Lenders are digitizing the mortgage closing process to improve borrower experience and increase operational efficiency. However, lenders cannot achieve these results by purchasing and implementing a digital closing solution alone. They must ensure their settlement partners—who are ultimately responsible for conducting the closing—will adopt the technology and use it as intended. Without settlement’s buy-in, lenders struggle to scale digital closings.
The question is, how do lenders ensure that settlement will adopt their digital closing technology? In this article, we will break down the two critical factors required to ensure settlement adoption.
Settlement and lenders must partner together
Lenders should start their digital closing journey with a platform that already offers widespread settlement usage. When settlement offices already know and use a digital closing platform, they’re more likely to execute your closings digitally.
At Snapdocs, more than 40,000 settlement offices use our platform to conduct digital closings. This means that when a lender closes via Snapdocs, there’s a good chance the settlement agent already uses the platform and will therefore readily partner in completing the closing digitally.
Why? On any given day, a settlement agent typically must switch between more than eight different closing products as they collaborate with each of their lenders. Each product utilizes its own unique sign-on process and credentials. It’s a fragmented and cumbersome process for agents, requiring them to remember multiple usernames and passwords. This manual process slows them down and invites errors. Any number of obstacles might ultimately lead them to prefer a wet sign to a digital one, for a given closing.
Settlement partners must experience better outcomes than before
The platform you choose should be purpose-built to deliver value to your settlement partners. Settlement shouldn't view your digital closing technology as just another “lender portal.” Instead, the digital closing technology should make settlement’s lives easier–thereby increasing settlement efficiency and ensuring adoption.
This is why Snapdocs has built our digital closing platform with settlement workflows in mind. We do this by offering:
- An intuitive user interface for settlement
- Digital title document capabilities
- Centralized communication platform with real-time status updates
- Direct connection to notary scheduling
Lender success stories
With Snapdocs, lenders are able to immediately plug into a settlement network that ensures adoption and drives results. This is why over 97% of settlement agents using Snapdocs opt-in to hybrid closings, complete the closing as intended, and immediately scanback the completed documents right to your LOS.
Here are a few examples of customers that experienced strong settlement adoption after implementing Snapdocs’ digital mortgage closing solution:
- TMF: 99% of TMF’s closings have the completed package uploaded to Snapdocs by settlement. With such high settlement engagement, TMF can give funding authorization once the completed package is uploaded, instead of waiting to receive the physical documents.
- Evergreen: The team now has a single process for interacting with all of their settlement agents for all closings. By standardizing and streamlining how they work with their partners, Evergreen has achieved greater efficiency internally.
- GMFS Mortgage: The company’s settlement scanback opt-outs decreased from 4% to 0% in a matter of months. In addition, settlement scanbacks increased by 25% from January 2021 to August 2021.
Snapdocs is not just another lender portal. We’ve designed our digital closing platform for settlement workflows, so completing closings is straightforward, seamless, and stress-free.
With these features, settlement partners can successfully conduct digital closings, improving the experience for both borrowers and lenders.
To learn more about how Snapdocs works and dive deeper into our customer success stories, download our eBook.
