For an industry that has always been up to its eyeballs in paper, digital mortgages have long been the dream of mortgage lenders, title companies and servicers.

Over the years, tremendous progress has been made toward this goal—from UETA and eSign legislation to eNote adoption, the MERS eRegistry, MISMO data standards, SMART Doc and eNote adoption.

But until now, there was one major piece that was keeping lenders from going completely digital. And we now have it.

What It Takes to Go Digital

To create a completely digital mortgage experience—one in which borrowers have the option to buy a home entirely online—lenders need access to several important pieces of technology.

The first and most obvious is eSign technology that allows borrowers to sign any document digitally over the Internet. The second is a complete library of SMART Docs for every document in a loan file. SMART Docs contain an almost unlimited amount of data that can be read instantly by systems without character recognition or human interaction. They also include a secure record of when a loan document was created and modified and where it was sent.

The third piece is eRegistry and eVault services, so eNotes can be safely transferred to the MERS eRegistry and stored and accessed by different parties. But there’s also a very important fourth piece, without which a truly digital mortgage is impossible.

It’s All About the RON

As one of the industry’s most trusted eClosing providers, SigniaDocuments has already seamlessly integrated eSign, SMART Docs, eRegistry and eVault services into our proprietary mortgage ecosystem, a collaborative platform for digitizing the home purchase process. What we didn’t have were remote online notarizations, or RONs.

RONs enable borrowers to sign closing documents safely and securely over the Internet without the physical presence of a human notary. The use of RONs has been soaring since the COVID-19 pandemic and are currently legal in about three-quarters all U.S. states. Ultimately, they are bound to become borrowers’ preferred method of signing closing documents.

However, RONs currently require lenders to use technologies from different parties and trust that they’ll work well together. The problem is they usually don’t.  That’s because no single provider had all the digital mortgage ingredients—SMART Docs, eMortgage services and RONs—under one roof. Until now.

How We Found the Missing Piece

Earlier this month, our parent company, Evolve Mortgage Services, acquired E-Notary Seal LLC, which provides a platform that enables borrowers to remotely sign and notarize a document from anywhere, on any device, in just minutes. This acquisition now enables SigniaDocuments to provide closings for title and mortgage companies through a single, end-to-end digital process.

We know E-Notary Seal’s founder, Felicia Grimes, very well. A public notary in Texas with a degree in applied science, Felicia has had many conversations with our CEO, Paul Anselmo, about the industry’s lack of a complete eClosing solution. It was these conversations that inspired Felicia to create a platform to provide RONs in all 50 states.

We couldn’t be more thrilled to be the first company to finally bring together all the pieces of a digital mortgage into one platform. We’re also super excited that Felicia has joined Evolve as Vice President of the company’s eMortgage division. Her ingenuity, technology expertise and notary experience make her a perfect fit for our organization.

It’s important to remember that there are many companies out there promising a fully digital mortgage experience. But if you dig deeper, you’ll find they don’t truly have everything you need to create a purely digital experience. We know we do.

Ready to build your own digital mortgage strategy? To get started, just reach out to us at 1-877-7SIGNIA or by email at Info@SigniaDocs.com.