Data-Driven Work Cultures: Dan Catinella Of Total Expert On How To Effectively Leverage Data To Take Your Company To The Next Level
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Personalized messaging. With enhanced visibility into the individual behaviors and goals of your customers, you can ensure you are leveraging the right messaging at just the right time. For example, if you know your customer has a young child, you can provide them with engaging messaging around planning and saving for college, right when it is most relevant for them.
As part of our series about “How To Effectively Leverage Data To Take Your Company To The Next Level”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dan Catinella.
With 20 years of experience in mortgage technology, Dan Catinella is a seasoned technology executive focused on driving digital transformation through all channels of lending. In an ever-changing digital landscape, Dan keeps a constant pulse on the next innovation that could change the way business is conducted. As Chief Lending Officer for Total Expert, Catinella identifies and develops high-impact innovation strategies that align with the company’s business goals and growth priorities. He works with Total Expert’s customers to dig into the problems they’re looking to solve and aligns Total Expert’s innovation strategy with their business goals.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
My career has always been at the intersection of lending and technology. Before joining Total Expert as Chief Lending Officer, I spent 20 years working in mortgage technology roles supporting technological efficiency amidst a fast-changing digital landscape. In my previous role as Chief Digital Officer with Finance of America, I led sales and operations support through digital innovation and core digital platform strategies.
I’ve always been passionate about modernizing the lending industry and I joined Total Expert because they aligned with that vision. Now, I get to help lenders leverage technology and data to foster deeper relationships and create customers for life.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take aways’ you learned from that?
When I started my career, I was responsible for what we called “Wednesday night updates,” which was every Wednesday (except for the last week of the month) we pushed out our software changes to the loan origination system and other software platforms we were making changes to. We would conduct these at 10 p.m. EST each night, and back then, had to do onsite in order to deploy the updated code to our on-prem infrastructure. So, on one Wednesday, it was my time to shine…after working a full day from 8 am to 6 pm, I decided to grab a bite to eat and then headed back to the office around 8 pm to prepare. I was well prepared and ready to go about an hour before our 10 pm window, so then decided to cozy up and watch a show on the TV in the lobby….the next thing i remember…an originator woke me up at around 7:30 in the morning, asking me what the heck I am doing sleeping at the office!! Moral of the story….drink lots of espresso and don’t lay down before a long night of software deployments!
Are you working on any new, exciting projects now? How do you think that might help people?
Our team at Total Expert recently launched Customer Intelligence, a first-of-its-kind the only complete turn-key solution that uses intelligent automation and consumer insights to empower banks and lenders to gain a holistic view of their customers and to use data-driven insights in order to engage them at the ideal moment to best serve them.
Providing lenders with the behavioral data they need to reach their customers with hyper-personalized messaging and offerings can drive growth, have a crystal clear ROI model, and help build lifelong customer loyalty by anticipating needs and surface opportunities to serve them, ultimately creating additional deal flow.
The platform helps lenders work efficiently and effectively to uncover opportunities that would have otherwise fallen through the cracks — something critical now more than ever as market conditions and interest rates have impacted sales volume. Some current users of Customer Intelligence were able to uncover 1,200 opportunities that would have otherwise been missed in only two weeks of using the platform, which is extremely meaningful for those teams.
It also helps drive financial literacy and success for consumers. When banks and lenders can tap into their customers’ intent data, they can provide recommendations and products that best fit their individual financial needs and goals.
Thank you for all that. Let’s now turn to the main focus of our discussion about empowering organizations to be more “data-driven.” For the benefit of our readers, can you help explain what exactly it means to be data-driven? On a practical level, what does it look like to use data to make decisions?
Financial institutions are inundated with data. They have so much of it, but often lack the tools or time to ensure it’s being properly leveraged for sales, operations, and marketing. The difference between having data and being data-driven comes down to ensuring it is usable and actionable. Without relevant insights into customer intent, it’s nearly impossible to ensure you’re delivering the right messaging and products every time.
To be data-driven means to keep your data at the center of everything. To us, that means keeping your customers and their needs as priority #1. If you can leverage customer behavior and intent data to inform marketing, product development, and sales, you can ensure you are keeping your customer at the center of all operations — and, ultimately, enhance your customer experience and become a trusted advisor well after the initial transaction.
Which companies can most benefit from tools that empower data collaboration?
Customer-facing teams across industries have so much to gain from integrating data into sales and marketing functions. Throughout financial services, there is a major opportunity for traditional banks, credit unions, and mortgage companies who are competing with fintech companies who have focused on creating seamless digital customer experiences. These institutions can use available financial data to unlock insights that help their employees deliver intentionally designed offerings and experiences that drive desired outcomes at precisely the right time.
We’d love to hear about your experiences using data to drive decisions. In your experience, how has data analytics and data collaboration helped improve operations, processes, and customer experiences? We’d love to hear some stories if possible.
While I currently work directly with Total Expert’s customers and prospects to address industry challenges and respond to financial trends, my previous role as Chief Digital Officer with Finance of America included implementing Total Expert across all business channels; including distributed retail, consumer direct, and wholesale. Our teams leveraged the platform to drive efficiency while growing and scaling the business. We were able to innovate around the platform to set a strategic vision for leveraging data to empower our loan officers to enhance the customer experience and engage with customers at the right time.
