Many factors are having a profound impact on the Real Estate industry today. These changes are creating a ripple effect on other industries. Examples include firms involved in providing appraisal, home inspection, and title insurance services. During these times of change, innovation can have a dramatic effect – often appearing quickly and without warning. This is happening today. Select firms are investing in Fintech, which is driving increased adoption of automation technologies. As part of this transformation, companies are taking a closer look at applying RPA in the Title Insurance industry.
Those who are in the industry understand that accuracy and trust are two very important factors when performing title searches. This concern has slowed down the adoption of digital transformation across this industry.
Read more on this topic, Is Digital Title Insurance a Sure Thing for the Future?
But there are many other facets of the industry where automation and RPA (what is RPA?) can play an important role without adding risk. Now might be an ideal time to further advance your automation strategies. Today’s market conditions forcing companies to quickly adapt to a new, lower volume environment.
This HousingWire article provides further insights, Is now a good time to invest in real estate automation technologies?
Industry leaders are implementing new cost-cutting and efficiency improvement programs. The first step is to define the best initial “Use Cases.”
What is a Use Case?
This term comes from the software industry. A “Use Case” is a usage scenario how a software application works. In other words, if you implement a new application, how will you use it to justify the Return on Investment or ROI of that purchase?
In the case of RPA in the Title Insurance industry, think of RPA as a way to perform repetitive tasks faster, tirelessly, and more accurately than humans. Here are five use cases that would be an ideal place to start your RPA journey.
- Form Registration – Automate data entry performed by every new customer. This will streamline the title search processes. Automating the input of this information can speed up the application and process, cutting down on the resources required to complete it. RPA could cut down the time required by up to 40% while reducing reliance on and time spent by the workforce.
- Claims Registration and Processing – This process involves the collection of a lot of information from a wide variety of sources. The goal is to avoid all manual processes. RPA can integrate the various claims processing data from multiple, disparate sources. By automating manually intensive consolidation processes, such as data extraction, error tracking, or claims verification, it is possible to condense these steps to operate faster and with greater accuracy.
Here is an example of a data extraction service that automates the collection and extraction of data from other sources.
- Underwriting – Similar to the registration process, performing underwriting involves working across multiple systems, extracting data, and validating accuracy. Apply RPA to streamline and simplify the process. RPA can also populate data fields or transfer data from one system to the other.
- Regulatory Compliance – Every step in a real estate transaction is under far greater scrutiny today than ever before. Manual processes or data entry steps are at risk for errors, which can cause many problems during a compliance audit. RPA can be used to validate existing customer information, generate regulatory reports, and send out account closure processing notifications. Each of these steps can be automated with RPA to improve and streamline the process.
- Customer Service – Customer interaction is unavoidable in nearly every industry, including Title Insurance. Examples include communications about status updates, document requests, or other general questions. Many of these inquiries could be addressed via Chatbots or other self-serving, automated assistants utilizing RPA technology.
It should now be obvious that there are many opportunities to apply automation strategies to common processes that are part of the Real Estate and Title Insurance industry. Leading organizations are already investing heavily in these types of systems, which offer a way to quickly scale down the business during lean times without any service level degradation. More importantly, however, is the fact that these same businesses can also leverage advanced automation strategies to scale back up the business quickly when the next boom cycle occurs. Automated systems and processes work well in both streamlining and scaling up a business, providing an insight as to why automation strategies are so popular today.