The document provider is set to complete the rollout of its full e-closing capability by April
As a document provider to the mortgage industry, Docutech is now undertaking efforts to offer full e-closing capability and expects to completely roll out the offering by April. As part of this goal, the company announced in September a partnership with Simplifile to improve e-closing for agents, lenders, and borrowers. Harry Gardner, executive vice president of eStrategies at Docutech, sat down with Mortgage Professional America to talk about current development at the company, their strategic vision, and technology trends in the industry.
MPA: What developments are underway at Docutech?
Harry Gardner: We are very close to releasing our full e-closing capability. We’ve had our own e-signatures in for a long time, and we do e-disclosures for our lender customers as a mainstream production operation for many years now. So we’ve taken that, we’ve redesigned our whole e-sign user interface this past year, and created a whole new UI, learning from the best of what’s out there and trying to make a better mousetrap in terms of a clear, clean e-signature experience for the borrowers. And now that we’ve done that, we’re building upon that to build up the full e-closing capability. And the newest thing is (in September) we announced our partnership with Simplifile, so what we bring to the table is the industry-leading e-recording capability. So the notarized documents can be electronically recorded in over 80% coverage of the population of the United States, and they also have e-notarization capability.
MPA: What other solutions and services does Docutech offer to the mortgage industry?
HG: Well, at our core, we’re a document provider. What we’re hearing from some of our larger lender customers who also have banking services is that they would like us to be their document provider not just for mortgage documents but for consumer lending and all kinds of other banking areas. So we’re really looking at taking our dynamic document engine and then expanding that way beyond just the mortgage confines to be a universal document engine.
So not only for consumer lending and areas like that, but even for customer communications, we’re finding that some of these large lenders have huge libraries of standard customer forms that they use to communicate. And in many cases, they’ll have something like 18,000 different forms or something, and of those, most of those are duplicates or very minor differences from one form to the other, but they have individual instances. So they’re looking to us to help them kind of automate that and streamline it and whittle that down to maybe like 1,000 or 2,000 unique forms instead of so many...
MPA: What is Docutech’s strategic vision moving forward?
HG: (T)he strategic vision is, both on the document and on the e-signature side, to become more universal in both regards. So universal documents in any kind of a vertical that our customers need. And then on the e-sign side, our e-signature engine can also be applied to any electronic document. So we anticipate the ability to enable our lenders not only to do e-closings for mortgage, but also to e-sign all of their other internal documents and consumer documents and things like that and just kind of give them that unified universal offering in both regards.
MPA: Do you foresee any major tech or software trends that will emerge within the next 12 months or so or even further down the line?
HG: I think the technology right now seems to be fairly stable. Probably the biggest thing that’s emerging right now is this remote notarization, the ability to electronically notarize documents through a video connection. That started with a Virginia law, and now it’s expanding to other states. … Montana, and then Nevada, Ohio, and Texas have all passed laws more recently.
So it really enables the notarization function to become much more convenient for the borrower. They can sit at home, connect through a video link, and actually sign their closing documents without leaving home.
Related stories:
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Online notary standardization effort launched
MPA: What developments are underway at Docutech?
Harry Gardner: We are very close to releasing our full e-closing capability. We’ve had our own e-signatures in for a long time, and we do e-disclosures for our lender customers as a mainstream production operation for many years now. So we’ve taken that, we’ve redesigned our whole e-sign user interface this past year, and created a whole new UI, learning from the best of what’s out there and trying to make a better mousetrap in terms of a clear, clean e-signature experience for the borrowers. And now that we’ve done that, we’re building upon that to build up the full e-closing capability. And the newest thing is (in September) we announced our partnership with Simplifile, so what we bring to the table is the industry-leading e-recording capability. So the notarized documents can be electronically recorded in over 80% coverage of the population of the United States, and they also have e-notarization capability.
MPA: What other solutions and services does Docutech offer to the mortgage industry?
HG: Well, at our core, we’re a document provider. What we’re hearing from some of our larger lender customers who also have banking services is that they would like us to be their document provider not just for mortgage documents but for consumer lending and all kinds of other banking areas. So we’re really looking at taking our dynamic document engine and then expanding that way beyond just the mortgage confines to be a universal document engine.
So not only for consumer lending and areas like that, but even for customer communications, we’re finding that some of these large lenders have huge libraries of standard customer forms that they use to communicate. And in many cases, they’ll have something like 18,000 different forms or something, and of those, most of those are duplicates or very minor differences from one form to the other, but they have individual instances. So they’re looking to us to help them kind of automate that and streamline it and whittle that down to maybe like 1,000 or 2,000 unique forms instead of so many...
MPA: What is Docutech’s strategic vision moving forward?
HG: (T)he strategic vision is, both on the document and on the e-signature side, to become more universal in both regards. So universal documents in any kind of a vertical that our customers need. And then on the e-sign side, our e-signature engine can also be applied to any electronic document. So we anticipate the ability to enable our lenders not only to do e-closings for mortgage, but also to e-sign all of their other internal documents and consumer documents and things like that and just kind of give them that unified universal offering in both regards.
MPA: Do you foresee any major tech or software trends that will emerge within the next 12 months or so or even further down the line?
HG: I think the technology right now seems to be fairly stable. Probably the biggest thing that’s emerging right now is this remote notarization, the ability to electronically notarize documents through a video connection. That started with a Virginia law, and now it’s expanding to other states. … Montana, and then Nevada, Ohio, and Texas have all passed laws more recently.
So it really enables the notarization function to become much more convenient for the borrower. They can sit at home, connect through a video link, and actually sign their closing documents without leaving home.
Related stories:
Cloudvirga, Docutech partner to ease disclosure generation
Online notary standardization effort launched