We had no shortage of data, but what made the most difference was the ability to blend it with real-time industry information to get comprehensive and actionable insights about our customers and prospects. When we could achieve this holistic view of our customers, it changed how we engaged with them and ultimately grew the pipeline and strengthened customer loyalty.
Has the shift towards becoming more data-driven been challenging for some teams or organizations from your vantage point? What are the challenges? How can organizations solve these challenges?
The challenge isn’t the data; most industries, including financial services, have no shortage of it. We know that data is the key to understanding customer intent, but how can it be filtered down to actionable insights? How can teams combine those insights with industry trends to see the bigger picture? These are the questions that many financial institutions find themselves asking when assessing their own ability to be data-driven. In-house data science or machine learning can be expensive, and few institutions have the capacity to integrate their existing customer data with data from third-party providers. Luckily, new technologies like Total Expert exist to combine data integration, analytics, and marketing automation into single end-to-end platforms.
When we work with our customers to adopt our technology, we also run into another common challenge: the process in which financial organizations approach digital transformation. They tend to be somewhat siloed and often use many different technologies, so they struggle to approach digital transformation holistically. Where we often see success is when institutions start with a narrow slice of their business to drive impact, then move to the next slice. When they can use the digital transformation of one part of the business to drive the next, it’s often easier to understand ROI.
Ok. Thank you. Here is the primary question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are “Five Ways a Company Can Effectively Leverage Data to Take It To The Next Level”? Please share a story or an example for each.
- Relationship building. Data allows you to gain a deeper understanding of your customers and their behaviors. By learning about them and their individual pain points, sales teams can engage with prospects and customers in personalized ways that drive long-term relationship growth. For example, imagine you had a prospect that initially did not credit qualify, however after educating them on the steps to take, their credit improves to the level necessary, and you immediately are able to re-engage with them with the positive news.
- Personalized messaging. With enhanced visibility into the individual behaviors and goals of your customers, you can ensure you are leveraging the right messaging at just the right time. For example, if you know your customer has a young child, you can provide them with engaging messaging around planning and saving for college, right when it is most relevant for them.
- Product development. Using data to transform customer experience must go beyond personalized marketing. Personalized marketing shouldn’t lead to a one-size-fits-all product; it ideally should drive customers to hyper-personalized products that are built with their pain points and goals in mind. This is another way you can ensure a human-first versus a product-first strategy. For example, you notice a customer just turned 62 and has a significant amount of equity in their home and could benefit significantly from better understanding a reverse mortgage.
- Integrations. Engaging with technology integrations that can provide third-party data strengthens your insights and your ability to achieve a holistic customer view. By combining first- and third-party customer data, you can create a single source of truth to drive growth and product innovation. For example, imagine being able to identify when your customers’ debt or income profiles change significantly and could benefit from a refinance.
- Leverage automation. Data-informed marketing automation can take any team’s efficiency to the next level. Using behavioral and transactional insights to segment consumers into groups allows you to assign them to hyper-personalized customer journeys. This ensures you’re providing the right message at the right time — from lead to conversion to customer and beyond.
The name of this series is “Data-Driven Work Cultures”. Changing a culture is hard. What would you suggest is needed to change a work culture to become more Data Driven?
Digital transformation can be difficult to implement, especially when working in an industry that is tasked with catching up to other disruptors. To drive data-driven work cultures, marketing, sales, and operations teams must be un-siloed and work together to understand the goals, roadblocks, and opportunities of digital transformation.
When previously separated data and workflows can integrate across teams, they can identify more opportunities to leverage that data to drive growth and enhance the customer experience across all business objectives.
The future of work has recently become very fluid. Based on your experience, how do you think the needs for data will evolve and change over the next five years?
As consumers grapple with fluctuating market conditions and societal shifts that have changed what it means to be financially responsible, they will be looking for financial partners that can understand their individual financial situation and provide valuable services and expertise. Financial organizations will continue to feel the increasing pressure to keep their customers engaged and meet their unique needs to compete with digital fintech companies that have prioritized building modern tools.
Over the next five years, these pressures will force financial institutions to look at their data and ensure that they are providing their teams with the technology they need to enhance customer experience and build innovative products that go beyond one-size-fits-all solutions.
Does your organization have any exciting goals for the near future? What challenges will you need to tackle to reach them? How do you think data analytics can best help you to achieve these goals?
Current market conditions and rising interest rates have made it increasingly important for loan officers to provide a competitive customer experience as it relates to a purchase-centric market. Understanding when and what to offer their prospects based on their behavior and intent data can help them get a leg up as every lead is becoming increasingly important.
Over the next year, we want to continue to help our customers leverage technology to address the shifting market and step beyond traditional outreach efforts to surface new mortgage opportunities and enable cross-sell from their existing customers. By making continuous platform upgrades and adding industry-leading integrations, we’ll help our customers adopt technology when it can be most critical and support lenders nationwide as they navigate the changing market and help their teams understand what modern lending means and looks like in their organizations.
How can our readers further follow your work?
You can keep up with Total Expert and our team on our website and our Linkedin. You can also follow me on Linkedin or listen to my recent Expert Insights podcast episode with Total Expert Founder and CEO Joe Welu.
Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!
Data-Driven Work Cultures: Dan Catinella Of Total Expert On How To Effectively Leverage Data To… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
