RON and Mobile Notary: Simplifying the Mortgage Signing Process

Marvin Stone (00:00)
Well, hey everyone, welcome back to Stewart in the Studio. We just had a great time with Brian Webster of Signer's Choice talking about everything from what is RON, what is IPEN, what's hybrid closings all the way through eNotes and how title agents and lenders can both get digital fast. Let's do this.

This is Stewart in the Studio from Stewart's thought leaders.

Okay, so let's start with just definitions. Okay, so you know, there are all these acronyms, there's IPEN. Y’know, where do we start? So just kind of take us off the top. Starting with RON.

Brian Webster (00:36)
Yeah, so RON. So RON is remote online notarization. You know, it's been around probably 15 years, 14 years at least, right? And so, what that is, it's a digital process where, you know, the individual signers, the principals and the notary meet in a two-way audio-video kind of conferencing session. So, I'm thinking of what we do every day at work. Whenever we're on meetings together. So, it's the same type of situation, right? The documents are presented electronically. Everything is signed electronically. The notarization is done electronically. And then the documents are locked, sealed, tamper-evident, applied to them, and then delivered back to the client, whether it's a lender, title company, fully electronic.

Marvin Stone (01:25)
So, no paper.

Brian Webster (01:27)
Absolutely no paper. You get the audit trail. You get the video recordings. So there’s so many kinds of artifacts that go along with the RON transaction that really provides, you know, a level of confidence, a level security that you don't get in any other type of transaction.

Marvin Stone (01:42)
And you were involved with the first RON, weren't you?

Brian Webster (01:45)
I was around, thanks for dating me there, I was around back then working in kind of that area of the industry. I was with the lender at the large depository bank, when this really started kind of coming to market. We were engaged on the client side and as a stakeholder with many of the early vendors that's how I met Rick the founder of NotaryCam and really got engaged with him and to really understand the process and from a lender's perspective. So where I worked we were we were lender, we were the investor, we were the servicer. We were the depository. Right? And so we had a role from every stakeholder's perspective and these types of transactions and so early on, we're getting in there to try to influence to make sure that this was evolving in the market in a way that was safe for everybody.

Marvin Stone (02:48)
We need to come back to the investor piece because that's always a big question. But real quick, you know, we talked about RON, IPEN, hybrids, we hear that hybrids are the best of both worlds, the worst of both worlds. You know, one minute flyover, like, where do those fit in?

Brian Webster (03:05)
So IPEN is kind of one step back from a RON transaction. So IPEN is in-person electronic notarization. So, think about 99% digital transaction, but you're meeting in person, right? So, you have a laptop, you have a tablet, the signers are meeting, sitting across the table next to each other, you know, because I know you like being close to me T.J., with the documents presented electronically. So, the digital documents, digital signatures, digital notarization, but you're just doing it in a face-to-face kind of situation. On the kind of a traditional mobile is paper documents, wet-ink signatures, you're traveling to a location, either a branch or a coffee shop, or, you know, notaries going to, you know, the signer's home.

Then the hybrid is kind of a combination of, you know, a few of those different things. So it's just like it sounds right so some documents are signed electronically, some documents are still paper documents that are done in traditional wet-ink fashion. It's usually bifurcated between you know I've referred to them as critical and non-critical documents, right? So, your critical documents are the ones that can impact funding and closing, right? And so that's you know the lenders bread and butter, right? I need to make sure I can close it. I need to make sure I can fund it. I need to make sure I can sell it.

Then you have your non-critical documents, right? You're CYOA documents. Those are the supporting documents that are thrown in a closing package. Traditionally, it's been because, well, the signing agent is there with the signer, and I can make sure that all of these documents get signed at the same time, but they don't really impact my ability to sell a loan.

There's just those additional supporting documents. So, from a hybrid, that's really kind of how it gets bifurcated.

T.J. Harrington (05:01)
Even in that space, you have title agents who have their own sets of documents. That constituency has not always been brought into the lender ecosystem. So even when you've intended to have an IPEN in times you've had a hybrid just because of those paper documents having to paper it out, you've really approached the settlement agent community to say, hey we have a solution they can bring you all in to really preserve that IPEN or RON transaction. So, I think that's a really cool feature of the platform that you help.

Brian Webster (05:26)
Absolutely. Yeah.

Marvin Stone (05:26)
For sure. And then I want to hit on the member experience of credit unions real quick on IPENs and RONs and then we’ll move on to all the hard stuff on all the acceptance and investor criteria. All that stuff.

Rich Kuegler (05:37)
Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, for a lender, credit union or community bank or major bank to have access to all those different closing options really helps them to meet the borrower or the member where they would be. Right. And so you're able to, as you mentioned, benefit from digital transaction in some cases, but also still that face-to-face and member engagement that’s so vital to credit unions and their relationship with the members.

