Your career in the title insurance industry has been stellar, with your knowledge and sales acumen reaching a peak mid-career. That’s when you decided to start up your own agency.
And while you may be aces at running a business, managing people and understanding the intricacies of your industry and how it works, if you can’t navigate where technology is going because you don’t understand what your IT staff or service provider are talking about, you are in danger of getting left behind.
As a business owner heading into a fast-changing technological landscape, you must be able to talk tech, and here’s why.
Interoperability
With companies juggling more than 100 solutions in their tech stack, interoperability has become a buzzword over the past few decades, as flummoxed business owners try to build in efficiencies without overwhelming the staff with multiple gateways.
Open standards and application programming interfaces (APIs) have paved the way for software systems to share information to avoid this conundrum. A great analogy for the two concepts is that open standards provide a common language through publicly available specifications, accelerating the development of APIs, while the API is the messenger, delivering a pathway for the software systems to communicate with each other.
Being conversant with these concepts can give you greater edge in communicating with technology providers as you drill down on a particular solution’s potential.
Driving productivity
The truth is you may not know what you don’t know when it comes to purchasing software systems that will make your staff more efficient and drive productivity. Doing your due diligence by researching and comparing various offerings can give you the necessary knowledge to ask intelligent questions when you start exploring evolving solutions in the title insurance space.
Cybersecurity
Cyber threats continue to evolve and expand and the only way to keep your agency safe is to understand the threat and the solutions that can prevent the fraudsters from gaining a foothold in your systems. Whether you are working with an inside IT department or an outsourced provider, you need to be able to speak intelligently with the team about the safeguards they have in place.
Staying ahead of the competition
Title insurance agencies are tied into their real estate and lender customers, and if you don’t have a working knowledge about how your customers are building out their tech infrastructure, you will not be ready to plug in when the time comes. Learning the tech language of your customers is as critical as understanding the nature and capability of your own software systems.
Learning the language of technology is no different than learning a foreign language. Rule number one is to immerse yourself in the language often, in this case by studying the technology landscape on a regular basis. Rule number two is to procure a good study guide that delineates the basic vocabulary. And finally, practice speaking the language by attending conferences where tech companies are presenting and speak tech until you are fluent.
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. Contact us to learn more.
