REAL ESTATE INVESTMENT, ASSET MANAGEMENT
Businesswire | May 31, 2023
Closinglock, a leading provider of fraud prevention solutions for the real estate industry, today announced the availability of a new identity verification solution that helps title agencies and real estate firms combat the growing amount of fraud.
Seller impersonation fraud is one such area of fraud that is on the rise. This type of fraud primarily involves identity theft to sell vacant land, second homes, and vacation and rental properties all across the country.
Closinglock’s latest solution includes the ability to identify fake driver's licenses, which is the most common method used by fraudsters in seller impersonation fraud.
This new solution is a significant improvement over antiquated methods like knowledge-based authentication (KBA). According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), “the ease with which an attacker can discover the answers to many KBA questions … cause KBA to have an unacceptably high risk of successful use by an attacker.”
"As KBA is obsoleted in this new digital market due to targeted spoofing, AI, and web and social media scraping, our team engineered a solution that quickly and easily verifies identity using modern technologies," noted Closinglock’s CEO and Cofounder, Andy White, PhD.
Since Closinglock closely follows the NIST guidelines, it worked to utilize more stringent methods to fight fraud. The new solution from Closinglock is more secure than KBA because it uses a variety of methods to verify the identity of a user which makes it much more difficult for scammers to bypass the verification process.
“We believe that this new solution is a game-changer for the real estate industry,” said White. “It will help to protect our customers from fraud and ensure that their transactions are safe and secure.”
About Closinglock
Closinglock is a leading provider of fraud prevention solutions for the real estate industry. Closinglock’s platform protects payments, payoffs, and all related communications with strict security protocols and offers seamless integrations with closing and title company software. The company currently protects billions of dollars each month with its software, and is trusted by thousands of settlement companies, title agents, law firms, attorneys, lenders, real estate agents, home buyers and sellers and others. Learn more at closinglock.com.
Read More
REAL ESTATE INVESTMENT, ASSET MANAGEMENT
Businesswire | June 01, 2023
Cross River Bank (“Cross River”), a technology infrastructure provider that offers embedded financial solutions, today announced its strategic partnership with paymints.io, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform to for real estate payment transactions. This collaboration marks a significant milestone in transforming the way stakeholders in real estate transactions handle and control their funds. Initially launched with two payment rails, ACH (including same day ACH), and wires, the partnership gives stakeholders unprecedented transparency and security to the entire payment process to further the mission of eliminating paper checks and reducing fraud for partners and customers.
"As a leader in modernizing payments, we are thrilled to join forces with paymints.io to transform the real estate payment landscape," said Keith Vander Leest, Head of Payments at Cross River. "By combining our expertise in payments, compliance, and financial technology, with the paymints.io team’s deep expertise in real estate, property and title insurance, we are advancing the way funds are handled in real estate transactions and ensuring a seamless and secure experience for all parties involved. It’s niche B2B verticals, like real estate, that have outdated payment processes which are ripe for innovation. These verticals are where Cross River works with partners, like paymints.io, to drive better, more efficient payment experiences."
The partnership between Cross River and paymints.io provides stakeholders involved in real estate transactions - including buyers, sellers, agents, and escrow holders - with a revolutionary payment platform that enables them to move money swiftly, conveniently, and in line with their individual preferences. By leveraging Cross River’s API technology with the paymints.io platform, this innovative partnership offers streamlined payments, expanded payment options, and enhanced visibility—at all touch points, from earnest money deposits to funding and disbursements. Stakeholders on the paymints.io platform can track funds in real-time, verify transactions, and enjoy a heightened sense of security and trust throughout the entire real estate transaction journey.
“The innovation of digital payments for real estate is still at the early stages,” says Jason Doshi, CEO of paymints.io. “And our partnership with Cross River enables us to continue to build the modern payment experience the real estate industry so desperately needs to make the transfer of funds as safe, convenient, and secure as possible.”
The innovative partnership between Cross River and paymints.io represents a groundbreaking step towards modernizing real estate transactions, ultimately delivering a superior experience for all involved parties. The partners look forward to adding additional payment capabilities in the future for access to all payment rails within a single platform.
About Cross River
Cross River provides technology infrastructure powering the future of financial services. Leveraging its proprietary real-time banking core, Cross River delivers innovative and scalable embedded payments, cards, and lending solutions to millions of consumers and businesses. Cross River is backed by leading investors and serves the world’s most essential fintech and technology companies. Together with its partners, Cross River is reshaping global finance and financial inclusion. Member FDIC. Find out more at www.crossriver.com.