Brian Webster (06:01)
Yeah, when I was when I was at CFPB and we did the eClosing pilot right? You know a credit union was one of our first kind of participants and I remember after it was all said and done you know I went to the executive sponsor and I was like, so what was your ROI on moving to digital? How much money did you say? And she was like, I have no idea. And I was like, well how do you measure success? Member satisfaction surveys. She said we saw a 12% bump in member satisfaction surveys. So, from the credit union perspective, and it's all about the member. It's all about the member experience, and what can they do to, like you said, meet the member where they want to be met, deliver how they want it to be delivered, and how they want to deliver that experience. And so having the options of different closings, such as RON or IPEN and mobile, really helps an institution, deliver that and meet that.

Marvin Stone (7:00)
For sure.

Rich Kuegler (7:01)
Right, right.

T.J. Harrington (7:01)
And you and Rich are both Navy vets, right?

Brian Webster (7:03)
Absolutely.

T.J. Harrington (7:04)
So, you guys are engaged with that constituent credit union. That’s such an important, a key part of the experience, right?

Brian Webster (7:11)
Absolutely. Thank you for your service, sir.

Rich Kuegler (7:14)
Thank you, too.

Marvin Stone (7:15)
No doubt. So, T.J., I always like to come to you first when we talk about state-by-state regulation, the patchwork of laws and things. RON is certainly no exception to that. So, I mean, just kind of kick that whole topic off. What does the lender need to know?

T.J. Harrington (07:28)
Yeah. One of the biggest challenges has been identifying early in the process what transactions are eligible. And I tell you, NotaryCam has built a really nice tool for that. And luckily we've seen more and more states sign on to RON. The challenge has been honestly at the county level. It's Betty Sue at the window. She sees a RON transaction submitted through Simplifile eRecord, doesn't like the way that it looks and kicks it out, despite there being an e-sign enabling statute with the RON statute on the books. And so, you know, there's still some-

Marvin Stone (08:00)
But at least there are only, what, 3,300 recording jurisdictions?

T.J. Harrington (08:02)
Right. It's not easy to solve. But, you know, I would say whatever technology partner you do engage on the RON side typically has built the toolset to enable that.

And title companies and settlement agencies are aware of places where there's challenges around it and we do try and get ahead of that. I mean just the work in particular that Brian has done personally, you know he's been a marquee figure in this space for a very long time.

Brain Webster (08:28)
We have been to about 3,200 of the jurisdictions

Marvin Stone (08:30)
You’ve got all the scars.

T.J. Harrington (08:31)
Just carrying the torch.

Rich Kuegler (08:32)
I wouldn’t say he’s the face of RON. But you could argue.

T.J. Harrington (08:35)
But, but.

Brian Webster (08:37)
I don’t like that at all. You need a better face.

Rich Kuegler (08:38)
You get what you get.

T.J. Harrington (08:38)
The point is that he’s carried the torch around and so you’ve seen more and more counties like dominos fall and get savvy to the fact that this is out there and that there's good controls around it. And even to speak to the secondary market requirements, some of the concerns initially were around enforceability and identity verification. And what we've seen is there's less risk now in RON than there is an in-person notarization because those notaries are not trained to do ID verification.

Marvin Stone (09:06)
Well, they can't really. I mean you don’t have the tools.

T.J. Harrington (09:09)
Well and it’s gotten more and more sophisticated at that level. Fake IDs have gotten more prevalent. With the type of tools that NotaryCam is rolling, that becomes a thing of the past. Plus, you have a recorded video. So, you're not creating defenses to foreclosure.

And secondary markets recognize that. So initially, there was reluctance to roll it out because of those issues. Those are pretty much gone away. And now it's about building the ecosystem, which we'll let Brian talk about a little bit.

Rich Kuegler (09:31)
I was just say, too, like, you've got the reluctance but then you’ve also got the question of how do I generate adoption? Or how do I make this work? How have you kind of addressed that?

Brian Webster (09:41)
So really it’s around education, right? So, you know, as T.J. was alluding to about the state requirements, how do you determine eligibility, right? So, you know, RON is determined at the state level. So, has a state passed RON regulations allowing the notarization to be conducted remotely, right? So, I think there's 45 states, and DC, that have legislation on the books, right? Those that are the holdouts are usually attorney states for various reasons. You know, there's some reluctance there. So, determining kind of can I do a RON, you're going to know up front because you're going to know by the property address, right? Same thing with the recording. You're going to know the recording jurisdiction. A lot of-there's loads of information out there available around whether or around whether or not a county will accept e-recording or not.

You know the Betty Sue thing right? And no offense to anyone named Betty Sue of course.

Rich Kuegler (10:48)
Always a slippery slope.

Brian Webster (10:49)
Yeah yeah. Just because the county is set up and approved to do electronic recording doesn't mean that they'll e-record a RON transaction or e-record real estate documents or e-record just an electronic signature. That is all very specific to the county recorder themselves, to the point where it's specific on the clerks working the desk.

