By: Dan Green for Tomorrow's Mortgage Executive
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) released “Leveraging Technology to Empower Consumers at Closing” on August 5, 2015. This is an eagerly anticipated report covering the eClosing Pilot project the CFPB conducted with a group of lenders and mortgage technologists during the first four months of this year. (Full disclosure: we participated in the pilot with BECU, our long-time partner and one of the most experienced users of our lending technologies.)
A little background: The CFPB issued a Request for Quotation last April from teams of lenders and technology partners to help them test several hypotheses concerning the paper-based mortgage closing process as it exists today versus the newer, still under-utilized eClosing processes successfully used by some lenders. The CFPB’s hypotheses — that consumers would favor eClosing over paper closing because it would give them a better understanding of the process and a feeling of empowerment, leading to greater satisfaction — all turned out to be true.