CertifID and Stewart Report Significant Reduction in Wire Fraud Risk Over Past Two Years
AUSTIN, Texas–CertifID Inc., a leader in wire fraud protection, and Stewart Information Services Corporation (NYSE-STC), a global leader in real estate services, today announced a significant reduction in wire fraud risk for the title company, home buyers and sellers, and lenders as a result of their partnership. This is in the face of the 64% year-on-year rise in overall cybercrime losses most recently available from the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3).
“The partnership has provided winning solutions for consumers through both our direct operations and our agency services, who take advantage of the CertifID protections.”
In 2020, the companies entered into a partnership agreement to enable Stewart direct offices and independent agencies in Stewart’s Trusted Provider™ network the ability to securely collect and send wire instructions to customers. Since then, the partnership has continued to grow successfully in scale and scope.
Many of Stewart’s Direct Operations and independent agency partners have moved to CertifID software as their primary solution for wire fraud protection. CertifID is now available nationally through Stewart‘s Direct Operations across 35 states.
“Wire fraud is one of the largest and underpriced risks to our industry, and that’s why Stewart has been making significant investments into the right technologies, including companies like CertifID,” said Fred Eppinger, CEO of Stewart. “The partnership has provided winning solutions for consumers through both our direct operations and our agency services, who take advantage of the CertifID protections.”
CertifID launched PayoffProtect earlier this year to address a key pain point for its core customers. Mortgage payoffs comprised 45% of all wire fraud incidents reported to the CertifID fraud recovery services team, the single largest use case over the past two years.
“The recent addition of PayoffProtect to our CertifID software agreement reduces this major source of risk for our operations,” said Bob Taylor, Vice President of Escrow Accounting at Stewart. “Since we began using CertifID two years ago, I have seen a substantial drop in the number of wire fraud attempts reported.”
CertifID also provides fraud recovery services to any consumer or business who becomes a victim of wire fraud. The team provides a single point of contact for customers to help them navigate across multiple parties including banks and law enforcement who need to work together during a fraud recovery process. Trained by the U.S. Secret Service, the CertifID team recovered over $50M in funds from cybercriminals over the past two years.
“By necessity title agencies must become cybersecurity companies now. We just don’t all realize it yet,” said Tom Cronkright, a large title agency owner and Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of CertifID. “The core mission of a title agency has always been to protect the home buyer and seller. Now that protection includes zealously safeguarding their funds given the exponential rise of cybercrime syndicates targeting our industry. Fundamentally the core economics of our business have shifted due to the risk caused by wire fraud.”
“As an industry, we need to move from the focus on awareness in the last few years – into a new chapter of focus on execution,” said Tyler Adams, CEO and Co-Founder of CertifID. “A lot of the right technologies now exist to build proactive defense strategies. Wire fraud will still be a problem, but we can significantly reduce our attractiveness to criminals by working together as an industry to put the right measures in place.”
About CertifID
CertifID is a leader in wire fraud protection. A provider of software and services for the real estate industry, the company is trusted by title companies, law firms, lenders, realtors, and home buyers and sellers. With tens of thousands of transactions protected, CertifID helps safeguard billions of dollars every month from fraud, and provides further peace of mind with up to $1M in direct insurance coverage on every wire it protects. Learn more at: www.certifid.com.
