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
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