Marvin, Rich, T.J. (11:16)
Yes, yes, yes that’s the problem.

Brian Webster (11:18)
We had one where we submitted it on Monday, got rejected, it, we submitted it on Tuesday, different clerk, and they accepted it.

Marvin Stone (11:23)
Wow. Well, this kind of goes to the whole topic, you know, you brought up, is the lender has to kind of figure out like, okay, for this transaction, is it going to be a go or not? And if I do it this way, now am I worried about the investor or am I worried about and even the title underwriter? I mean, there's so many variables in this. Is it just, is it that hard? Or am I making it too hard?

T.J. Harrington (11:43)
No, no, you're right. And one thing, because NotaryCam has been an incumbent in the market, they've gone and got buy-in from all the underwriters. That kind of part of it's taken care of. The technology's been vetted, and so the insurability risk is gone. But for a long time, and again, to give kudos to Brian for his work, that secondary market, when you're a lender, you don't always know what your best execution is when you go to sell a loan. You don’t always know what investor it is and there’s a whole capital markets play around that. And so for a long time it was, okay the transaction’s eligible, but I'm taking a hit because I'm doing an eNote because I'm having to sell this other investor may not be the best execution. That's gone away to a certain extent because of the work that people like Brian have done to educate those investors and even the cost savings from not having to do post-close from having speed of secondary market delivery.

I get that note e-signed or electronically signed, and I'm able to get it off the warehouse line most immediately because there's not this time around it and there's an ecosystem around the vaulting and the custodian around that and working with the warehouse lender and moving all the collateral. NotaryCam solved for that in a turnkey manner so that part of the ecosystem's been developed so those concerns are infinitely less than they were even three or four years ago.

Marvin Stone (12:59)
But maybe not socialized widely.

T.J. Harrington (13:02)
That’s it.

Brian Webster (13:04)
But yeah, and let's just start with the investor requirements, right? And so as a lender, as an institution, you know, I have to make sure that I can sell a loan.

T.J. Harrington (13:11)
Yeah.

Marvin Stone (13:12)
For sure. Yeah.

Brian Webster (13:13)
You know, credit unions and depositories have loan programs that they portfolio, right? Perfect, perfect opportunity to do these specialized kind of types of transactions, RON, eNote etc. Because they control it. They don't have, you know, downstream stakeholders that they've got to worry about what they’re going to require. But you know, even in kind of their traditional investor community, the GSEs, by RON transactions, all of the government, you know, agencies, you will ensure ability programs, you know, will ensure a guarantee, RON transactions. So, all of those type of takeouts are fully supporting RON transactions today. Where you get into, you know, some less of a supportive ecosystem is some of your aggregate investors.

Some of your non-GSE programs because they just haven't gotten there and talking to a lot of those.

Marvin Stone (14:08)
But it’s 2026.

Brian Webster (14:09)
It is 2026, you're right.

Rich Kuegler (14:11)
But we've also been talking about that RON was going to take over adoption for 15 years, maybe even more or right so it's been a long time because of those hurdles and now that's starting to unwind a little bit.

Brian Webster (14:22)
Well, you know eNotes are going to matter one day that we've been saying that for 26 years.

Marvin Stone (14:26)
But they're starting to matter if you look at the statistics.

Rich Kuegler (14:28)
Yeah the percentages have really increased.

T.J. Harrington (14:30)
We also haven't had a foreclosure cycle to test those eNotes from an enforceability standpoint. We’re getting there.

But the technology around ID, ID verification, the coalescing around standards around data security, the preservation of the actual recorded session, all that has caught up to basically where that's no longer a concern. And I think the aggregators are still catching up on that part.

Brian Webster (14:53)
Well, and, you know, previous life before coming over here, you know, working at a investor servicer, you know, we had the fortunate or unfortunate, you know, opportunity to test eNote enforceability and foreclosure in courts. And it was never an issue. Enforceability of an eNote, it was never an issue. There may have been a few cases that didn't go our way, but it had nothing to do with the eNotes, right, and enforceability. The other benefit to that is, you know, you've you never lose a note, right? You never lose a document, because everything has always been electronic, right?

Rich Kuegler (15:34)
Back to the quality piece of it too right so now you've got a higher quality portfolio if you're portfolioing or if you're an investor now you've got better there better intel on what you actually have in that transaction.

Brian Webster (15:47)
And going back to the requirements right and so talking to several investors like why are you not supporting this, why aren't you doing this and some it's not a priority right? They don't have the technology to support it yet, right? I want to do it but you know regulatory environment changes and other investor changes you know kind of shift their technology prioritization.

Marvin Stone (16:10)
What if?

Brian Webster (16:11)
What if? Others you know just don't want to and then you know we had this other kind of hurdle you know in the in the market because of some language that was in the GSC seller servicer guide that said a seller had to reproduce the RON video upon request, paraphrasing.

