In the race to automate title insurance operations, a curious gap has emerged between vendors selling automation solutions and the industry professionals who need them. The problem isn’t the technology itself. It’s that many vendors building these solutions have never worked inside the operations they’re trying to automate.
Jimmy Lewis of TrueFocus Automation has noticed this pattern repeatedly over the past few years. As a Co-Founder of TrueFocus Automation, he fields inquiries from title companies frustrated with automation projects that looked promising but failed to deliver meaningful results.
“Domain expertise isn’t optional when you’re automating processes that determine whether a policy gets issued,” Lewis argues. “You need to understand what you’re automating.”
Challenges for Automation
The title insurance industry presents unique challenges for automation. Workflows involve interactions between multiple legacy systems, county-specific requirements, manual handoffs, and processes where mistakes can result in significant financial liability. A vendor who understands robotic process automation but not title insurance workflows will optimize the wrong things.
TrueFocus’s approach reflects Lewis’s more than two decades in the title and mortgage industry, combined with partner Sridhar Loganathan’s 20+ years in title and mortgage operations. Together, their experience shapes how the team identifies and evaluates automation opportunities.
“We’ll tell clients upfront if a process isn’t ready for automation,” says Sridhar Loganathan, TrueFocus’s COO and Co-Founder. “We don’t take on every project just to make money. If the ROI or value is limited, we’ll recommend focusing on other workflows that are better suited for automation.”
The distinction matters in practical terms. TrueFocus has deployed 760 bots handling over 2,400 tasks across title, mortgage, and appraisal operations. The average per-bot cost runs around $9,500, with clients seeing ROI within weeks or months rather than the multi-year timelines common with enterprise automation projects.
Compare that to competitors who position automation as a massive upfront investment with ROI timelines stretching three to four years into the future.
Why the Ownership Model
The ownership model is another key difference. Many automation vendors keep ownership of the solutions they build and charge ongoing transactional fees for years. TrueFocus offers those models as well, but also gives clients the option to own what is built, helping address long-term cost planning and data security concerns.
“Many organizations prefer the ownership model,” Lewis says. “They want control of their infrastructure and don’t want to pay transactional fees indefinitely.”
This operations-versus-technology divide extends beyond pricing and ownership structures. It shows up in which problems get solved. Tech-first vendors often focus on replacing existing systems entirely or building new interfaces. Operations-first vendors look for the tedious manual processes happening between systems that create actual bottlenecks.
Take Title Hunter®, TrueFocus’s RPA, an AI-powered solution for online title searches. The bots can deliver tens of title searches in less than an hour in counties where traditional abstractors may need hours to days to complete the same work. The value isn’t just speed. It’s understanding county-specific requirements and the exact sequence of steps required to produce a usable title search.
As artificial intelligence integration accelerates automation capabilities, the operations expertise gap will likely widen further. More vendors can build bots that execute tasks. Fewer can identify which tasks need automating and how to integrate those solutions into existing operational workflows.
The question for title insurance companies evaluating automation isn’t whether the technology works. It’s whether the vendor understands the business well enough to apply that technology effectively. In an industry where process mistakes carry significant liability, the difference between a tech expert and an operation expert matters considerably.
About TrueFocus Automation
TrueFocus Automation provides intelligent process automation solutions for title insurance, mortgage, and appraisal operations. Founded by title insurance veterans, the company combines deep industry expertise with custom bot development to automate complex workflows while allowing clients to maintain ownership and control of their automation infrastructure.