MBANow: MBA’s William Kooper on a Unified Legislative Approach to Online Notarization
The Mortgage Bankers Association released a new video featuring MBA Vice President of State Government Affairs and Industry Relations William Kooper, who discusses an MBA-sponsored Remote Online Notarization model legislation for states.
The video can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMlv–46odU&feature=em-uploademail.
Kooper noted in 2017, Montana and Virginia and Texas took very different approaches to permitting online remote notarization. Interest from other states escalated “quickly,” he said, and the resulting legal uncertainty. The Texas bill passed with strong input from the Texas Mortgage Bankers Association, giving remote online notarization the same legal footing as in-person or traditional notarizations. Other states, such as Nevada, followed through with similar legislation, prompting prompted MBA and the American Land Title Association to create model legislation based on the Texas bill.
“In 2018, we anticipated a lot of other states were going to take up similar legislation,” Kooper said. “[We] recommended MISMO enact a new working group and convene…experts to talk about these data standards that secretaries of states would need” to go forward with legislation.
The MISMO working group convened this past September; MBA/ALTA released a single model bill in December, along with ancillary materials. “All of this is co-branded and we’re going out to the states with one uniform approach,” Kooper said.
Rather than a piecemeal approach to online notarization by states, “What we’re hoping for and what we see as a stronger result is a uniform set of standards across different states,” Kooper said. “It would be the worst result to have 50 or more different approaches enacted across the country. And we believe that by using that Texas model to create our model legislation, legislators will have a degree of comfort to what the industry is suggesting in that our model will look very familiar if they’ve read the Texas bill.”
For more information visit http://mba.org/RemoteOnlineNotarization.
Other videos in the MBANow series can be viewed at the MBA YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Swk2VUJeZFI&feature=em-uploademail. The videos are also available on the MBA Insights landing page, https://www.mba.org/publications/insights/insights-publication##SubscriberID####RND##&PageID=21109.
