Lender marketing teams ask us the same question every month. Should we connect HubSpot, Total Expert, and Encompass into one stack, and if we should, where do we start. The honest answer is that connecting all three is sometimes the smartest move a lender can make, and sometimes it is a six figure project that will not change a single business outcome. The difference comes down to a handful of conditions that nobody on the sales call wants to talk about. This post lays out where the three system stack pays off, where it does not, and what to ask before you let any agency touch your pipes.
What Each System Is Actually For
HubSpot is a CRM and marketing platform. Top of funnel capture, segmentation, nurture, lifecycle reporting, partner and recruiter marketing. It is built for many to many relationships across many record types. Strong reporting, weak loan domain knowledge.
Total Expert is a customer engagement platform built specifically for mortgage and banking. Loan officer driven journeys, milestone communications, co marketing with real estate agents, compliance friendly templates. Strong mortgage domain depth, lighter on B2B marketing flexibility.
Encompass by ICE Mortgage Technology is the loan origination system. It is the system of record for every loan in flight. Milestones, conditions, disclosures, closing. It is not a marketing tool and it should never be treated as one.
Each platform does one job extremely well. The question is whether the way you operate today actually requires data to flow between all three.
When Connecting All Three Makes Sense
You have separate marketing, sales, and production motions that all need data from each other. You run paid acquisition through HubSpot, hand off qualified leads to loan officers in Total Expert, and originate inside Encompass. Each team owns one system, none of them logs into the other two, and pipeline visibility today requires three different reports stitched together in a spreadsheet. A real integration removes that spreadsheet and gives leadership one view from lead to funded loan.
You run refinance or recapture programs that depend on loan data. A recapture program needs to know which past borrowers crossed a rate threshold, when they last closed, what product they took, and whether their servicing status still allows outreach. That data lives in Encompass or downstream of it. The campaign that goes out lives in Total Expert or HubSpot. With no integration the recapture team is running stale lists pulled by hand every two weeks. With integration the campaign fires the moment the borrower qualifies.
You want cross sell from servicing back into origination. If your bank also offers home equity, deposit, or wealth products, the borrower in Encompass at funding is the warmest lead your other lines of business will see all year. A clean integration pushes that funded borrower into HubSpot with the right lifecycle stage and triggers the appropriate cross sell journey, with consent and suppression rules respected on every channel.
When Connecting All Three Does Not Make Sense
You have one loan officer and a single source of leads. A solo originator who closes thirty loans a year does not need a three system stack. Total Expert plus Encompass is usually enough. Adding HubSpot on top will create more work, more confusion, and more data drift than it removes.
You have not solved data hygiene in any one system yet. Integration multiplies whatever state your data is in. If HubSpot has fifteen duplicate contacts for every borrower, Total Expert has stale tags from a 2023 campaign, and Encompass has loan officer assignments that no longer reflect your org chart, an integration will spray that mess across all three systems. Clean one system first. Then connect.
Leadership has not agreed on the system of record. Every field needs an owner. Borrower contact information lives in Encompass. Marketing consent lives in HubSpot. Loan officer assignment lives wherever your producer compensation logic lives. If three departments still argue about who owns what, integration cannot save you. It will hard code the disagreement into the wiring and create a new round of finger pointing every time a number does not match.
Mapping Scenarios That Actually Work
Scenario A. Lead to funded loan visibility. HubSpot captures the inbound lead and qualifies it. Once a loan officer is assigned, the contact and lead source sync to Total Expert with a journey trigger. When Total Expert converts the lead into a started loan, an Encompass loan record is created with the originating campaign and HubSpot deal ID stored in custom fields. As the loan moves through Encompass milestones, status updates flow back to Total Expert journeys and to HubSpot lifecycle stages. Leadership gets one dashboard showing cost per funded loan by source, with no spreadsheet glue.
