ALTA Board Approves Best Practices Maturity Model to Help Measure Compliance

June 30, 2016

ALTA’s Board of Governors approved the development of a Best Practices Maturity Model to help companies demonstrate the progress made toward implementation of ALTA’s Title Insurance and Settlement Company Best Practices.

After nearly a year of discussions with members, lenders and assessment providers, ALTA’s Best Practices Executive and Internal Auditing committees created the Best Practices Maturity Model to help companies evaluate their policies and procedures to ease adoption of Best Practices.

“Maturity Models are used by lenders and regulators to analyze how companies operate and to measure a company’s policies against benchmark compliance levels,” said Michelle Korsmo, ALTA’s chief executive officer. “It provides companies with a valuable tool to help them determine where they are on the path of Best Practices compliance and how they can improve. Compliance with Best Practices is an ongoing process for ensuring policies and procedures are followed and updated, and errors are quickly detected.” 

The Maturity Model includes five compliance categories ranging from ad hoc—meaning a company has not established any policies or procedures—to optimized—where a company is fully compliant with the Best Practices.

“The results are shown in a summary similar to a report card and provide a more streamlined view of a company’s compliance with Best Practices. This new tool also helps companies define what steps must be taken to reach the ‘optimized’ category of compliance,” Korsmo said. “The Maturity Model creates a working evaluation of the process necessary to achieve optimized compliance, giving ALTA members a better understanding and appreciation for the assessment process.”

The Maturity Model is under a public comment period until July 29. Send questions and comments to [email protected]. After the review comment period ends, comments will be considered before the Maturity Model is finalized and becomes effective Oct. 7.

For more information about how to use this new tool, ALTA has provided a Maturity Model Explainer. 


Contact ALTA at 202-296-3671 or [email protected].