The third edition of the British Conveyancing Awards is just around the corner. Alongside a new, larger venue and a new headline sponsor in Groundsure, #BCAwards2023 is all about recognising and rewarding the herculean efforts of conveyancing superheroes who, despite hurdles aplenty, continue to go above and beyond to help clients move into their dream home.
Ahead of the splendour and celebration on the 21st March, Today’s Conveyancer will recognise those who help make the event possible through a series of “Sponsor Spotlight” pieces. Here, we speak with Nick Chadbourne, CEO, LMS, sponsors of Conveyancing Firm of the Year – National.
First of all, tell us who you are and what you do.
I’m Nick Chadbourne, CEO at LMS having taken up the role seven years ago. We are the UK’s largest provider of conveyancing and outsourced property services, developing best in class tech solutions in collaboration with our clients to facilitate over 400,000 transactions and £70 billion in loans for intermediaries and lenders in the industry every year.
LMS has been a key provider to the sector for over a quarter of a century. In that time, what is the biggest change you have seen?
The conveyancing sector has seen considerable changes over the years, but the development, evolution, and adoption of technology is definitely the most notable. Digital transformation has really taken off in the last couple of years thanks to the fact that consumers have become accustomed to almost instant gratification in other sectors and are coming to expect the same of the mortgage market.
The economic volatility instigated by political instability both at home and abroad last year especially exacerbated this demand. It caused a somewhat unsteady year in the mortgage market, with all stakeholders feeling the pressure to deliver in a very stressful time. As a result, businesses looked for collaborative, digital solutions that enable them to address their customers’ needs in a more efficient and certain manner than ever.
Availability of services like law firm identity checking and anti-money laundering tech, integration of CMS providers, and digital proof of ID checks have not only tended to this demand, but driven efficiencies in the mortgage journey by removing some of the most time-consuming, manual processes. It even led to the first fully automated remortgage in the latter half of 2022 – something which would have seemed almost unthinkable 25 years ago!
What is a change you’d like to see over the coming years, and how will LMS be a part of that change?
Increased collaboration needs to be the focus. Technology has developed to the point where it can solve most problems. Policy, commerciality, aversion to risk and competing priorities are now the only reasons that we aren’t proactively addressing pain points in the market. Removing these barriers by driving collaboration from all areas of the industry and all stakeholders is key to moving at pace and seeing the wide scale tech adoption that we need.
LMS is taking the lead in pushing this to the top of the agenda in order to give everyone equal and uninhibited access to the right technologies and transform the market further still. Ongoing investment in the solutions is key as more and more data becomes available, but improving collaboration and accessibility allows all stakeholders to deliver the best customer outcomes now, and that has to be the next step.
One key development for LMS in 2022 was the introduction of LMS DART. Could you explain this technology and the impact it has – and could have – on remortgages as well as sale and purchase transactions?
LMS DART – Decisioning and Automated Remortgage Technology – is designed to drastically simplify the lender instructed mortgage journey. The award-winning, purpose-built software works with firms to enable the end-to-end automation of simple cases from the point of information being received to post completion workflows, minimising the need for manual intervention.
It allows each case to be individually assessed for complexity within seconds of the all the borrower information being submitted so that all stakeholders are aware of any additional legal work, fees and documents that may be required as part of the transaction. As such, any additional information can be requested immediately rather than later down the line when delays will ensue.
We are already collaborating with four major lenders and it is proving able to completely automate remortgage journeys for simple cases. With the tech receiving consistent investment and the integration of more data sources, 2023 will see additional automation throughout the journey, allowing more complex cases to be processed and the plan is to extend to purchase transactions too.