Scenario B. Rate alert recapture. Encompass funded loan data syncs nightly into a warehouse or directly into Total Expert. A rate alert engine watches market rates against each borrower's note rate and product. When a borrower crosses the threshold and is outside any prepay window, Total Expert launches a journey to the loan officer of record and to the borrower simultaneously. HubSpot receives the same event so the marketing team can layer in paid retargeting that respects the same consent rules.
Scenario C. Post close cross sell to deposit and wealth. At the funded milestone in Encompass, a webhook tells HubSpot to set the contact lifecycle to customer, attach the loan product, and enroll the contact in a cross sell sequence after a thirty day cool down. Total Expert continues to own the borrower communication for the mortgage relationship. HubSpot handles every other line of business with full attribution back to the original funded loan.
Why Knowing How Each System Talks to the Others Is Critical
There is no single right way to connect these three. There are at least four. Native connectors, middleware platforms like Workato or Tray, point to point custom webhooks, and ETL into a warehouse with reverse sync back to each system. Each option trades off speed, cost, control, and fragility differently. A vendor who pitches one path without explaining the tradeoffs is selling you a hammer.
You also need to understand the field model in each system. Encompass uses borrower pairs and loan level custom fields. Total Expert uses contact, loan, and journey objects with permission rules baked in. HubSpot uses contacts, companies, deals, and custom objects, with associations that can get expensive at scale if you do not design them carefully. A field that looks like the same thing in two systems is rarely the same thing under the hood. Get the mapping wrong once and you will spend the next two quarters reconciling reports.
The teams that get this right design a single source of truth per data domain before they write a line of integration code. They decide that loan status owners live in Encompass, marketing consent lives in HubSpot, journey state lives in Total Expert, and every other system reads those values rather than overwriting them. That discipline is the difference between an integration that quietly works for years and one that needs a developer on call every quarter end.
How to Choose the Right Agency Partner
Not every HubSpot partner knows mortgage. Not every Total Expert implementer knows HubSpot. Almost no one outside the lending world has shipped Encompass field work. The right partner has done all three together, more than once, and can show you the artifacts.
Ask for the data dictionary from a recent engagement. Ask which middleware they recommend and why. Ask which Encompass field categories they have written to and which they have only read from. Ask how they handle conflict resolution when two systems update the same field within the same minute. Ask which compliance constraints they have run into and how they solved them without slowing the business down.
Most importantly, ask for the runbook they hand to the client after launch. A partner without a documented runbook is a partner you will be calling for every small change for the next three years, and that bill adds up faster than the original project ever did.
Do Not Let a Failed Integration Kill the Next Opportunity
Many lenders are gun shy because of an earlier integration project that went over budget, missed timelines, or quietly broke six months after launch. That experience is real and it deserves respect. It is also not predictive of the next project.
The integration market has matured significantly in the last two years. Middleware platforms that used to require custom engineering now ship templated connectors. Total Expert has expanded its API surface. Encompass Partner Connect lets vendors operate inside the LOS in ways that were not possible three years ago. HubSpot custom objects, association labels, and unified analytics are far stronger than they were when most failed projects were originally scoped.
A new project, scoped by a partner who has shipped the same pattern recently, on the current generation of these platforms, is a different animal entirely. Judge the opportunity in front of you on the strength of the plan, the team, and the success criteria. Do not judge it through the scars of a project that was scoped in 2022 with the tools available at the time.
The Bottom Line
Connecting HubSpot, Total Expert, and Encompass is one of the highest leverage moves a modern lender can make, when the conditions are right. It is also one of the easiest ways to waste six months and a meaningful budget, when they are not.
Get clear on which scenario you are in before any agency starts writing field maps. The right answer is sometimes a full three system integration, sometimes a phased rollout that starts with two systems and earns the third, and sometimes a polite "not yet." A partner worth hiring will tell you which one applies before they quote the work, and will walk away from the engagement if the conditions are not in place. That is the partner you want.