And servicers and sellers read that in a way that I themselves had to keep a RON, copy of the RON report, which they don't have to, right? We as a service provider as the RON platform keep it for 10 years because we have to.

Rich Kuegler (16:50)
That's important to know too because that's been a major adoption issue of like where do I get this bandwidth? How do I do that from a technology standpoint?

Brian Webster (16:54)
But that recently went away, so hopefully it'll open up some of some of the investors getting back into this.

Marvin Stone (17:00)
So, let's move on to talk about the member experience a little bit. You know, we're really in the credit union space. You kind of brought up really what's a competitive advantage when they run their own book and they have their own loan programs that are unique. That really kind of gives a way to compete on the experience versus maybe what the fintechs have in their advantage.

Rich Kuegler (17:23)
Right, right. I mean, our credit union clients are looking for ways that they can drive a better member experience all the time. They realize that they're not necessarily gonna be the cheapest. Or maybe even the most efficient just because, you know, a mortgage or a home equity transaction might be one of many different types of consumer lending vehicles that they provide to their members. So being able to provide a possible, you know, good touch amount, so they stay engaged with those members, but also take advantage of the technology, really puts RON or even an IPEN solution as a great as opportunity.

Brian Webster (17:58)
You know, it goes to this like omnichannel or omni-options type approach, right? And if you think about, you know, the customer profile or the member profile for a credit union can vary greatly between, you know, higher net worth sophisticated, you know, clientele to younger generation that wants immediate gratification and I just want to be able to go online and do what I want to, when I want to, how I want to do it. And so, you know, credit unions need to be able to service all of those different type of members, those different type of clientele, right? So, being able to support, you know, wanting to come into the branch and sit down with their banker and conduct all of the transactions and I can still do it electronically, right, via IEPN? Or, you know, that younger sophisticated or not even younger, right? I mean, I'm not young. I still want to do everything.

Rich Kuegler (18:57)
But very tech-forward. Yeah, but yeah, get back to that. So omnichannel, right, because now it's not just real estate transactions. You can talk about what you've done with your business and that's huge for that.

Brian Webster (19:08)
Yeah, so like with RON and NotaryCam, I would say less than half of my transaction volume is real estate transactions. So, you know, we span across real estate, non-real estate, auto lending, credit card lending, and not just in lending. You know, identity verification, new account setups, consumer lending, so basically any situation, especially a credit union or a depository, what's to be able to deliver a notarization service to their members, they can have one provider that can span across all of those different use case scenarios, right? So, and even if a member needs something notarized, right, like, you know, Do I go to my bank, do I go down to the post office? Where do I go? Oh wait. When I did my home equity transaction with my credit union, you know, last year I did everything remotely.

I wonder if I could get this document notarized in the same way and they can come back to you and it creates that sticky relationship with members, not just, you know, from a financial and lending perspective, but just in the relationship overall.

Rich Kuegler (20:22)
And then it could be something consistent as well.

Brian Webster (20:25)
Yeah, absolutely.

Rich Kuegler (20:25)
So now the credit union can benefit from having a consistent experience depending, it doesn't matter about the price.

Brian Webster (20:30)
And whenever a credit union member or any type of customer starts thinking about where do I go to get this done, you start training them to think, well, my credit union does this. My partner does this and be able to kind of, that's the first thought that comes to mind. And so, when they're buying a car, when they're looking at consumer lending products, if whatever they need, that's the first thought that comes to show us.

T.J. Harrington (20:56)
So we hear from credit unions and customers continuously that they want to roll RON, but they may not have the tech budget to roll it out, where there's the need to coordinate doc providers, there's the need to build an ecosystem where the custodian and the warehouse bank and all those constituents.

Rich Kuegler (21:09)
They don’t have a vault.

Marvin Stone (21:11)
An eVault.

T.J. Harrington (21:13)
An eVault. And so, there's a lot of concern about spend, credit unions always spend on member experience, but not always on technology. It's always a challenge for them to find to find that. You've really taken that out of the equation with what you've built. Do you want to share a little bit about your solution?

Brian Webster (21:30)
Hitting on all those points, you know, I've worked at two different lenders that implemented digital mortgage and have the battle scars to kind of show that. And what really kind of was the common theme is coordinating all the different moving parts right, not just from a technology spend, but from an operation. And you know just process flows and things like that. So, what we've tried to do is kind of solve that problem and in turn it starts to bleed into benefits kind of what you're talking about right and so you know what I'm really kind of alluding to is you know building out tools to put into the hands of a title agent right?

