ALTA Best Practices
We Shield What Matters
ALTA Best Practices®
The American Land Title Association® (ALTA®) has created Title Insurance and Settlement Company Best Practices. These are meant to serve as a guide for ALTA members in enhancing existing business practices to protect consumers, ensure quality service, provide for ongoing employee training, and meet legal and market requirements.
Armor Title have developed agency standards and instituted processes to ensure consumers, lenders and our agencies are protected and will have a quality experience for their transactions – putting us ahead of the game in preparing agencies for CFPB compliance. In coordination with the ALTA, our company has been talking with a variety of experts, trade associations and lenders throughout the real estate industry and staying on top of all developments surrounding the proposed rule and bulletin. We support every effort of the ALTA to establish best practice standards for the industry.
For many years, the lending community has been subject to statutory and regulatory obligations to protect their customers’ nonpublic, personal information. Recently the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) released Bulletin 2012-03, which restated and further emphasized the importance of those obligations, especially in the context of banks’ relationships with third-party vendors—such as those providing title insurance and settlement services to a lender’s clients. Since the CFPB has developed a reputation for levying huge fines against those who fail to comply with their rules, and has already started auditing mortgage lenders for third-party vendor risk-management compliance, lenders have responded by increasing their efforts to perform due diligence on title companies. The type of due diligence performed has been inconsistent within the industry, with some lenders asking vendors to complete questionnaires, others requesting vendors to submit their policies and procedures, and still others conducting interviews and on-site visits.
In response, the American Land Title Association (ALTA)—the title industry’s national trade association since 1907—stepped in to help its approximately 5,000 members (title insurance companies, title agents, independent abstracters, title searchers, and attorneys) and the title industry as a whole. ALTA’s solution was to establish a “best practices” framework to assist title companies with satisfying their responsibility to clients, underwriters, banks, and mortgage lenders. Beyond the establishment of these voluntary best practices, ALTA also has proposed that title companies obtain an assessment by an independent third party to demonstrate the title company’s compliance with ALTA Best Practices.
While the development of the ALTA Best Practices Framework is new to the industry, from an operational standpoint, many title insurance and settlement companies already have been applying similar standards to satisfy their responsibility to underwriters. Best Practices initially requires an organization to prepare a written set of policies and procedures that address each of the seven pillars of Best Practices as outlined by ALTA:
Licensing
Escrow Accounting Procedures
Privacy & Information Security
Settlement Procedures
Title Policy Production & Delivery
Professional Liabilty Insurance Coverage
Consumer Complaints
Why Important….
- Your company is adhering to the industry best practices
- Your company has implemented a minimum level of controls that provide more security to your organization
- Minimizes the time consuming task of responding to lenders request for documentation
- Increases the likelihood of favorable terms on professional liability and or cyber insurance policies
- Differentiates your firm from the competitors with regard to security practices
- Increases the positive relationship with the title insurance underwriters
- Improves your odds of obtaining new business from your lenders
- Helps prevent and deter losses from fraudulent activities
- Helps owners sleep better at night
ALTA Best Practice Certified - 2015
Click to view our ALTA Best Practices Certification document for 2015.
ALTA Best Practices Certified - 2017
Click to view our ALTA Best Practices Certification document for 2017.