Mortgage Marketing Still Comes Down to Trust

When people ask me where mortgage and marketing intersect in 2026, I usually end up talking about data. Most lenders with a book of business or a servicing portfolio already have a tremendous amount of it. But are they actually making use of what they have? At the same time, you can’t separate mortgage marketing from what’s happening in the market. Rates, affordability and the broader economy all change the conversation. And unlike a lot of things people buy, a mortgage is tied to a decision that can carry a huge amount of stress. Buying a home is often the biggest purchase someone will ever make, so I think there’s a responsibility to be aware of what people are feeling when you market to them. You can have a very sophisticated data strategy and still get the marketing wrong if you don’t understand the person on the other end of it.

I’m pretty opinionated about first-party versus third-party data. First-party data is information you’ve gotten directly from your own customers or from people who have chosen to hear from you. Third-party data is information you buy or rent to find people who look like a certain audience. A simple example is targeting T-shirt shoppers on Facebook. That’s useful, but it’s nowhere near as useful as knowing that one of your own customers looked at a particular shirt, put it in their cart and didn’t buy it. You know what they were actually doing. You’re not making an educated guess based on what some other company knows about them.

A lot of marketing used to be much more blunt than it is today. You’d have a list of 1,000 people, send all 1,000 the same offer and hope you got a response. There wasn’t much else you could do at scale. That’s changed pretty dramatically. AI can generate a huge number of variations, help you test them and make it much easier to tailor a message to different people. Technology is making it possible to do things that would have taken an enormous amount of manual work a few years ago. I don’t think the interesting part is that we’re going to send more messages. We’re already doing that. The interesting part is whether the messages actually get more relevant.

We still buy data at Figure, including from companies like Experian. I don’t have a problem with that. What matters to me is what happens after you buy it. We run our own models on top of that information and combine it with what we know from our own customers and our own business. That’s where you start getting something that is actually useful. I don’t see much of a future in the idea that the best thing a company can do with consumer data is sell it to somebody else. Apart from the compliance issues, which are obviously real, there’s a basic business problem with it. If you’re selling the same information to five different companies, you’ve made the data less interesting to all of them. I’d rather use it to build something that gives us an advantage.

AI has been a huge help with the execution side of marketing. If I need 100 subject lines, I can get them. If I want to test different versions of a message or figure out the best time to send something, I can do that much faster than I could before. A lot of work that used to require people sitting around doing repetitive tasks can now be handled pretty easily. That’s great. Where I think people sometimes get carried away is the idea that because AI can produce something quickly, it can also replace the person who had the idea in the first place.

I see a lot of decks and campaigns, and you can usually tell pretty quickly when something was made by someone who had a strong idea and when it was assembled because all the ingredients were there. The latter isn’t necessarily bad. Sometimes being competent is exactly what you need. But as AI gets better, there are going to be more and more competent campaigns floating around. Everybody will have access to the same tools. Everybody will be able to produce more content. Everybody will be able to personalize it. At some point, the thing that gets your attention is going to be the thing that doesn’t look like everything else. That’s where I think people are going to have to get better at having an actual point of view. AI can help you execute an idea. I’m much less interested in having it decide what the idea should be.

We’re still figuring out how comfortable people are going to be with AI in customer interactions. At Figure, we built an AI outbound voice agent, and one of my favorite interactions was with a borrower who spent 40 minutes talking to it. We told them at the beginning that they were speaking with a virtual assistant, so they knew what it was. At the end of the call, the borrower asked if they’d been talking to AI. The agent said yes, and the borrower said they were genuinely impressed. I liked that story because there wasn’t anything particularly futuristic about it. Someone had a conversation, the conversation went well, and they were surprised by how good the technology was.

I don’t think that means we’re heading toward a world where nobody wants to talk to a person anymore. Especially in financial services, there are still plenty of situations where people want another human being involved. If you’re talking about someone’s home or their finances, that relationship matters. What I like about AI is that it can take some of the work that doesn’t require a person and get it out of the way. If that gives a marketer more time to think, talk to customers and come up with better ideas, that’s a pretty good trade.

We saw the importance of that with home equity. When I started at Figure in 2018, we’d put something on social media about home equity and the comments would immediately fill up with people telling everyone else not to touch a home equity line of credit. People called it a credit card against your house. That always struck me as a little strange because the reputation was so much worse than the actual product. If you’re a homeowner comparing a personal loan with a home equity line of credit, you’re generally going to get a better rate with the home equity line. A lot of the fear around it comes from people not really understanding how it works.

We eventually realized we weren’t going to change that by coming up with a cleverer ad. We needed to explain the product better. More importantly, we needed people who had actually used it to talk about what they did with it. A customer explaining how they used home equity to pay for a renovation or deal with another financial need is going to be more convincing to another homeowner than a brand telling them that the product is safe and useful. That’s just how people work. We’re naturally skeptical when a company tells us how great its own product is. We pay more attention when someone who isn’t selling us anything tells us what happened to them.

That’s really where I think mortgage marketing is headed. The companies that do well aren’t necessarily going to be the ones with the biggest AI budget or the most impressive demo. Those things can certainly help, but they’re not going to make up for bad data, bad messaging or a poor understanding of the customer. I’d much rather have a company that knows its own customers extremely well, uses outside data intelligently, has AI doing the work it’s actually good at and has people spending their time on the parts of marketing that still require judgment and creativity.

The technology is going to keep changing, probably faster than any of us expect. The mortgage market will change with it. But the basic problem hasn’t changed much. Someone is trying to make a very large financial decision and they want to know whether they can trust the company they’re dealing with. If you can use all this new technology to understand that person better, give them information that’s actually useful and make the experience easier without making it feel less human, you’re doing something worthwhile. If all you’re doing is using AI to send more people more messages, I’m not sure you’ve really improved anything.