TILA-RESPA Integrated Disclosure (TRID) went into effect in August, 2015 with noble goals. Before the federal government mandated TRID to assist consumers with the paper-laden process of buying a home, there were dozens of disclosures scattered throughout the purchasing timeline. It was confusing, hard to manage, and even more difficult to understand.
Today, by combining multiple documents into only two, and clarifying the timing in which the documents need to reach the hands of the buyer, the consumer has more time to review, understand, and sign the required paperwork. However, now with two years of TRID’s mandates, it’s clear that with streamlining comes a new crop of issues, and these affect the stakeholders supporting the transaction on the back-end.
One big problem that lenders and title agents come up against with TRIDis that their legacy systems aren’t built for seamless changes. While band-aids can be applied, they come unglued quicker than it takes to develop the fix in the first place. Furthermore, each adjustment requires a lot of time – at a cost. This brings up the next hurdle. TRID requires a specific period of time to deliver the Loan Estimate and Closing Disclosure. If the timing is off or if there is an error, loans may fall apart, penalties could be levied, and important business relationships might be compromised.
Stakeholders are struggling to comply with the highly regulated lending environment without spending more than what is brought in. And state and federal regulations are always being added and amended. It’s tough to keep up in this environment with new types of calculations, variable timelines, and constantly changing forms. Each modification begs for errors and can be costly to implement, especially for smaller agencies. Moreover, there is the constant need to update and reinforce security efforts to ensure the confidentiality, integrity and privacy of consumer data. Each breach covered by the news calls for additional attention, time and money in order to properly secure the consumers’ personal information.
Fortunately, technology is available to ease the burden, balancing what comes in and what goes out. Companies can benefit from a checklist that ensures they’re investing in the right technology to be more time and cost efficient. Setting these as must-haves can even help improve thebottom line.
The best rule of thumb is to find a single software solution that provides:
- SaaS that updates in real-time – When there is a new regulation, let the software developer make the appropriate changes and updates. When the work is done in the background, code stays current while reducing IT costs. An added benefit is that SaaS lets you work from anywhere.
- Proven integration capabilities, transparency and audit trails – Consider these to be must-haves in choosing the right platform. The secure integration of lenders, underwriters, escrow accounts, e-recorders, shipping providers, release trackers, and title examiners means no crucial step is missed, unnecessarily re-keyed, or performed incorrectly. It also provides easy and thorough access to all data should a question or potential lawsuit arise.
- SOC 2 accreditation – This independent third party security audit provides proof of established processes and practices to monitor unusual system activity in cloud environments, whether malicious actions or unintentional. This may not be TRID specific, but it is imperative for companies to be covered.
Here’s the takeaway: there aren’t enough band-aids to keep an old system running at peak conditions in the modern climate. Fortunately, software systems that are SaaS-based are constantly being tuned to the best real time best practices. The most intricate will even guide you along the way. Software isn’t as expensive or difficult to set-up as before because you don’t have to keep buying new releases, or take on the burden of reprogramming and re-building internally. Source smart now and it will pay off in the long-run.