My Personal take:  It's a day late and a lawsuit short.

Someone realized that unknown, unseen, unvetted strangers were being emailed or given borrowers' loan applications willy nilly with no regard for what was being spammed... with everything an identifity theft or someone "borrowing a credit history" needs to know and more.

The "financial information" background check is common for bank and lender employees.  My guess is to CTA, some lender's attorneys figured out that just handing out completed loan applications to total strangers NOT employed by the lender is a bad idea.  Whose deep pocket do we go for when the non-attorney signing agent, their child, spouse or next-door-neighbor's teenage son, takes the information in the loan application and has fun with it?  I don't think a background check saves them, but certainly is a good idea since we are total strangers given the borrowers' "financial information" and "checking out" their home's contents and its security measures, by invitation through their lender, while they are busy signing documents.  Borrowers' thought:  Why would my lender send a crook my loan documents and use them to enter my home.

Personally, if the "financial documents" were removed from all closing packages and kept between the lender/mortgage broker and borrower only, this isn't necessary.  Old enough to remember when I never saw a loan application in a closing package sent to an attorney's office.