Tampa, Fla. – January 18, 2018 – The Florida Agency Network announces the completion of its Closing Manager collaboration portal with the help of their IT partner Premier Data Services.  The Closing Manager has features that bridge wire fraud security best practices with the benefits of a consumer-friendly closing experience. Consumers, real-estate agents, and other parties to the transaction can minimize their email exposure when utilizing the Closing Manager.

“We surveyed and gathered data on Florida Agency Network’s clients to see if portal sentiment in the real-estate community had shifted. With the recent spike in wire fraud activity, we received overwhelming support from both directing and non-directing agents,” says Jay Roberts, Chief Technology Officer for Premier Data Services. “In fact, the percentage of those in favor continually increased each quarter over the past year. The Closing Manager minimizes the cyber footprint of a transaction and extends industry best practices through to the consumers at a time when it is needed most.”

Traditionally, collaboration portals have struggled to gain adoption by real estate agents who direct most transactions and have become the primary target of cyber-crime. However, with the rampant escalation in business email compromise (BEC), the security features associated with the Closing Manager provide clients with a safe-haven to conduct business and protect all components of the transaction. These features include:

• Secured Chat allows parties to discuss sensitive, transaction-specific items without the exposure of traditional email.
• Multifactor Authentication strengthens all parties’ control of information. This is currently a standard in the state of New York and its adoption is anticipated industry-wide.
• Infosheets allow buyers and sellers to submit information requested by title insurance companies without the need for traditional email.
• Two-way Document Sharing provides all parties associated to the transaction the ability to upload or receive documents without email delivery.

With fraud and cyber-crime increasingly impacting the real estate industry on a national level, the market has welcomed the adoption of collaboration portals with security tools like those offered by the Closing Manager.

Mike LaRosa, Chief Operating Officer for Florida Agency Network says, “With cyber fraud rampant in the title insurance industry over the past few years, the only responsible reaction appears to be securing transactions at the individual level. Compromised email attacks and social engineering have become highly sophisticated, and we in the industry have too much to risk. We deal with non-public personal information (NPPI) and significant amounts of escrowed funds on a daily basis. The move to individually-secured, portal-based communications seems like the most logical step in countering the current barrage of daily cyber-attack attempts.”

PREMIER DATA SERVICES is an IT/Managed Service Provider that remotely manages a customer’s IT infrastructure and end-user systems with the highest level of security. Its intelligent remote monitoring and security tools provide expert, cost-effective IT management ensuring a company’s system operations are not only healthy, but also optimized for performance. For more information, please visit https://www.pds-1.com.