Just when you think you have your agency wheels well-greased, a new wrinkle in the title insurance and escrow world comes along to confound the situation.

Such is the case in 2025, as title agencies prepare for yet another requirement on their long checklist of rules, regulations, and disclosures.

In August 2024, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) announced a final rule that is designed to combat and deter money laundering by increasing transparency in the U.S. residential real estate sector.

In 2016, FinCEN began issuing Geographic Targeted Orders (GTOs) – originally covering Miami and New York City but later expanding to 69 counties in 13 states – focused on gathering information on all cash residential transactions by legal entities. This information gathering process was extraordinarily successful in adding yet another tool in the agency’s tool belt to combat money laundering.

That success led to the establishment of a new rule expanding the requirements nationwide with the onus for reporting falling primarily on title insurance, escrow and real estate closing professionals.

Each time there is a new requirement, the challenge is how to integrate the work into your processes in a way that is compliant, cost effective and seamless.

Agile technology

It is in such situations that having an effectively built tech stack becomes imperative. For the title insurance industry in particular, this means technology structured with API architecture.

This approach to creating software emphasizes the inclusion of application programing interfaces (APIs) which in turn allow software applications to exchange information and data, as well as communicate with each other at a sophisticated level.

This is critical in an industry that encompasses a substantial number of players on a single transaction, which in turn necessitates a wide variety of software integrations.

When we think of one transaction, it’s complicated enough. But generally speaking, agents are connected to multiple title insurance underwriters as well as a host of lending institutions that finance the wide variety of transactions in their sales funnel week to week.

Beyond the basics, title agents have their own vendors such as search providers and closing specialists that require yet another integrated approach to managing projects, timelines and payment.

The “cautionary tale” is to remember as you explore replacing or adding technology in 2025, do so with a critical eye as to the ability of this new solution to easily communicate with your existing structure with the goal of streamlining processes rather than adding yet another task to your staff’s already crowded list of to dos.

At VizionX, we understand the pace of technological change in the real estate, lending and title insurance triad, and we are dedicated to developing technology that will help title agents future proof their companies. VizionX will shortly be rolling out what we believe will become the gold standard for title production technology, TitleOS. Our SaaS based offering will be launched this year. Contact us for more information.

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