XSites users to get benefit of digital signatures once reserved for biggest brokerages, lenders

A lot of buzz in the media and in the halls came out of our booth at the 91st annual Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) Conference & Expo in San Francisco October 24-26 with our announcement that in conjunction with Wave Systems, we're bringing digital signature technology to small and medium sized mortgage brokers and lenders in December.

"It's the same kind of digital technology once available only to the largest brokerages and originators. We're driving electronic mortgages – and ultimately electronic real estate transactions – by 'seeding the market' from the ground up by putting the same technology in your hands as an XSite owner," said Brad Eaton, a la mode's Mortgage Products Manager.

Although commonly referred to as an "e-signature," a digital signature uses a PKI encrypted certificate to sign a document and protect it from fraud. The term "e-signature" is much broader and can mean anything from the technology our XSite users will soon be getting to the digital pad you sign when you use a credit card to make purchases at Target or Home Depot.

To help push the market towards electronic mortgages, our entire customer base of tens of thousands of real estate agents, mortgage brokers, inspectors, loan officers and appraisers who use our XSites will receive the digital signing capability – which is legally-binding and standards-compliant – as a free upgrade to their Site. The target date for releasing this service inside Mortgage XSites is Dec. 20.

"This is a significant step for the entire real estate industry," said Frank Cook, Publisher of Real Estate Intelligence Report, a respected industry newsletter. "What's different here is that technology that was once only available to the largest firms and mortgage originators is now available to small businesses and individual brokers and agents," Cook added.

We think so too. We've been serving brokers and loan officers for years with our free, fast Mercury Network, which connected our lender customers to their appraisers for efficient ordering, statusing and delivery of appraisal work product.

As we look more towards the future of real estate, we decided to give the Mercury Network a new name – XSites Network – new solutions and a strategic direction. It reflects our commitment to the XSite's platform which provides the communications hub between lenders, appraisers, real estate agents, and the vendors who service them.

With digital signature technology, your Mortgage XSite saves you money and allows you to close loans faster by giving you the same electronic order management, review rules, and automatic status updates used by the largest EVNs and management companies. Plus, full blown Internet-based marketing presence with online 1003, automatic borrower status updates, and online rate sheets makes your Mortgage XSite, as we like to put it: "The public side of your LOS®."

We've even expanded our network of appraisers and equipped them with an even more powerful set of tools to meet your needs. The XSites Network is still connected to appraiser desktops in every county of every state in the nation. So doing business with your appraisers is easier than ever through your XSite or otherwise.

Observers have often chided us as a company for putting resources into things – like digital signature capability for small businesses – that the market wasn't clamoring for. But we've never considered ourselves as primarily responding to market demand, but rather creating it. Years ago, the big players were wrangling over Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and how to profit from vendors being able to send paperless mortgage documents securely and electronically. We developed a free, secure EDI solution that was instantly adopted by our tens of thousands of appraisers, our customers. Today, pay-for-play models don't fly.

We're going to revolutionize digital signatures the way we did EDI. XSites users are now on a level playing field with the big players when it comes to the efficiency and security of e-closings.