LMS and PEXA have been selected to take part in the Bank of England’s Synchronisation Lab, which has been set up to test business models for synchronising payments across the financial services sector. The tech companies are the only two participants selected for the ‘house purchase’ element of the BoE’s synchronisation testing.
“In October 2025, we announced the Synchronisation Lab – a platform for industry to demonstrate use cases and understand business models for synchronisation,” BoE explained.
“We received a strong wave of applications. We’re delighted to announce that 18 organisations have been selected to take part. These organisations will be testing a diverse range of use cases, reflecting the depth of interest and commitment across the sector.”
LMS, through its National Property Transaction Network (NPTN), will aim to prove how synchronised settlement can make the remortgage process faster, safer and more certain for lenders and other stakeholders across the transaction.
“Despite progress across financial services, property transactions remain heavily manual, with poor alignment between payment finality, legal completion and charge registration,” LMS said.
“For lenders, these timing gaps create settlement risk, operational friction, and avoidable delays to completion. The Synchronisation Lab is exploring how synchronising the movement of money and assets using central bank money could address these challenges at their root.”
LMS works with around 4,000 law firms and 45 lenders and, through NPTN, is extending its role to combine payments infrastructure, digital identity and legal processes.
Working in eight-week testing cycles, NPTN will test a synchronised remortgage process within the lab’s simulated real-time gross settlement (RTGS) environment. This includes splitting payments into earmark and settle stages via RTGS, while aligning with wider industry processes such as priority search or advance notice and charge registration.
Nick Chadbourne, CEO of LMS, explained:
“We’ve already used the NPTN sandbox to work collaboratively with 15 lenders to test use cases that improve the journey. Through the Synchronisation Lab, we can deepen that collaboration by ensuring synchronisation cuts settlement risk and streamlines completion, giving lenders greater certainty, while also aligning with the requirements of our law firm partners as we explore the future of the home buying and selling process for all key stakeholders.”
PEXA has been selected as a participant to demonstrate atomic settlement (delivery versus payment) for property transactions. Its use cases focus on how synchronisation capabilities could support stronger coordination between the reservation and release of lender funds and title lodgement steps within a property transaction flow.
“The aim is to test how these steps could be aligned more closely, so that completion processes can be delivered with greater certainty and reduced operational risk,” PEXA said.
Using an existing remortgage or sale and purchase flow, PEXA expects to demonstrate the successful reservation, releasing or cancellation of an earmark placed against lender funds held in their respective settlement accounts in the renewed RTGS; the successful lodgement of title with HMLR, and the potential demonstration of rollback; and atomic completion, where lender funds held in RT2 are released only when title lodgement is assured.
The work is relevant to organisations involved in property transactions and settlement flows, including lenders, conveyancers and ecosystem partners interested in supporting a safer, more predictable completion process, PEXA said.
“To be selected by the Bank of England after a rigorous application process is a huge achievement in itself,” PEXA’s UK CEO Joe Pepper added.
“It gives us an enormous opportunity to showcase the capabilities of the technology we’ve spent significant time and resource building as a bespoke solution for the UK. We will demonstrate that it is possible to eliminate property settlement risk without the need to build entirely new, duplicate infrastructure. We’re thrilled to be selected, and looking forward to getting started with the support of an expert team.”
Earlier this week, UK Finance said its Great British Tokenised Deposit (GBTD) project had been selected to take part in the Synchronisation Lab. GBTD is an industry-led payments system that enables the clearing and fungibility of tokenised commercial bank money in GBP for a wide range of use cases.
“The Bank’s synchronisation experimentation will provide an incredibly valuable way to explore its use cases with atomic settlement in central bank money,” UK Finance said.
A live pilot phase of work in the GBTD project was launched in September last year, which is set to conclude this year with live tokenised deposit transactions across retail and wholesale use cases.
“The design phase of the live pilot has progressed well, and we have moved into the build phase,” UK Finance added.
Monzo has recently joined the GBTD project, the seventh bank to do so alongside Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group, NatWest, Nationwide and Santander. The project is also supported by vendors Quant, EY and Linklaters.