The person closing the transaction the one executing the documents, the one that is actually ensuring that documents are signed correctly, finished correctly, to ensure clear, marketable title and transfer of ownership, a real property, right? So we've taken all of these tools and embedded into our single platform. So we can take dumb PDF documents, we flag and tag all the documents, we can get the data, we can generate an eNote, we can deposit it into an eVault, we can deliver it to a lender's, we can either provide a lender their own eVault, we can deliver it into the custodian, the warehouse lender, the investor, all of this kind of independently of kind of the lender really needing to step in and do all of this themselves, right?

And so, what we've tried to do is take all of that burden away from the lender, given into the hands of kind of the title agent to let them be that transformation agents. But where that gets is the credit union doesn't have a big technology span to get started.

Rich Kuegler (23:27)
Right, right. Yeah, it takes that out of the out of the way.

Marvin Stone (23:22)
Yeah, which is really key, that whole sort of “done for you” approach, because I think what's happened is over time, people are like, oh no, I looked at the whole e-thing, and that was hard, and they sort of remembered that, they haven't really kind of revisited that because of the way the market's been. They haven't come back to that.

Brian Webster (23:43)
So they go to the credit union, right? I don't have a warehouse lender. So I don't have to worry about getting approval to fund the transaction. I'm a depository, or typically they just sell to the GSEs because they're not selling into these aggregators. So funding the transaction is not an issue. Selling it is not an issue because the GSEs buying these every single day. So really it's just the credit union saying, yes, we're going to do this and finding the right partner that can come in there with the right tools and technology to help them get started.

Rich Kuegler (24:16)
We know somebody.

T.J. Harrington (24:18)
Yeah, and in educating the title company right if you've done a great job and outreach with building understanding in the marketplace for title agents how to use these tool sets and that's a big focus of where you've been kind of…

Brian Webster (24:30)
Where can I find some title agents that can help me do that?

Rich Kuegler (24:32)
Coincidentally, we know some people.

Brian Webster (24:32)
Yeah, we might.

Marvin Stone (24:35)
So, let's move on to compliance and confidence and insurability, kind of the really toughest part of this whole thing because-

Brian Webster (24:43)
The four horsemen of the apocalypse.

Marvin Stone (24:45)
Yeah, right. I mean, it's pretty tough, you know, and especially I want to talk a little bit about AI and deep fakes, I mean, because there's some, there's some concern there as well. So I know what are you seeing as far as, you know, KBA, knowledge-based authentication was like the Holy Grail, that was the gold standard, but maybe not as much anymore with what's going on. So where are we today?

Brian Webster (25:12)
So, you know, what we as a notary provider, as a notary, as the software, you know, what we have to do is written in state law, right? And regulations promulgated by the Secretary of State's office, and those say you have to do credential analysis, which is that forensic review of an ID document, and in 37 states, 38 states, roughly, you have to do knowledge-based authentication for ID proofing. And it's written in law. Right, and it's written in law. So the ability to kind of shift away from that is not really an option, right? We have to do these things. There are some states that allow ID proofing to be completed using biometrics, which is facial recognition, right? And so comparing the picture of the signer with the image from the ID. Not all underwriters or not all stakeholders really support that. There's discussions going back and forth. That's really up to kind of your stakeholder. It gets into title under writer requirements, investor requirements.

But those are the minimums, right? Those are the minimum things that you have to do. A solid service provider and a trusted partner doesn't do just the minimum, right? Because we have a stake in this as well, for sure, right? Like, we have a duty to our partners and our clients to make sure that we're doing the transaction in a legal and compliant and secure manner, right? So, you know, you do that through additional tools, you do that through training, policies, and procedures, which we all have in place, that we're continuously evaluating and updating. On the technology side, because of, you know, deep fakes and filters and AI, as always a big threat in the real estate industry, always looking at additional technologies that can help combat that, right? But it all isn't just about the technology. It is about the people.

It's about the training and it's about the procedures in place. And that's where I think some stakeholders kind of miss the boat. They only focus on the technology. Well the technology…

Rich (27:23)
They don’t know how to use it. Right. It's a tool.

Brian Webster (27:25)
It's a tool. It's a tool to help you do your job. There's still a notary involved. Yeah. Training the notary on how to look for. What to look out for giving them the right procedures to follow to ensure that they are making sure that they're doing everything that they need to do in order to ensure the true identity of the person in front of them. Like we had one that we require the signer to hold their ID up to the camera right you know the requirement that they show that this is the idea used to pass credential analysis. I am the holder of that ID. And it is me on the license.

When they held the ID up to the camera, it interfered with the filter that the signer was using that then showed the true person behind the filter was not the person that they were portraying themselves to be, right? And so caught that one, cleared that out, you know, reported it and stopped the transaction. You know, AI is with the deep fakes is getting better and better, so it's not just a filter, but there's tools that we've implemented around liveness checks. From the ID verification, but also in room. There's ways that you can monitor the video stream in order to do that to help detect deep fakes, right?

And so, you know, even though the ways to combat the fraudsters and the criminals were always, you know, a step behind, you know, we're a fast follower in keeping up with that to make sure that we're protected.

