The mortgage payoff process is one of the most fraud-prone in a closing—and it takes work. Escrow teams must commit time to collecting important data, ensuring statements are ordered and updated, and accurately entering information into the system, sometimes in more than one place.
Fraud doesn’t rely on bad intent; it exploits inconsistency when hurried professionals deviate from process in moments like these. Team members may skip steps and bypass tools outside the core workflow—or get tricked by fraudsters into straying from safe practices. For title & escrow executives, this creates uneven execution, stretched staff, and fraud risk driven by human-dependent processes.
The Automated Payoff Agent in Qualia Shield addresses these challenges by removing variability and discretion from mortgage payoffs.
Combining process automation with generative artificial intelligence, the agent standardizes and automates how mortgage payoffs are identified, gathered, and imported into Qualia. This reduces your team’s workload while ensuring the same rigorous, secure workflow is enforced on every file, without exception.
Unlike standalone wire fraud solutions, which rely on employees to navigate different systems to manually execute a process, Qualia Shield is integrated directly into the system of record. As a result, Shield’s guardrails are automated and embedded into the transaction, erasing the vulnerabilities inherent in manual processes and disconnected tools.
Crucially, payoff instructions gathered using the Automated Payoff Agent are eligible for coverage under Qualia’s $2M insurance policy. For a team closing 100 transactions per month, that translates to 200-300 hours returned to higher-value work—without adding headcount, and with coverage applied consistently across virtually every transaction.*
“Our Automated Payoff Agent turns a traditionally time-consuming and high-risk escrow task into a predictable, automated process,” says Charlotte Brown, Vice President of Product & Design at Qualia. “Teams spend less time chasing payoffs, while leaders gain confidence that each wire is being assessed every time.”
Integrated payoff automation at scale
Automated Payoff Agent can be used on individual orders. Still, customers can maximize the built-in automation, creating consistency and bolstering fraud protection, by adding the agent to any core workflow, such as basic purchase. This will apply the payoff option automatically to all orders using that workflow. That level of seamless integration spurs efficiency and strengthens fraud protection across a title & escrow business.
The need for that protection continues to grow: real estate cybercrime resulted in more than $173 million in adjusted losses in 2024, and 95% of title & escrow professionals told Qualia in a recent survey that attack volumes have remained the same or increased.
“Even when companies use wire fraud prevention tools, manual workflows and standalone tools create critical vulnerabilities by requiring busy employees to operate perfectly around the clock,” says Brown. “Teams act with good intentions, but a single missed step during a rush closing—one fraudsters understand, anticipate, and actively exploit— can expose the business to catastrophic loss. Effective defense depends on systems that enforce guardrails automatically.”
Automated Payoff Agent demonstrates a key example of how Qualia Shield provides those guardrails. Payoff fraud typically happens when a lender is impersonated and wiring instructions are changed to divert money to scammers. Working in concert with Qualia Connect, Automated Payoff Agent closes that security gap, managing mortgage payoffs end to end.
The agent detects existing payoffs or requests the information directly from the mortgagor through Qualia Connect. It secures payoff authorization, orders payoff quotes, and imports the details directly into the file. The agent assesses wire instructions as low risk through Qualia Shield, providing peace of mind and coverage under Shield’s $2M insurance policy. Importantly, escrow professionals have full visibility into the ordering status through a progress tracker and activity log that provides a complete list of actions performed.
“Fraud thrives when processes break down,” says Brown. “By embedding automated payoff handling into core workflows, Automated Payoff Agent standardizes a critical risk point in the transaction, enabling title & escrow leaders to protect customers and the bottom line at scale.”
Conclusion
Mortgage payoffs are a time-consuming and risk-sensitive component of the closing process. While teams may already use tools to help manage it, manual steps, handoffs, and inconsistencies still create exposure and operational drag. Fraudsters are eager to exploit those gaps.
Automated Payoff Agent helps close them by embedding payoff automation directly into the system of record title & escrow companies use to run their business. By handling identification, authorization, ordering, verification, and risk assessment within the workflow, Qualia Shield’s Automated Payoff Agent removes the choice to bypass safety checks and enforces the same stringent process on every file. Without adding another siloed tool to manage, teams gain consistency by default.
As Brown puts it: “The result is a more consistent process that enforces safeguards on every payoff, significantly reducing fraud exposure while delivering meaningful time savings for escrow teams.”
Footnote: *Based on the average dollar amount of wires across Qualia deployments in 2025, over 99% of wires are insurable.
Learn more about how you can simplify and secure your title & escrow business with Qualia. Chat with one of our experts today.
