Understanding Remote Online Notarization (RON) Eligibility

A Remote Online Notarization (RON) closing is a fully digital experience where documents 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. 

The option for RON closings comes down to whether they are supported by state, county, and investors. The RON eligibility tool allows you to consider if the loan is eligible for a RON closing, or if you can instead have a hybrid or paper-based closing as the next best path forward.

• RON Eligibility Factors
• Encompass Integration

RON Eligibility Factors

Several factors influence the ability of a loan to use a full RON closing including county recorders' capabilities, title underwriting guidelines, and state RON legislation. 

    Tip: The RON eligibility feature helps lenders easily identify loans 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. For example, because an address cannot be resolved or crosses county boundaries where the counties have differing support for eRecording.

Blend Lender Workspace

The RON eligibility can be found in the Disclosures & Closing tab under Closing Details. Once the subject property address is populated in Blend, your loan team will be able to see the following information:

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 update custom fields.

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 require the user to click the RON Eligibility link to generate the information.