T.J. Harrington (29:00)
It's interesting that you mentioned the people part of the process, because you recently became the leader of Signature Closers which is Stewart's notary company. And have deployed a platform called Signer's Choice. Talk a little bit about some of the innovation you're driving there.

Brian Webster (29:13)
Yeah, so going back to it, you know, it's beyond just the technology, right? It's the, you know, people process technology, right?

And so, you know, with, you know, the mobile notary side, under Signature Closers, and NotaryCam on the RON side, we saw a lot of synergies there, a lot of overlap, right? As we were evaluating this and figuring out the best way to deliver, you know, that premier solution to our customers, right, not just from lenders, credit unions, but title agents as well, building out kind of Signer's Choice. And Signer's Choice is exactly what it says, right? It really provides the option to deliver the option of whatever the signer wants to do and whatever kind of it wants to do and whatever kind of method they want to be able to complete the transaction, right? So you can order a RON transaction, you can order a mobile notary transaction, mobile with IPEN, but we also have our eSign capability as well.

You know, eSign360 is our eSign tool that we've rolled out. So truly any type of signature solution or signing solution that, you know, your customer needs, we have that in a single offering under the Signer's Choice brand.

Rich Kuegler (30:27)
Yeah, that's a key part of, from a Stewart standpoint on our infrastructure, right? Being able to deliver that as a value add, but as part of the process. And as you mentioned, even for title agents, that might work with Stewart's agency group as well, which is really neat.

Brian Webster (30:42)
That was, you know, what it's always looking at what problem are we trying to solve, right? And, you know, operational problems, you know, cost problems, right? How can we make it easy for our customers to work with us, right? We want them to want to work with us, right? We want it to be easy, right? You know, one of the challenges always faced, especially in a RON transaction, was, you know, an agent, a lender, sends the transaction request over, and you can't get the borrower to pass, you know, credential analysis or KBA, or like, we've added this document now, we can't do RON or Betty Sue is working this week so we're not going to be able to record. And so traditionally it was, sorry I can't help you, right, here's, cancel the transaction, here's your documents, good luck.

Marvin Stone (31:34)
Right. Right. Print the paperwork.

Brian Webster (31:34)
That created burden for the title company, created burden for the lender, because now I've got to recoordinate and I've got to find another signing service.

T.J. Harrington (31:43)
Bad customer service experience.

Rich Kuegler (31:45)
An additional reluctance for adoption of that kind of thing as an alternative.

Brian Webster (31:50)
You know, with Signature Closers and NotaryCam coming together, as Signer's Choice, you're kind of eliminating that issue because if we can't close it via RON, we just convert it to mobile.

Marvin Stone (32:03)
From the title agent perspective, you're very involved with ALTA and the title agent community, you're at every ALTA event. What does it take to be a title agent who wants to be cutting edge and offer these services? Because back in the day when this whole thing first got rolling they had to have complicated technology that completely different process for anything electronic it was hard okay? So what is it like today? Title agent, you're talking to a title agent, and how do they do this?

Brian Webster (32:31)
They just send the transaction to me.

Marvin Stone (32:33)
…Okay.

Rich Kuegler (32:34)
Can’t get much more simple than that!

Marvin Stone (32:35)
That's pretty easy. There's what? Set up the whole thing. I mean seriously what does it take?

Brian Webster (32:40)
I mean there's setting up contracts and billing and configuration within the system right so with any implementation of setting up a new platform.

Marvin Stone (32:50)
But that’s not like a six-month deal.

Brian Webster (32:50)
It’s not a sixth month deal. I mean we get clients stood up within a week typically, right? In order to deliver that cutting edge technology. You know, in order for that title agent to really be the digital transformation agent for a lender. Right. That's what our service, that's where our tools deliver. Right? So, you know, again, going back to it, you know, the title agent gets their dumb PDFs from the lender, they add their dumb PDFs from their doc provider, they send it to us. We flag and tag everything. We create the tag documents, we generate the eNote. We execute all the documents, we drop the eNote into the NotaryCam eVault, and based on kind of some of the data that comes over from the agent or from the lender, lender says, all right, you're going to send it back to the lender eVault with this MERS org ID, or you're going to send it to my custodian or my warehouse lender directly.

All of that is just configuration and setup, right? On the back end, as we are getting clients implemented onto the transaction. So, they just send us everything, it gives us kind of the metadata to say what to do with the transaction after we're done, and then the systems do it automatically. MERS made some changes a couple of years ago, thanks, Harry, that allows, well allow us to do this very thing, right. Previously you had to have the eNote registered on MERS under the lender's org ID, right? So now I can deliver an unregistered note through MERS, or I can register it on the lender's behalf as a DFT, delegatee.

But those changes really allow us to do what we're doing today and to deliver that solution. So, you know, title agent that says, I just want to be able to offer this to my customers, we've already built all of the technology in order to do that.

