The systems behind closing day, kept working and kept hard to impersonate.
One believable message at the right moment is what it takes. A wire instruction that looks like it came from the right person, sent at the moment a payoff or an earnest-money transfer is actually due. Industry case reporting has described offices recovering less than half of funds diverted in a matter of minutes, even after the bank was contacted immediately. There is often no second attempt once the money has moved.
The office does not need to be careless for this to work. It needs one convincing email, at the one moment a genuine transfer is expected.
Email, phones, title production and backups can quietly become one closing-day failure domain. A small office can look redundant on paper while every one of those systems actually depends on the same identity provider, the same administrator, or the same network connection. When that single dependency goes down, everything tied to it goes down with it, on the day a closing was scheduled.
A transaction moves through more separate logins than the closing itself suggests. Title production, a lender portal, e-signing, a notary platform, the bank, and the underwriter's own system each hold their own privileged account. Each one is a door that stays open long after anyone remembers to check whether it should be closed, especially after someone leaves the office.
Deadlines are fixed regardless of what technology does that day. Recording windows, policy delivery timelines and reporting deadlines do not move because a system went down. A funds-transfer format change or a portal outage becomes a missed deadline problem, not just an IT problem.
ALTA Best Practices is a company-wide framework covering escrow accounting, information security, licensing, insurance, policy production and consumer complaints. It is voluntary, and no organization, including ALTA itself, certifies a company or an IT provider as meeting it. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something that does not exist.
What we actually do: configure and monitor technical safeguards aligned with the relevant portions of ALTA Best Practices, harden email against impersonation, implement multi-factor authentication and access controls, run phishing training, and test backups rather than trust a status light. Wire-release authority, payee verification, callback procedures and your relationship with your underwriter stay with your office. We provide the technical evidence your compliance adviser can use, not a substitute for their judgment.
Send us one question about your office's IT and we will give you a straight answer, at no charge, with nothing to sit through afterwards. We do this because the question somebody asks us today is usually cheaper than the mess we would be called about later. If the honest answer is that somebody has to look at it, we will tell you that too.
This is an answer to a question, not troubleshooting, system access, or ongoing support.
Some questions cannot be answered honestly from the outside. When that happens we may offer to come and look properly: a read-only review of the systems we agree on, and a written summary of the sampled findings and our recommended next steps within the agreed scope. These take real hours, so reviews are subject to availability, and we will confirm any date in writing.
Asking does not book a review. We confirm the scope and the date in writing before anyone touches a system. Printed material does not reserve an appointment. One review per office.
A review is a point-in-time sample of the systems named in the written scope. Items outside that scope are not evaluated and have not passed. This is a limited IT safeguard review, not an ALTA Best Practices assessment or a legal opinion.
Tell us what your office has quietly learned to work around, and we will start there.
Call (817) 265-5000 or email info@bdunn.com. Arlington, and we answer our own phone.
Ask us your question