In this Ten Minute Talks, Diego Sanchez interviews Tyler Adams, co-founder and CEO of CertifID, a company dedicated to preventing wire fraud in real estate transactions. Tyler discusses the challenges of fraud in the industry, the importance of technology in safeguarding transactions, and the recent acquisition of Payments.io, which aims to enhance their service offerings.
Category
đź—ž
NewsTranscript
00:00each of those sort of different avenues for fraud, they continue to be the same in terms of
00:05the actual movement of money. The tactics just keep changing by the fraudsters to make them
00:10harder and harder to detect. I'm Diego Sanchez, President of HousingWire, and this is 10 Minute
00:23Talks. My guest today is Tyler Adams, co-founder and CEO of Certified. Tyler, welcome to 10 Minute
00:32Talks. Thanks for having me, Diego. Excited to be here. It's so great to have you on. Before we dive
00:39in, could you just give a brief introduction of yourself and the Certified business? Yeah, happy
00:46to. Tyler Adams, co-founder and CEO of Certified. We started the business back in 2017 to help
00:52prevent wire fraud in real estate transactions. Today, we are the leading software provider in
00:59keeping all parties involved in a real estate transaction safe. We sell mostly to title
01:04companies and law firms that are holding escrow for a deal. They utilize our software to protect
01:11incoming funds from a buyer, protect outgoing disbursements to sellers, protect mortgage
01:16payoffs. Essentially, it enables them to feel safe and secure for all of the movements of money
01:23that they're going to have and ensuring that they're not going to get ripped off by a fraudster.
01:29You plug into some of the title software platforms that are out there. Do you also
01:36plug into any real estate or mortgage platforms? How do you present yourself to the real estate
01:42and the mortgage side? Yeah. Our customers utilize our software as a service platform, either
01:48as a standalone product experience that they can go to to communicate and verify all of the
01:54different parties involved in the transaction, or they leverage us via a title production software
01:59integration. We are integrated with ResWare and SoftPro and RamQuest and all of those core title
02:05production software platforms. Otherwise, they're just leveraging our software as a service platform
02:11directly. I love your LinkedIn posts. Every once in a while, and it seems like it's more
02:17frequent recently, you'll get on and you'll talk about another fraud that was prevented
02:22by Certified. Tell me about what you're seeing in terms of attempts at fraud and Certified's
02:29ability to bust it up. Yeah. I appreciate the fact that you've seen those and enjoy them.
02:36Luckily for the audience, I don't post them all because it would be too frequent that they would
02:42be showing up on LinkedIn. But look, we still see a lot of the similar style approaches, but the
02:51ways in which the fraudsters are doing it are making it harder and harder for them to detect.
02:56We're getting a lot of seller impersonation fraud, people trying to look like they own a property or
03:02impersonate the actual owner of a property. We see a lot of mortgage payoff fraud still.
03:08Our software is utilized every single day where someone's holding a mortgage payoff statement,
03:12they're about to pay off it, and they run it through our platform to verify that nothing's
03:17been tampered with and that the funds are going to get to where they're going. We caught over
03:2130 plus million dollars of fraudulent mortgage payoff statements just last year alone.
03:27Then we see a lot of buyers who are receiving fraudulent information trying to get tricked
03:34into sending their cash to close payments to the wrong places. Each of those different avenues for
03:41fraud, they continue to be the same in terms of the actual movement of money. The tactics just
03:47keep changing by the fraudsters to make them harder and harder to detect. I know you have
03:52a bunch of engineers on your team. Are you also employing fraud experts and former law
04:00enforcement folks to help you track down all these different cases of fraud? It's always
04:06ever-changing, like you just said. Yeah, for sure. That's where we believe
04:12we need to be for the industry to be safe. We have really taken that position as wanting to
04:19be the most trusted fraud prevention platform in real estate. We've done that by surrounding
04:25ourselves with amazing advisors, amazing partners, the United States Secret Service. We have an
04:30incredible partnership with them on all of our fraud recovery services. We've brought in-house
04:35now. We have a whole trust and safety team. We just brought in a new director of fraud.
04:40Our new head of technology came from Early Warning. If you're familiar with that,
04:45that was the bank-level consortium of data that helps prevent fraud across all the different
04:51financial institutions that are a part of that, including he helped lead and create Zelle.
04:58There is a ton of investment being made by us because the fraudsters are making investments
05:05every single day at a rapid rate because of how much money they are making from these scams.