T.J. Harrington (34:38)
It's so powerful for a title agent to go to their lender to say, I know your business, let me help you with this business problem. That's incredible.

Rich Kuegler (34:57)
It solves a key issue.

Marvin Stone (34:58)
For sure. But you did say a few things for somebody not tuned into this whole thing. You're talking about dumb PDFs, and that means it comes over just as a basic old PDF that's not tagged for eSignature.

Brian Webster (35:11)
Don't need smart docs.

Marvin Stone (35:11)
And that's been a huge piece. So I wanna make sure that we talk about that because that means any PDF, if any PDF comes over and previously, somebody had to sit there and tag and drag.

T.J. Harrington (35:23)
Click, click, click.

Marving Stone (35:24)
Yes, exactly right T.J. So it was so painful, that was very labor intensive. And so you take care of all of that. Is that right?

Brian Webster (35:31)
We did. We did. Yeah. So, you know, sitting in a lender's office, was it two months ago and you know they're like well I've got to change doc providers I've got to be able to get my docs tagged. I was like no you don't. You don't have to do anything different. Generate your documents as you do today, right? We have integrations and partnerships with doc providers, right? And so, there's multiple ways that we solve for this problem. But for the for the dumb docs that we get over, we have the tools in place that will automatically tag the documents we're running automatically tag the documents. We're running out about a 93 to 94% accuracy rate on the tag, right? Which anybody that used kind of these AI tools know that that's pretty darn good. We've taken that hard workout, right?

The tagging, you know, early on was templates, right? Templates work great if you have a static document.

Marvin Stone (35:25)
Were they? I mean they broke a lot.

Rich Kuegler (36:26)
Limited. If you have a static document, nothing.

Brian Webster (36:30)
Same document same format. Nothing moves. Right but I mean title documents are always the same right? So you never run into that issue.

Marvin Stone (36:38)
Okay.

Brian Webster (36:42)
But you know in real estate transactions, they never work right like just one additional name, one additional line in the legal description everything moves to the next page. So being able to use this kind of dynamic tool has really helped us eliminate a lot of the time that we had staff and notaries tagging documents clients tagging documents. We then can take, you know, the data the documents that are coming over, get the data we need and then generate an eNote. A smart doc, GSE, MISMO-compliant eNote, right? So, we solve that problem and then we already have our own eVault which we can either white label and resell or operate independently to be able to be able to deposit the eNote. And then deliver it wherever it needs to go post-closing.

So, we really kind of addressed, tried to address and solve all of these problems. Again, things that I've learned, you know, when I was much younger.

Rich Kuegler (37:39)
Right right.

Marvin Stone (37:39)
The scars.

Brian Webster (37:40)
Just had more hair in order to be able to do this, right?

T.J. Harrington (37:45)
You solve basically for a turnkey digital strategy and built a fulfillment network via title agents and notaries nationally. So you're basically a one-stop shop. So if a lender wanted to roll digital in 2026, they're calling you.

Brian Webster (37:56)
They should. Well, call Rich and then call us.

Marvin Stone (37:58)
There you go.

Rich Kuegler (37:59)
We know people.

Marvin Stone (38:00)
And if a lender says, oh, I need to get this, my title agency network, because they've got their favorite title agents across the region or country or whatever, I want to get them set up. I mean, to be fair, you mentioned a lot of things that title agents don't deal with every day. MERS, eNotes, smart docs, I mean if I'm, if I were still a title agent today, I'd be like, oh, that's noise.

And so, I'm just taking it at your word here to say, you've taken care of all of that. You have to walk them through the whole thing, and they can be on the, like T.J. says, on the cutting edge in the digital mortgage world for the closing space just by implementing your service.

Brian Webster (38:39)
And the great thing is that nothing's really different for the title agent.

Marvin Stone (38:39)
Right.

Brian Webster (38:40)
So, the title agent still sends us a closing order.

Marvin Stone (38:45)
Just like... they do today.

Brian Webster (38:45)
The only difference is it's like, yeah, let's generate an eNote on this.

Rich Kuegler (38:49)
Right. So you enable that with your technology.

Brian Webster (38:50)
Right. So, through direct integrations, we've got partners that are building out additional data points that they can pass all of that data to us through the API. But, you know, if you come to the UI in order forms, you can select, hey, generate an eNote, send it to this MERS org ID, which the title agent gets from the lender, right? So that's two additional data points that they need.

Marvin Stone (39:13)
Anybody can do that. That's not hard.

Brian Webster (39:15)
And it really isn't changing the agent's workflow. Again, you know, going back to, and Fred, you know, talks about this all the time, we have to make it easy for agents to work with us, right? And so, you know, when this first rolled out, it was, you know, giving it to the agent, agents, tag document, the agent has to do all of this work, right? And that was not making it easy for the agents, right? You wanted to give, in order for adoption.

