Blogs

We’re pleased to announce that AtClose will be getting an upgrade, and with this upgrade, you’ll be able to automate the Title Search module. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a technology that is being utilized to automate processes such that only little human interaction is necessary to execute the tasks inside the Title Search module.Read more: Speed of Delivery: Title Extending Closing TimesRPA Software’s AdvantagesReduce Cost – Cost reductions of approximately 30% can be obtained by automating processes. In addition, software robots are less expensive than a full-time person.Customer Experience – RPA allows you to put your high-value resources back on the front lines, assuring customer success.Lower Operation Risk – RPA decreases the rate of mistakes by removing human errors such as fatigue or a lack of expertise, resulting in a lower degree of operational risk.Improved internal processes – Companies must create clear governance rules in order to use AI and RPA. As a result, internal reporting, onboarding, and other internal tasks may be completed more quickly.It does not replace existing IT systems – One of the most significant benefits of employing a virtual workforce or an RPA bot is that it does not need the replacement of existing systems. RPA, on the other hand, can use your current systems in the same manner that a human employee can.How Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Works?A BOT operates as a system user and does a Title Search with the aid of RPA by first assigning itself a pending task for property verification. When a BPO user claims a job for his or her manual operation, the BOT’s ID is entered just as it is now.  Because most property information is already available online, the BOT begins by navigating to the specified URL and retrieving the necessary papers, such as Assessor and Taxation collateral. Each county has its own URL, and the framework is built in such a way that it can quickly find the needed papers. However, a website’s structure can be modified in the future, and in order to accommodate such changes, the system must be informed that a County’s website has been updated. As a result, the framework must be reviewed before the BOT may continue to function.Ready to get started with RPA?Are you ready to learn more about RPA Software? Contact AtClose today to work with a company that is always one step ahead.

By making mortgage lending industry processes more convenient and secure for all transaction stakeholders, AtClose is transforming how the mortgage industry can support all of its required functions. We provide solutions that are a step ahead and can lead to closing loans faster than ever before. With our dashboard reporting combined with automated, configurable workflows, our customers, vendors, and employees alike can act on and or monitor your specific procedures in real-time streamlining the entire process.Customary Closing Time FramesOnce the buyer and seller sign the contract, the closing process begins — and therein lies the rub. It almost certainly will not move as quickly as anticipated. While seamless closings are ideal for everyone involved, they rarely happen. This is where AtClose comes in to help the process.One would assume that the appraisal is to blame for extended turn times, however as it turns out, the culprit is said to be the title.  Lenders, realtors, title agents, and customers all want every transaction to go as smoothly as possible to ensure the best settlement experience.  AtClose’s technology keeps each of these stakeholders informed and ensures a more efficient transaction. At all times, each stakeholder can be made aware of the title status as well as have mechanisms in place to keep track of every curative item independently.  By keeping the parties informed and in sync, there are no surprises, and better service is provided to the consumer.With automated workflows that are driven by client-specific barcodes,  typists, as well as product delivery, can result in no-touch processing and partner notifications.  This process sets all parties up to provide and receive updates and products in real-time and helps to avoid miscommunication which could lead to closings being jammed into the end of the month.Here at AtClose, we are streamlining industry processes with our technology making it easier, faster, and more effective for everyone involved. Contact AtClose today to learn how we can help you!

Here at AtClose, we provide solutions to easily connect with your vendors based on your needs.Here is how our Vendor Management system worksWhen providing services in multiple geographic locations, you likely need hundreds of vendors at your fingertips. This often brings to mind quality, performance, and relationship management concerns. Thankfully, our system includes a robust vendor management module to help solve these concerns and more. From scorecards, reporting dashboards, and assignment decisions that can be configured to meet your needs, the system will do the rest for you. Based on your criteria, the module can be set up with your rules, your way.  Rules by product, location, price, quality, and service levels are all taken into consideration to route your orders in the most efficient manner possible with your desired results in mind.Once the orders are assigned to a vendor and the vendor has accepted your order you can then reach the vendor directly in the portal to exchange comments, status updates, and add attachments as needed.Read more: Speed of Delivery: Title Extending Closing TimesWhat AtClose Provides in Vendor ManagementVendors such as abstractors, appraisers, attorneys, real estate agents, settlement agents, and mortgage recorders can be automatically assignedCategorize vendors by location, product type, price, and other morePerformance scorecard reporting on demandPerform vendor due diligence with easeVendor compliance includes but is not limited to insurance and required license expiration trackingRepository for Contracts, W9, and background checks information, if requiredIncludes support for multiple vendor distribution modelsPlace controls on order and service levels for smooth, efficient, and error-free processingVendor self-service portal that allows new vendors to easily register onlineWork with a company that is always one step ahead by contacting AtClose today.

 Here at AtClose we are passionate about creating the most innovative solutions for our clients working in the real estate industry. We specialize in software packages for title production and process flow that can be configured and scaled to fit any size business. We handle our clients' needs with efficiency, flexibility, and scalability.AtClose, which is used by a number of title companies, ensures that transactions are accurate and efficient, and that employees follow the same procedures every time, reducing missing data, lost productivity, and costly errors.We offer you personalized style reporting of your processes. Once we provide you with your own personalized reporting, it is yours to access at any time free of charge. Our competition typically struggles with providing you with a title production that is customized to your needs and they usually charge you to access your own data! To help assist customers in making more informed business decisions AtClose made the decision to move its application reporting from a traditional reporting tool to Microsoft Power BI, the world's most popular BI tool.Customers will be able to see current and historical data to identify ways to increase profit, analyze customer behavior, track marketing representative performance, spot market trends, optimize operations, and discover issues and problems as a result of this move.AtClose will provide a data warehouse to clients so they can analyze their data however they want. Clients will be able to do analytics and reporting right out of the box with the Power BI tool. Did you know? AtClose is the only mortgage product running on AWS. AWS Cloud Economics developed the Cloud Value Framework to help organizations build a comprehensive business case for cloud by measuring and tracking progress against four key dimensions of value: cost savings, staff productivity, operational resilience, and business agility.Preparing You For SuccessOur vision has become a reality that benefits title professionals daily. This includes the creation of a standardized title information that spans the nation and empowers you with your data.We achieved this in part by responding to the industry’s increasingly ambitious productivity goals, including pioneering the automation of large-scale property title databases. We continue to refine our processes in an effort to reduce the expense of conducting and concluding property title searches improving the process as a whole.Are you ready to have your own individualized Title Production that you can access at any time? Work with the company that is always one step ahead by contacting AtClose today.