05:11We've got to be investing for those fraud specialists and capabilities if we stand a
05:16chance of being able to help this industry not get more of their money stolen as a result of
05:23the criminals that are targeting it. You recently had a big announcement
05:27about an acquisition, which seems very exciting, but I'll let you talk about it.
05:33Tell us more about your acquisition of Payments.io.
05:37We acquired Payments.io. We are incredibly excited about what this means for our business and the
05:43future capabilities that we'll be able to bring to the market. When we entered the industry,
05:48we knew that if we went to each one of these companies that was facing this fraud landscape
05:53and said, hey, we've got a new way of helping you move money, it was going to be met with a
05:56lot of resistance. We tried to meet them where they were at and said, okay, you can still move
06:01the money the way that you're moving it, but let's make sure that you're going to send it
06:04to the right place. Our entire product and experience was all based on verifying the
06:09parties involved in a transaction, validating the information that they have that they're
06:14about to utilize to send funds, and then giving them an insurance policy and saying, hey,
06:19if you send the funds to this place, we are going to guarantee it because we are that confident.
06:24We've done the verification appropriately and your money will not get picked off.
06:28But there was no way to move the funds. It was one of the most common pieces of feedback we'd
06:32receive. It was like, oh, this is amazing experience. Thank you so much. I thought I
06:36was going to get to move the money. We always knew that it was going to be a natural extension
06:40of what we wanted to do as a business. We've invested a lot of time and energy to determine
06:45was this something that we wanted to build, we wanted to buy, we wanted to partner with someone.
06:49When we found the folks at Payments.io, the expertise that they have around moving funds
06:55specifically for the real estate community, we just knew that it was going to be a perfect
07:00match for us and them to come together and to be able to now provide holistically that
07:06verification of parties, validation of their information, and now finally, also the movement
07:12of those funds. We are going to support buyers and making sure that their funds get into a real
07:17estate transaction securely. Then we're going to help all of our title company customers and
07:22law firms that are utilizing our software to make sure that when they disperse funds,
07:26they're going to get to where they're going securely. I think the beauty there is that
07:31we're going to get to see with more transparency when those funds get sent and when they land in
07:37an account. Because today, we could give that insurance policy, we can say, hey, you're safe,
07:43but we can't control the next level of communication that takes place where they
07:46receive one more ping from a fraudulent, somebody impersonating a real estate agent or the title
07:52company. Then they get tricked and they end up sending those funds. By us being able to do that
07:57end-to-end, we feel like we're going to be able to provide such an incredible secure-to-pay solution
08:04for everyone who's involved in the transaction. We're just really excited about what it's going
08:08to mean for the business. Now, Payments.io has competitors that also do fund disbursement.
08:16Are you still planning on playing nice in the sandbox with those competitors,
08:21even though you have a payment solution in-house now?
08:26Yeah, for sure. Look, when we entered the market, no one knew anything about fraud.
08:32I'm so happy to see the amount of companies that have leaned in to try to streamline these
08:37operations for, honestly, an underserved market. There's more than 20,000 independent title
08:42companies across the country that are moving trillions of dollars every year. I'm happy to
08:49see that there's other folks that are out there trying to help solve these problems, trying to
08:52help make those businesses more secure. For companies that want to utilize us still as their
08:57most trusted fraud and identity product, we're happy to do that. If you're going to utilize
09:02somebody else for moving money, that's going to be fine. Of course, we're going to try to convince
09:07you to utilize our services end-to-end, and we're going to try to make that worth your while.
09:12But we'll definitely continue to be partnered with other folks in the industry that are
09:17serving a common goal and purpose because we just truly believe that any weak link in this network,
09:24in this community and industry is just bad for real estate in general. It's ultimately
09:31horrible for the consumer who ends up losing their life savings as part of this. We all got
09:37to band together to beat the fraudsters because they are extremely well-funded and extremely
09:42motivated to steal our funds. So I'm happy to see that there are other folks out there
09:47trying to do the same thing. Well, Tyler, really interesting acquisition. Wishing you a lot of
09:54success with the acquisition and also with growth in 2025 and beyond. Thank you so much for joining
10:00me today on 10-Minute Talks. Yeah, appreciate you having me and looking forward to what we're
10:04going to be able to accomplish in this industry in 2025. Thanks a lot, Diego.
10:12you