And this is something I’ve talked about before. In order for adoption to really be successful, you have to make it to the point where the adopter doesn't know that they're doing it.

Marvin Stone (39:58)
Right. So this reminds me of a quote from a couple years ago, a few years back, from a lender at a major bank who said, understand that the only thing worse than a bad process is two good ones. Meaning that it's so hard to have separate processes. What you've done is integrate with the singular process that a closer has, so it's not this major outlier that they have to go then that switch to.

Brian Webster (40:21)
Well, in getting to the process, right, and you know, lender adoption has always been you know a roadblock that, well, I've got to have two different workflows, right, or 50 different workflows because it's a property estate. You know, a friend of mine who runs, was running lending in a bank who was like, well, if I want to do digital and traditional, I have to have two different workflows. It's like, no, you don't, right? I mean, taking a loan from application to, you know, secondary market, it's a manufacturing process, right? It's an assembly line. And in order to be efficient, you need that process to work simultaneously, regardless of the product, the property location, the bar, we're tied, right.

The more efficient and singularity you can get and the similarities supporting you know any of your different loan products and offerings into that single workflow of course the more efficient the higher bottom line is I mean that makes sense for everybody we all benefit from that. The analogy that I like to use is this manufacturing process is kind of like the loan highway right and you know the endpoint is getting to the closing table and all you need to determine is which exit do I take? Do I take this exit, which means I'm going to email the documents or I'm going to print them out and ship them to the notary? Or am I going to push them into an eclosing platform and I'm going to push them over to a NotaryCam in order to execute the documents electronically? Leading up to that point, nothing is different. Right?

Getting to the eligibility, what can I offer the signers, what can they do? Of course, those are questions that get asked along the way. But then when you get to the point, it's like, okay, which way am I going to go? But in reality, from a lender's perspective, I'm typically emailing documents or pushing them into a platform regardless.

Only when it gets to the notary, the signing agent, do they print it out before meeting with the signers. Or is it loaded into kind of any closing solution like NotarCam before meeting with the signers. And then which on-ramp am I taking to make the return trip? Am I scanning them back? Am I dropping them in a mailing envelope and shipping them off? Or am I pushing a button that pushes the documents back to the lender instantaneously?

And again, no worry about missing signatures, missing dates, documents getting lost, delays. All of those things end up costing money to someone.

This way you eliminate those kind of hiccups along the way and really create, you know, the maximize efficiency that you can in in that that whole closing process right? One of the banks that I was working with, they're like oh if we get an eNote if we get electronic package our entire post-closing process is going to be different. And the question was is like okay what happens when you get a paper package? Well, we get the paper package, we scan it.

T.J. Harrington (43:31)
Scan it.

Brian Webster (43:32)
We load it into our doc, right, yes.

Marvin Stone (43:32)
That sounds about right.

Brian Webster (43:33)
Okay, what happens when you get an electronic package? We load it into our doc platform. I'm like, so, and then the post-closing process kicks off, right?

So, the post-closing process isn't different. Right?. How you start that process or how you get your docs, how you get your data, how you get your information to kick-start the process. That isn't different. And so coming to that realization from a lender, from a title agent, from anybody like that, really starting to visualize it and see is like it's not as different as we think it's going to be.

Rich Kuegler (44:11)
Or it doesn't have to be because Signer's Choice could be that utility all the way through that part of the process.

Marvin Stone (44:16)
All right. So, Rich, we're going to be at the ACUMA conference. Is that right?

Rich Kuegler (44:22)
We are. We've got some exhibit planned. We've got some sponsorships there as well as some sessions, looking to set up a bunch of meetings with clients and also prospects as well so happy to talk to any credit unions that's really looking to take advantage of the Signer's Choice platform or of Stewart in general.

Marvin Stone (44:39)
Okay, and if they just want to be cutting-edge in their market, they can talk to you about where to start?

Rich Kuegler (44:42)
Exactly right. Happy to help.

Marvin Stone (44:43)
And Brian, you're going to be at ALTA ONE. Is that right?

Brian Webster (44:45)
Every time.

Marvin Stone (44:47)
Okay, excellent. Great group of title agents there, obviously, every single time. Always wanting to learn about the latest in technology. So, if they want to get a hold of you, they're going to get to signerschoice.com or they're going to go to notarycam.com. Either way, they can find you and you can spell it out so that they don't have to figure out about tagging docs and eNotes and all of that.

Brian Webster (45:03)
Right all roads lead back to me.

Marvin Stone (45:05)
Good, good. OK, great. That's it for Stewart in the Studio. Find more episodes and insights at stewart.com/lender. We'll see you next time.

Disclaimer (45:14)
This podcast is for informational purposes only and reflects the views of the speakers. It should not be considered legal or business advice, and listeners should consult their own advisors before making decisions.