Five-second title reports new way to trim mortgage origination process

Shaving days off the back-end of loan originations would save borrowers time and lenders money, which in turn saves borrowers money and lenders time.

WFG Lender Services' new product, DecisionPoint, can process title requests within seconds, eventually shifting the industry standard. Cutting the title insurance decision to nearly instantaneous will be the norm in the next 12 to 24 months, according to WFG.

"A year or two from now, title companies that work with lenders directly, I just don't see how they're going to compete if you don't have this type of solution because we're all working to streamline how long it takes to originate a loan," Matt Slonaker, senior vice president and head of enterprise solutions sales at WFG, said in an interview.

WFG Lender Services is a unit of Williston Financial Group, which is also the parent of underwriter WFG National Title Insurance, one of the independents competing in the market against the four national firms.

Prior to this, the process of getting the title report took three to five days on average. With clean decisions greenlit automatically, title officers would gain bandwidth to spend on the decisions with worse grades that require more time. DecisionPoint enables lenders to open their own triage, lowers title costs and enhances the customer experience.

"By making sure a loan is good to go as early as possible, DecisionPoint allows lenders to jumpstart their underwriting process," Slonaker said in a press release. "It makes the title process more efficient and saves more loans."

DecisionPoint uses an algorithm to generate the five-second report with full grade and details, dictating how long will be needed to issue a title insurance policy. However, it doesn't replace the search required to issue a title commitment, so the underwriter takes on no additional risk.

After launching in May, WFG noted several lending clients already use the product.

The title insurance industry posted eight consecutive years of net income and saw its highest total since before the financial crisis in 2018, according to the Kroll Bond Rating Agency.