ALTA Best Practices

As a proud member of the American Land Title Association (ALTA), Fortune Title Agency follows the national organization’s seven pillars of best practices for the title insurance industry.

The Title Insurance and Settlement Company Best Practices ensure that consumers have increased faith in their title service providers, such as Fortune Title, when they are working together on a real estate transaction. We don’t look at these guidelines as mandates; compliance and safeguarding every customer’s non-public personal information (NPI) has always been a top concern for Fortune Title. Each of our employees are trained rigorously on the compliance standards affecting our industry and continually educated on current regulations and compliance matters.

The seven pillars that comprise ALTA’s Best Practices are 1) having the proper licensing, 2) ensuring that a company has proper procedures regarding escrow services, 3) having a procedure protecting non-public personal information, 4) ensuring that a company has proper closing procedures, 5) guaranteeing proper delivery of a policy after a transaction, 6) being properly insured in case of errors, and 7) having an avenue for consumer complaints.

Our Escrow Procedures

Fortune Title maintains separate escrow and operating accounts. Escrow accounts are prepared with trial balances and reconciled on a daily basis. Fortune Title takes the additional security measure of payee recognition for our escrow accounts. Instead of only verifying account information and funds, our system also verifies the payee is accurate.

Your Security is a Top Priority

We take protecting your NPI seriously. Only our vetted employees can access customer information through our secure servers. We heavily restrict the type of information that can be accessed on cell phones and portable storage devices to best safeguard NPI. Documents containing non-public personal information are transmitted from our office using Citrix Sharefile, a vendor specializing in safe delivery of documents using encryption and password protection.

In addition to protecting your NPI, we take every step to protect your money. Having a fully trained staff allows us to ensure a segregation of duties so that it is less likely that an error will be made or a fraudster will get through our system of checks and balances. Our industry has become inundated with attacks by cyber criminals hoping to commit wire fraud. If your money is misdirected and ends up in the hands of wire fraud criminals, everyone loses.

Fortune Title trains our team on an annual basis to look out for fraudulent activity and better identify new tactics criminals use to try to steal your NPI and real estate funds. We also find opportunities on a weekly basis to create learning moments for the entire company, by sharing emails demonstrating attempts in email phishing schemes. These criminals try new strategies every day, so it is important that we remain vigilant and keep security top of mind.