Title Technology
We’ve been experiencing something truly amazing over the past few years. In the past, a declining market or dropping order volume usually meant cutting expenses set aside for automation and technology investment. It was all but automatic (see what we did there?).
Well, there’s no denying that we’re in a down cycle now. And yet, we’re still seeing calculated investment in new technology, not just on the title side, but across the greater real estate industry.
It’s fair to say that the way we sell homes and process mortgages, including the closings, is changing, and for the better. The term “digital revolution,” long an empty marketing phrase used by wishful tech producers, now defines what’s been going on in our industry.
An Emerging Threat to Digitalization
On the title and settlement side of things, we face a few hurdles when it comes to digitalization. They’re a big reason why it’s taken so long to automate so many manual processes. It wasn’t that long ago when getting land records into digital format was the biggest battle on our hands!
Two of the biggest challenges facing our industry when it comes to automation are about to come together. The first is navigating the mish-mash network of state, county and even municipal requirements and prohibitions when it comes to insurance, real estate and land transfers. The second, coming on with the speed of a bullet train, is cybersecurity, fraud prevention and data protection.
This dual threat/burden is what stands in the way of what could be our greatest operational advance in decades. Many title agents have dreamed of the day when they could all but retire their email accounts and phones from the effort to collect data of all kinds, in all forms and be able to quickly transfer it into their central production systems without the clacking noise of a keyboard in the back ground. Manual data entry has long been one of the primary challengers to operational efficiency.
An Opportunity to Combine Efficiency with Security
With the help of technology like AI, we’re rapidly moving towards the ability to automate just about any process, large or small, whether required only locally or in virtually any agency across the country.
But cyber criminals and fraudsters have long been aware of the treasure trove of personal data housed within the title industry. And, until now, it’s been relatively easy to access for them—to the detriment of lenders, agencies and consumers alike.
That’s the next great battle in the industry’s digital revolution—automating the collection, exchange and storage of data…but doing it securely.
We’ve got something up our sleeve to help in that battle here at alanna.ai. Stay tuned to learn more!