Closing Guard Wire-Fraud Tool Joins SettlementOne's Lender Platform

SettlementOne, the credit reporting and data verification firm for mortgage lenders, added Secure Insight's Closing Guard wire-fraud product to its platform. The partnership, announced Monday, puts instant settlement agent risk checks and verified wire instructions in front of SettlementOne's lender clients at the moment closing funds move.

The move targets the spoofed closing instruction. Settlement details still travel by email in many transactions, and the FBI has flagged real estate closings as a prime target for business email compromise for years. Closing Guard works on two ends of that problem: it vets the settlement professionals handling the closing, including attorneys and title agents, and it verifies the trust accounts that receive those funds before the wire is released.

Secure Insight, founded in 2012, calls Closing Guard the first-to-market closing table vendor management and wire fraud solution. The company says it has vetted and monitored more than 95,000 settlement professionals and verified more than 125,000 trust accounts.

The product runs inside SettlementOne's existing software connection to Encompass, ICE Mortgage Technology's loan origination system. Encompass lenders get Closing Guard through the SettlementOne integration they already run, and activity reports back to the SettlementOne platform for unified tracking and billing under a single account. The returned data gives lenders a record of each check alongside their other SettlementOne pulls, so the loan file shows the verification happened. Lenders avoid qualifying and paying a separate vendor; the companies said Closing Guard is available to all of SettlementOne's clients.

Secure Insight President Andrew Liput said the agreement gives SettlementOne's lenders access to the company's risk-verification technology. "We have long recognized the importance of closing table risk including risk of wire fraud and stand behind our fifteen-year history of providing effective and affordable solutions for lenders nationwide," he said.

The deal gives Secure Insight distribution: Closing Guard reaches SettlementOne's client base through a system those lenders already run. Wire-fraud tools have usually reached lenders as a separate purchase; here the check arrives inside a platform the lender already pays for. SettlementOne started as a credit reporting agency and expanded into a suite of verification tools covering the lending process, with customers that include community credit unions and major banks.

Settlement agents are a fragmented group; a lender's view of an agent often stops at a past deal or a referral. Secure Insight monitors the professionals on its list rather than screening them once, and that standing database is what lets the verification run instantly at the closing table.

A misdirected closing wire is hard to recover; by the time a fraud surfaces, the money has often moved through accounts that are difficult to trace. Secure Insight puts the value of funding wires protected by Closing Guard at trillions of dollars, and the product has covered more than 55 million residential loan transactions nationwide.