Blend Close: RON Eligibility

Remote online notarization (RON) closings are entirely digital: docs are signed and recorded electronically and the closing appointment is conducted in an online signing room. RON closings have clear benefits for lenders and borrowers, and this article will help you determine whether a loan is eligible for RON closing, so lenders can choose to use hybrid or paper-based closings as the next best path forward.

• RON Eligibility Factors
• Encompass Integration

RON Eligibility Factors

There are several factors that influence the ability for a loan to utilize a full RON closing including county recorders' capabilities, title underwriting guidelines, and state RON legislation. 

    Tip: The RON eligibility feature helps lenders easily identify which loans are eligible for RON closings.

The RON eligibility feature combines data including:

• Whether the recording jurisdiction allows eRecording
• Whether the state has active legislation supporting RON closings
• Which underwriters will underwrite a loan with a RON closing
• Whether the underwriter allows out-of-state notaries in a given state

These data points are updated monthly and are available via API. 

Using the property address as an input, possible values returned for each data point are ELIGIBLE, INELIGIBLE, or UNKNOWN. 

 Note: Blend will return UNKNOWN when a definitive answer cannot be determined, e.g. because an address cannot be resolved or crosses county boundaries where the counties have differing support for eRecording.

Encompass Integration

The RON eligibility API will also be integrated into the Blend Encompass plug-in (Kensie Mae plug-in). The plug-in will call the RON eligibility API every time a loan is opened and will update custom fields on the loan.

These new fields can be used in conjunction with the preexisting fields to automatically select the right defaults for the closing type. I.E., lenders that determine the loan is eligible for RON closing can configure a business rule that will prepopulate nearly every selection on the eClosing Management screen.

Specifically for RON Eligibility, there are some additional fields in the integration form:

The same information in the fields is used to populate a popup that appears when a user clicks the “RON Eligibility” link in the closing management screen:

In this current implementation, RON Eligibility is automatically calculated whenever the closing screen is opened and does not actually require the user to click the RON Eligibility link to generate the information. 

DISCLAIMER: The features on this page may not be applicable to your institution. Please reach out to Blend Support for more information on what features are enabled for your use.