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The HousingWire Awards Spotlight Series highlights companies that have been recognized through our Editor's Choice Awards. HousingWire's Tech100 Award nominations are now open until Friday, December 17, 2021. Click here to submit your company.

The title insurance industry generated US$6.8 billion in title insurance premiums in the third quarter, the best quarter in the industry’s history. As technology continues to provide ways to digitize and automate the manual aspects of the real estate transaction process, improving efficiency through technology enables companies to handle unprecedented levels of transaction volume. 

Companies such as Blend, which acquired title insurance and settlement service provider Title365 earlier this year, are using cloud-based technology to bring the consumer lending industry into the digital age, enabling its lenders to process billions of loans in one day. 

"Through automation, financial institutions can use data-driven processes to streamline the checkout process, reduce redundancy, and allow loan teams to delegate clerical tasks to well-trained algorithms without worrying about human error," said Kristen Estrella, Title 365 and 2021 HousingWire Vanguard winner. "With technologies such as Blend, property rights and settlement components can be integrated into consumers' mortgage loan experience, enabling them to automate property rights ordering and trigger instant property rights commitments early in the loan cycle."

Blend is the winner of the 2021 Tech100 Mortgage, which recognizes the most innovative and influential technology organization in the housing sector. 

We sat down with Estrella to learn more about Blend’s current automation capabilities and how the company can help streamline the checkout process and speed up checkout time. 

HousingWire: Which aspects of the property rights process will most benefit from technology?

Kristen Estrella: The title insurance process is traditionally super manual, expensive, and may involve the loan originator spending a lot of time emailing documents and manually comparing numbers. Blend's title team reimagined this process and created back-end technology to support the new standard of quality title insurance experience. For example, loan teams and property rights agencies usually send Closing Disclosures back and forth via email to manage changes, manually enter data on property rights commitments in LOS, and multiple reorganizations and reissues of initial disclosures for a single loan, further slowing down the closure. With technologies such as Blend, property rights and settlement components can be integrated into consumers' mortgage loan experience, enabling them to automate property rights ordering and trigger instant property rights commitments early in the loan cycle. This change allows the property rights team to begin liquidation of property rights early in the loan process, further accelerating the loan cycle.

HousingWire: We heard a lot about "gazing and comparing" and closing documents. What other manual processes have companies such as Blend helped alleviate or eliminate?

Kristen Estrella: Blend provides an end-to-end digital banking experience through its cloud-based platform, using verified data directly from the source to simplify many painful and inefficient parts of the banking process, such as "gaze and compare." The platform provides a unified omni-channel application for any consumer banking product, including mortgages, home equity loans and credit lines, deposit accounts, auto loans, credit cards and personal loans, and provides a set of powerful loan and banking tools to make the team more Efficiency and efficiency. As a result, financial institutions can provide consumers with a simplified, digital-first experience, supported by human interaction when needed. 

HousingWire: What are the key areas where automation helps eliminate errors in the closing process?

Kristen Estrella: In any manual, paper-based process, there are inefficiencies that lead to inaccuracies. Through automation, financial institutions can use data-driven processes to simplify the closure process, reduce redundancy, and allow loan teams to delegate clerical tasks to well-trained algorithms without worrying about human error. Blend's Close solution alone reduced document errors by 11%, lost signatures by 13%, and lost or lost notes by 12%. Through these improvements, early customers who used Blend Close shortened the closing time by two days, allowing the closing team to close the other two loans every day, and calculated that each loan could save $135.

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