Our mission at Snapdocs is to make mortgage less complicated. In an age where ads are personalized and setting up an Amazon subscription for toothpaste can be done in a single click, we think it’s time buying a home evolve past the convoluted, paper-driven process of the past two hundred years.
Starting at the end
We’ve started with one of the final steps: signing the paperwork. Regulations require nearly every mortgage document signing to be witnessed and sealed by a Public Notary in every state.
While the notary is often asked to answer detailed questions about the loan, they are usually independent contractors brought in at the last minute. Traditionally a notary was found by companies called Signing Services. They’d maintain a list of notaries and simply pick up the phone and call them one at a time until someone answered. Prices were all over the place, and predictability non-existent.
In such a fragmented market, Snapdocs offers a centralized gathering point for these companies. With a database of over 60,000 notaries, mortgage professionals can start finding notaries that fit their schedule, credential criteria and costs. Our automatic scheduling portal sorts notaries by experience and reliability. After a match is found it sets up the appointment automatically and acts as a secure, CFPB-compliant platform to exchange documents and signing details. We recently also launched features to provide simple online fee payments and expense tracking.
We liken it to AirBnB: a customer arrives at our site with a location, price point and experience type in mind. A quick search reveals hundreds of local, independent agents ranked on how good of a match they will be. Once a selection is made, both parties can manage the details in a shared space.
When you run a nationwide service, you better be strong everywhere
Our customers operate from Hawai’i to Maine to the US Virgin Islands. After all, people buy houses everywhere in the US and US financial regulations apply in all of those places. So when our customers turn to us to find a notary in Wichita Falls, Texas, we better have one ready! We aim to have at least 500 notaries available for every single search.
What’s next? Breaking free of paper
You board a flight with a QR code. Square emails you receipts. All your favorite photos live in the cloud. Over the past decade we’ve become a cloud-based, paper-less society.
Yet right now when you refinance your home, you’ll be sitting down for over an hour with 100–200 pages to initial here and sign there. The documents are then faxed back to Signing Services to manually go through and check for errors.
It’s a no-brainer: let’s move as much as we can online and automated! We’re working hard to make eSignings a reality: review documents on your on time, when the notary shows up they may only have seven pages that require a witness. While you’re making small-talk afterward, our software will be checking for missing signatures or typos.
Obligatory “we’re hiring!”
Find our work interesting? Think we’re idiots and you have a better approach? We are hiring! Data analysts, engineers, customer support, implementation managers; if you’re interested send us an app!
