At Centurion Land Title, "Have they been CertifID?" isn't a tagline. It's a verb. A daily check. A hiring question. A culture. 

That habit has paid Centurion Land Title back more than once — including the time CertifID flagged it before they could. "We've actually gotten the phone call from CertifID where they said, ‘Did you know that this seller you’re trying to verify right now is fraudulent?’"

Kurt Simpson, Chief Operating Officer at Centurion Land Title and has "been in the title industry for about 28 years. He first pitched CertifID to a previous employer in 2018. They passed. He moved companies and pitched again. Centurion signed on immediately. 

From afterthought to standard practice

Before CertifID, wire instructions went out by fax, by mail, or clients came in to pick them up in person. 

"It wasn't a focus. It wasn't anything. It was kind of an afterthought, really. It didn't even dawn on us at that point in time that this was an issue."

CertifID changed that. "It created a purposeful task. So there was a task that was attached to it, associated with it, that we could track, that we could measure. ‘Hey, did we send the wire instructions to the buyer? Have they been CertifID?’" 

The phrase spread through the office organically. New hires would use it for months before anyone stopped to explain it. "We've created trainings for new employees that just quite honestly teaches them about CertifID [and] tells them about the different products and services."

Fraud prevention has become part of how Centurion introduces itself to every person who walks through the door.

When the process does the work for you

The culture Kurt built around CertifID has paid off in concrete ways. Centurion sticks to the process on every deal, no exceptions. Because of that consistency, CertifID has caught fraud that Centurion's team never saw coming—calling them directly with the news rather than the other way around.

It's also stopped fraud before it ever got started. "Quite honestly, the seller verification has been a deterrent for fraud for us." In one recent case, a vacant-land seller walked away the moment Centurion initiated the verification process. "Only to find out very shortly after that was a fraudulent attempt as well."

When fraudsters know the process is airtight, they don't bother trying.

Kurt's message to any title leader still running the old way is blunt: "If they don't open their eyes to what's really happening in reality out there, they're just not gonna survive. I do think that the fraud is working. And so it's getting bigger, it's getting more sophisticated. And the only reason it's getting more sophisticated is because they're having success with it. You've got to get in line with this."

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