When it comes to confidential mortgage documents and sensitive financial papers lender employees often ask “Can I email it?” Yes, but to be honest, you really shouldn’t.
If you’ve been in the mortgage business for a while, maybe you remember what it was like to fill out a 1003 on a typewriter? Or switching from mail to fax to overnight carriers? It’s human nature to be reluctant to change, but if that change is more efficient, saves money, or provides a more secure process, lenders tend to bite the bullet and embrace it.
Take email for example. Years ago, software providers made it easy for lenders to email documents directly from their loan origination system. So today, the path of least resistance to get a mortgage document from here to there is to attach it to an email and click send. Now that we’ve become so comfortable with our email assisted work, we tend to disregard that emails should not be considered a secure form of communication.
We need to remember that we have the responsibility to protect our borrower’s identity from the electronic thieves that seem to grow in number daily. Just look at today’s cybercrime headlines to see that emailing documents is no longer the most secure methods. What if you emailed your borrower’s 1003 to their AOL account, only to find out later that it had been accessed by some hacker, account information and all?
Fortunately progress has been made again by mortgage software companies. There are loan origination systems that provide a safer, more secure way than emailing delicate documents called “e-disclosure”. E-disclosure takes safety one step further. Instead of sending a document actually attached to an email where it can be easily accessed and information compromised, e-disclosure provides a password protected hyperlink in the email to access the documents in a secure browser session from a secure server. For the lender it’s the click of a button, and for the borrower it is the click of a link.
E-disclosure can be even more secure for your borrower by verifying your borrowers identity and also verifying that the person retrieving the documents is a human and not a machine. All of this nearly assures that your borrowers sensitive information will remain private.
Contact us to learn more about e-disclosure and compliance methodology.