About Paymints.io
Paymints.io is a venture-backed, SOC 2 Type II certified, digital payments solution focused on elevating the payment experience in a real estate transaction. Automating payments and modernizing the B2B and B2B2C experience allows real estate industry participants to reduce its dependency on the costly, manual process of handling and processing paper checks. The platform offers a variety of payment solutions including earnest money deposit, cash to close as well as client and vendor disbursements securely - without having to expose and share account numbers and routing information. In 2022, paymints.io was awarded HousingWire's Tech100 Real Estate Award for the second consecutive year and in 2023 awarded the Electronic Transaction Association Top 10 Payments ISV. For more information on paymints.io, visit http://www.paymints.io.
Read More
REAL ESTATE TECHNOLOGY, REAL ESTATE INVESTMENT
Globenewswire | June 07, 2023
Today’s launch of BrainBox AI’s Autonomous Decarbonization solution suite marks another milestone for the company as it continues to deliver innovative and impactful solutions aiding the built environment in its fight against climate change. This unique product suite was created as an end-to-end sustainability platform for commercial and retail real estate portfolio owners seeking an AI-driven emissions reduction solution to propel their decarbonization journey.
BrainBox AI’s autonomous decarbonization solution directly addresses the 38% of global greenhouse gases (GHG) emitted annually by commercial buildings by measuring, reducing, and offsetting them, thereby supporting building owners in their journeys to net zero and carbon neutrality. This industry-defining technology uses deep learning, cloud computing and custom algorithms to empower building owners to drastically reduce their scope 1 and 2 emissions while decreasing energy costs.
“Your building is currently emitting 30% more GHG emissions than it should. That stat is scary but solvable,” comments Sam Ramadori, Chief Executive Officer at BrainBox AI. “Our new solution suite not only grants commercial and retail real estate owners the capability to measure their emissions, but autonomously implements optimization strategies that can reduce emissions by up to 40%. Our award-winning AI technology pinpoints and addresses both operational and environmental inefficiencies in buildings in real time. We are excited to offer this turnkey solution that generates continuous positive impacts on carbon emissions for the industry at large.”
BrainBox AI’s 3-part Autonomous Decarbonization suite launches a continuous AI-powered measurement and decarbonization system that unlocks a building’s true potential for emission reductions;
Measure: Easily generate a full scope 1 & 2, audit grade GHG assessment powered by the building’s data and trusted emissions factors, enabling the identification of operational inefficiencies. In addition, our individual building analysis compares your building’s energy usage intensity (EUI) to other comparable buildings and demonstrates your energy and emissions reduction potential.
Reduce: Act and conquer one of the most energy consuming and inefficient operational components of your building by layering our autonomous AI-tech onto your existing heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) system. BrainBox AI learns, modulates, and optimizes building HVAC systems resulting in a reduction of operational carbon emissions by up to 40% and a decrease in energy costs by up to 25%.
Offset: Access high quality carbon credits through a voluntary market. The virtual marketplace supports multiple types of options like carbon-capture technology, nature-based solutions, and renewable energy projects, giving clients the ability to make customized carbon credit purchases with key insights on the quality of the projects that are available.
While the deployment of each part of the suite can be done independently, adoption of the three maximizes emissions reduction impact and enables the successful execution of a decarbonization program.
“What we are hearing from our customers and the market is that measurement without action is not nearly enough to get us where we need to be,” said Omar Tabba, Chief Product Officer at BrainBox AI. “With this new product category, not only can we autonomously reduce carbon emissions using our AI technology, but we can also offer the tools to accurately and precisely measure where operational optimization can take place and offer clients a solution to explore and take part in the voluntary carbon markets – all in one platform.”
Buildings are on the frontline of the climate change battle, and the commercial real estate and retail markets are in the hotseat. The market is ripe for a solution that can deliver emissions measurement as well as reduction, two components that are absolutely necessary to reach net-zero and carbon neutrality.
About BrainBox AI
Founded in 2017, BrainBox AI was created to address the dilemma currently facing the built environment, its energy consumption and significant contribution to climate change. As innovators of the global energy transition, BrainBox AI’s game-changing HVAC technology leverages autonomous AI to make buildings smarter, greener, and more efficient. Working together with our trusted global partners, BrainBox AI supports real estate clients in various sectors, including office buildings, hotels, commercial retail, grocery stores, airports, and more.
Headquartered in Montreal, Canada, a global AI hub, our workforce of over 150 employees, bring with them talent from all sectors with the common thread of being in business to heal our planet. BrainBox AI works in collaboration with research partners including Montreal’s Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA), the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory (LBNL), the Institute for Data Valorization (IVADO) as well as educational institutions including and McGill University.
Read More