Does your business include providing notary services for your clients?

If it does, you may have a potential coverage gap in your errors and omissions insurance policy.

In the times that we live in today with the COVID virus in the state mandated social distancing rules and regulations, the notary industry has come up with what they call RON services, remote online notary services. This basically allows the notary to perform notary reacts without the signer of the documents physically appearing in front of the notary. And while this may be a great thing to do now, during these times, it does pose insurance concerns and coverage issues.

Most errors and omissions policies which cover notary acts contain an exclusion or exclusionary wording that prohibits a notary act without the signer of the documents physically appearing in front of the notary.

Well, if you are notarizing a document online, obviously the signer of the document is not physically in front of you. What do you do?

I suggest that you call your insurance broker that sold you your errors and omissions policy and have him or her confirm with the insurance carrier, that the RON services will in fact be covered under your policy.

We at Integrity First Corporation have called all the carriers that we deal with for the errors and omissions coverage and they all have answered positively with regards to the remote online notary services. They have confirmed that the policies will respond to the RON services provided that those services have been done in accordance with the state approved guidelines and regulations.

So again, you need to do the same. Call your broker and confirm that coverage does exist for these types of services in your policy.