Customer

A leading title insurance and settlement services provider.

Challenge

The growth of our client, a large title insurance company in the United States, involved the acquisition of several companies, which resulted in a highly disparate IT environment. More than one title and escrow systems were in use, and each system ran on a different platform. Some stand-alone applications were also in use by a large number of users.

Managing multiple, disparate software systems posed a major challenge. Supporting and coordinating across these systems was expensive and time-consuming. Our client discovered that adapting their IT infrastructure to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing industry had become a daunting task.

AtClose Solution

To address these challenges, our client implemented AtClose, a state-of-the art, web-based system for Title and Settlement services. One of the unique features that sets this solution apart facilitates centralized management for multiple companies, running as a single application instance. Implementing AtClose allowed our client to conveniently administer each of its acquired companies through a single, consolidated interface, while exercising complete control over them using the solution’s comprehensive set of features.

Nearly immediately, our client experienced a marked increase in productivity, thanks to the AtClose suite’s out-of-the-box support for integration with Black Knights Exchange, FedEx, UPS, ValuTrust, AgentNet for CPL, and eJackets. The suite’s cutting-edge Vendor Management and Underwriter Rate Management modules gave users powerful tools for more effective process and revenue management across all of its companies.

By providing a highly cost-effective solution that simplified and consolidated the management of multiple companies, AtClose improved our client’s ability to adapt more rapidly to changes in the highly challenging Title and Settlement industry. Through its use of advanced workflow-based technology and a highly scalable application architecture, AtClose replaced their disparate collection of information management tools with a single, integrated system for managing critical information across all of their companies.

Customer

A leading Title and Escrow company that communicates with a major lender for the bulk of its business.

Existing Process

Our client used a third-party portal to communicate with the lender. Every new order initiated by the lender had to pass through this portal before being sent to the title agent. This required the title agent to pay a per-click fee to the third party, with an average cost of $15, against every order. This method of communicating with the lender also required regular maintenance by in-house development resources.

AtClose Solution

The AtClose team developed a sophisticated solution that facilitated integration with the lender, eliminating the need for this third party service. This solution resulted in a direct channel between our client and the lender that supported all key events, both inbound and outbound, and covers the complete title and closing order lifecycle, including Good Faith Estimate (GFE) generation, order confirmation, Title Delivery and Curative, HUD statements, scheduling and post-closing. The AtClose lender integration solution uses an XML framework to send orders and receive status updates in a standards-based format, making it easy to configure for other partners’ needs.

Business Benefits

Implementing a direct lender integration allowed our client to eliminate the per-click and maintenance costs associated with the third-party communication service, and provided a secure, direct, and more efficient connection to the lender.

Implementing this custom integration cost $156,000. Based on an average of 10,000 files processed per month at $15 per file, the AtClose integration solution saved our client $594,000 over a 5 year period.

Customer

A premier provider in the title insurance and real estate settlement services industry that employs more than 500 personnel nationwide.

Existing Process

The recovery of the real estate market had generated a sudden spike in closing rates. As a result, our client experienced a substantial increase in the time and effort required for data entry during the preparation of HUD-1 forms, which contain many different sections and lines. Users had to go through lenders’ closing instruction files and enter this data manually. Users were also required to calculate and verify each of the various fees associated with the closing process before entering them into the HUD-1. In their existing environment, processing HUD-1 forms took between 30 and 55 minutes; our client’s capacity to serve their nationwide customer base was quickly outstripped by the sudden increase in workload.
Our client needed a way to accelerate the settlement process that did not compromise data integrity. To accomplish this, an automated solution was required that would eliminate manual fee calculation and data entry, allowing for quicker HUD-1 processing.

AtClose Solution

The Auto HUD module of AtClose automates the tedious task of preparing HUD-1 forms.
Thanks to its cloud-based design, our client was able to seamlessly integrate AtClose with its existing platforms. Once ensconced within their production environment, AtClose allowed our client to easily streamline their closing process as it adapted the lender’s closing instructions. The solution’s Auto HUD module calculated fees easily and accurately, generating a RESPA-compliant HUD-1 settlement document that incorporated data from the Good Faith Estimate.
Since many of our client’s closings involved multiple buyer and seller names, the Auto HUD module was configured to support this option. They also benefitted greatly from this module’s auto-email functionality, which lets users instantly email statements to other personnel working on a particular closing. This feature helped users across multiple locations to collaborate more easily, and drastically reduced the time it took to close a file. This new HUD-1 preparation process also allowed users to make important amendments, such as adding extra lines that a particular file might require.

Business Benefits

Using AtClose, our client experienced remarkable gains in productivity. Users could now generate HUD-1 forms automatically, and within minutes. AtClose offered them an efficient and flexible option to fit its closing needs.

Customer

A leading Title and Escrow company.

Existing Process

Our client was using different applications for various types of title, closing and valuation orders. In order to prepare fortnightly invoices and payments, processors in their Operations department had to generate reports from these applications and systems, and send these reports to the Accounting department. The Accounting staff would then manually enter this data into their accounting system, and finally generate invoices for customers and issue payments to vendors.

Because of the manual nature of this procedure, it was slow, prone to error, and required frequent follow-ups. Additional personnel were required to verify the data and correct any errors they discovered, which increased operational costs and made vendor management highly challenging.

AtClose Solution

The AtClose team developed a solution that automatically transferred data from the Operations department into the accounting system every night. In this way, all orders that were processed over the course of a workday became available for invoicing and issuing payments by the following morning.

The solution’s design allowed AtClose to identify GL codes, map fee amounts, and enter these items into the appropriate chart of accounts in the accounting system using the correct format. In addition to daily transactional data, the solution automatically propagated any changes in customer or vendor billing information to the accounting system.

Business Benefits

AtClose’s automated solution improved our client’s productivity. Their Accounting team no longer had to spend time entering data, which gave them more time to focus on their core responsibilities.

More regular and frequent updates from the Operations department improved the Accounting team’s ability to issue and track invoices and payments to customers and vendors in a timely fashion. This improved customer and vendor relations and reduced the incidence of delays, disputes and other issues.

Eliminating unnecessary manual entry led to drastic reductions in costly errors, prevented missing payments and receivables, and simplified the reconciliation of records in the Accounting department.