Total Expert is launching a marketplace this week for financial institutions to build their marketing technology stack.
Partners will plug into the Total Expert platform to offer solutions such as chats and texts supported by artificial intelligence (AI), targeted mail campaigns, and management of their online reputation. Customers, including banks, lenders and insurance companies, will have access to data and action systems under “one roof.”
“For us, it’s impossible to build every piece of technology that our customers need. What we focused on is listening to the problems our customers are trying to solve, the value that they want to be delivered, and then ultimately aligning with the partners in our marketplace to enable those things to happen,” Joe Welu, founder and CEO of Total Expert, said in an interview. “But it all has to do with supporting our customers’ needs as it relates to growing their business and improving customer loyalty.”
The platform, called Total Expert Partner Marketplace, initially includes eight partners —Capacity, Adwerx, InGenius, Verse.AI, DirectMailers, Experience.com, Birdeye and Clever —but the number is expected to increase depending on customers’ demand for new technologies.
The marketplace comes at a time when the macro environment – with higher interest rates for longer – has made investments in technology more complex. However, banks, lenders and insurance companies still want to innovate, so they have focused on high-impact and return solutions. According to Welu, the pressures are especially acute in the mortgage space.
“The independent mortgage banks have probably had the most difficulty over the last few years,” Welu said. “Organizations that had scaled up to meet a certain level of demand invested in lots of tools. What has changed for them is they have now been forced to go and look at those investments that are working or not … For us, the thing that we hear is: we want to simplify and streamline our tech stack.”
According to Welu, the fees Total Expert receives for making the partners’ tech available to its customers will be “put back into the product” to further develop the ecosystem since the marketplace is not seen as a profit driver for the company.
“We’re not turning into a solution aggregator. There are technology platforms in adjacent industries, and those marketplaces have been all about: How do we extract as much revenue from the partner? That is not our model,” Welu said.
“Our model is: how do we come together to create exceptional outcomes for customers? And if we do that, the marketplace partners and Total Expert will be able to share a small percentage of the value that’s delivered. But if you’re not delivering value, we don’t try to find ways to lock in people or force them to use a particular part of the platform. The purpose of the marketplace is about giving immense flexibility to our customers.”
