The Mortgage Industry Standard Maintenance Organization (MISMO) announced last week that the organization is looking for participants for an initiative focused on standardizing pre-closing title document data sets.
MISMO hopes that the initiative will streamline the business process and improve the efficiency of the closing process.
The process for reviewing pre-closing title data and documents is currently not standardized, meaning that it can differ from brokerage to brokerage or even agent to agent. This frequently results in delayed document review and general inefficiencies in pre-closing procedures.
In an industry often maligned for its inefficient procedures and lack of tech adoption, the MISMO initiative will hopefully give some standardization to an industry whose standards and regulations can differ from county to county.
Due to these varying regulations, MISMO will focus its efforts on standardizing the data sets of nationally used pre-closing documents including the American Land Title Association’s Closing Protection Letter (CLP) and Title Commitment, and the Request for Fee Sheet. The CLP forms a contract between a title insurance underwriter and a lender, in which the underwriter agrees to indemnify the lender for actual losses caused by certain types of misconduct by the closing agent, while the Title Commitment is a promise from your title company to issue the title insurance policy after the closing is completed. These documents are required nationwide and title and real estate agents have access to standard templates from ALTA.
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To tackle this challenge, MISMO will form a new development workgroup. The deliverable goals of the DWG will include soliciting participants for the initiative and then creating a standard dataset for each of the pre-close title document. MISMO expects the DWG will exist for one year, but it will not be disbanded until the initiative is completed. Parties interested in participation who are MISMO members can join the collaborate site established in “MISMO Connect.”
MISMO announced in April that data analytics giant Black Knight and digital mortgage vendor platform Stavvy received remote online notarization compliance. They were the ninth and 10th companies, respectively, to receive the special certification in the program’s first year.
Originally introduced in April 2020, the MISMO RON compliance certification was designed to assure RON tech providers meet a universal set of standards. Credential analysis, borrower identification, capturing and maintaining a recording of the notary process electronically, audio and video requirements, record storage and audit trails all fall under MISMO’s measurable requirements.