The post-closing industry is riddled with countless paperwork, uncertain delivery times and processes that rely on manual functioning. You can never truly forecast the amount of volume you will receive on any given day. We all can understand the cyclical cycles, month ends, mid-month closings, Friday dumps, etc. Your customers may be able to give you some estimation, but the ability to be precise had been elusive for years. With such unpredictable volumes from our clients, it made it difficult to integrate the order opening part of the process. Because sometimes it is not the client who is the delay, but it could be the borrower, notary, or even the overnight couriers. Delays in the manual routeThe manual route is a laborious process and involves several issues that can cause delays such as ability to gage staffing needs, prepare for scheduling time off, and in short, understanding your overall daily requirements. Being down even a few staff members can throw an entire day and deadline off schedule when you are looking at creating 2,500 manual orders daily into a production system. Dealing with such immense volumes manually itself is a hassle and can lead towards discrepancies resulting in low productivity. AtClose wanted to make a difference in handling bulk volumes through automation and the answer in fact was quite straight forward.The automation gateway to order opening:In order to process thousands of post-closing packages from multiple companies and lender, we required a unified solution that could improve our efficiencies and ensure we met client requirements regardless of the daily volumes we received. One of the major places we needed an uplift was in the order opening aspect.  We noticed our customers were starting to include a standardized barcode page within their packages. After deciding to explore options utilizing this barcode and the capabilities of the AtClose platform we realized that we could easily connect to our clients and leverage their internal barcodes for the order creation within our system. Eliminating manual order creationThe barcode and how we used it to automate the order creation aspect was a simple feature but had a major impact in terms of automating the entire order creation aspect. This feature has improved our efficiency by eliminating the need for manual order creation in most cases. This in turn allowed us to upscale when necessary, with no disruption to client service yet maintaining even better performance. Not having to rekey several orders a day is also a huge morale boost for our employees, and in today’s challenge of finding workers it is more important than ever. Today instead of manually creating majority of the orders, they simply point and click the client barcodes and the process is as automated as it can be. Leveraging the client barcodes has shown a reduction in the overtime costs, as we are able to output additional volume while still meeting our customers required SLA and improved our SLA on order creation to a 100%. Final thoughtsAtClose’s integration capabilities allow us a wide range of ways through which we can utilize automation techniques to make the entire process faster. In this specific case, we realized that a client’s barcode contains information which can be used for automating the process of order creation. Hence, we were able to scale quickly while maintaining quality and reducing overall costs in resource efforts. It goes at this point without saying, that if you cannot control the barcode or receive the order electronically, then sometimes you must leverage what you can receive to accomplish your objective.  

The Problem of Non-standardized Closing InstructionsFor years unstructured and non-standardized closing instructions have been a nightmare for the settlement agents. The more lenders a settlement agent works with the larger the deviation they have to deal with. Timing of when they expect to receive compared to when they actually receive is a problem that’s not going to dissipate anytime soon.Every lender has their own format of these key documents which is sort of the transactional manual for the closing. For some this is a 4-5 page document and for others it’s a 50 page document. Settlement agents typically extract the information from these documents based on their experience and working knowledge of the individual for the lender who prepared it. Another challenge settlement agents face is to train individuals how to read information from different lenders as they often have a totally different way of relaying the instructions. This often causes miscommunications and issues with the closings.While attending a presentation by James C. Lamphere (Home Services of America) and Kate Steinman (Wells Fargo) at the ALTA One 2018 Conference earlier this week, it was discussed that ALTA/MBA along with MISMO are working to resolve this key issue and trying to create standardize templates that they hope will be adopted by the majority of lenders and reduce closing errors and improve process efficiencies. With a standardization, settlement agent would not have to retrain employees from Lender to Lender.Working with companies like DocMagic and others they have created a draft Master Closing Instructions template as well as a transactional Closing Instructions Template. The template is divided into different sections and all the related information will be available at one spot so the settlement agent does not have to scroll up and down to find the information. Additionally, including a section for important dates Closing Date, Funding Date, Rate Lock Expires etc. will all be available within a single view as well as all the borrower information. Anyone familiar with the mortgage industry is aware the cycle time from proposed to adoption can be in years and this is a large initiative that has been going on for last 8 months and will probably extend to the tail end of 2019 and beyond as lenders adoption begins.This industry initiative will definitely help however with settlement agents from both an efficiency and reduced error standpoint. I was a little surprised discovering that although MISMO is involved, this is not the standardization of data but more like a well-defined and structured PDF document produced by the lenders according to the guidelines. For us, the technology platform providers (AtClose) we are always eager to add new automation and optimization to our platform. I feel it material to comment that it would have been more beneficial if settlement agents could import a standard data feed (XML for example) instead of a PDF document. While individuals will be able to easily identify the necessary components, unless standardization is added to the data elements within the document, technology providers will continue to have challenges importing such documents, and will be bound to reply on people to perform a final validation.