The Need for Proper Oversight of Closing Agent Vendors

When reviewing your vendor list at your mortgage company, do you pay close attention to your closing agent vendors? If not, you need to ensure you’re doing proper oversight going forward.

Why Are Closing Agent Vendors a Target?

Your closing agent vendors have an enormous amount of NPI data and play a pivotal role in the mortgage transaction.

In addition to the data they have access to, they have a lot of communication with the borrower leading up to the closing. It’s this communication and the email exchange of information which is now being targeted by the criminal community.

Closing Agent Vendor Oversight

If you are a lender who is failing to provide any vetting or true oversight practices of a closing settlement agent, the risk of information security and wire fraud is a very real threat to you.

Several years ago, I managed a funding department, responsible for the funding and processing of the mortgage wires for a national lender. Many billions of dollars passed through the department. And invariably due to the sheer volume, or a data entry error typing in an account number led to the misplacement of a wire transfer.

I can honestly say that the minute the funder discovered the error, I already knew what had happened simply by the look on their face as they came to report the incident. I should say that this didn’t happen very often, but it always stuck with me.

So, again, ensure you are doing proper vetting and oversight of those closing agent vendors.

 To learn more about how to do proper vendor vetting, download our infographic.