The months prior to Christmas last year were action-packed for PEXA – the first digital remortgage transaction was completed by Hinckley & Rugby Building Society and muve in September, followed in quick succession by Shawbrook Bank and Pure Law joining the network and similarly beginning their digital remortgage experience.
We caught up with Shawbrook and Pure Law recently, to check in on how they have found their experience completing remortgages with PEXA.
Shawbrook was enthusiastic about our suggestion that they be in our initial cohort of lenders to use PEXA. Senior Implementation Manager, Paula Dyson said:
“Our ‘best-of-both’ business strategy combines human ingenuity with the very best modern technology. Therefore, what PEXA offered absolutely aligned with our ambitions. Being able to digitise the mortgage completions process improves the experience for our customers and empowers our people to focus on offering the sort of expertise only a human can provide”.
Wanting to partner with a nimble, responsive firm for this new initiative, Shawbrook approached Pure Law. Heinrich Ferreira, Partner at Pure Law said:
“We have been working with Shawbrook Bank since their first loan and so we were excited when they asked us to go on this further journey with them. Of course, we had no idea what PEXA was, but from a quick search it was clear that they had a substantial positive impact on the Australian conveyancing industry”.
The practical benefits are noticeable already
PEXA’s goal is to improve the downstream components of the conveyancing process With so many tech solutions available for use by lenders and law firms, PEXA is focused on working with industry to ensure we address friction points in the conveyancing experience.
Many lenders have shared with us a sense of frustration about the lack of transparency once they have issued a mortgage offer. Paula commented:
“Having the ability to work together with our conveyancer on a shared workspace provided a real openness to the transaction that we’ve not had before”.
Law firms tell us they’re being weighed down by the growing administrative burden involved in completions. The team at Pure Law sees benefits.
“The funds clearing system does take away some of the administrative burden on our legal cashiers and partners who usually set up, approve, and process payments. The account verification checks add an extra layer of security. As we do not receive any funds into our client account, or send out any funds, there is less administration required, and all payments on a case are processed automatically and at the same time. Once funds are cleared by the platform, the legal charge is digitally dated and automatically lodged for registration, which in turn reduces the administrative burden on our post completion team”.
In respect of the experience more generally, the team at Pure Law continued to say:
“The workspace keeps track of your progress, and it only takes a brief glance at the matter dashboard to know what is still outstanding, and what still needs to be done. It aids in organisation. In addition to this, once a workspace has been approved and locked, you do not need to revisit it, deal with sending funds, date the legal charge, or deal with the Land Registry application, freeing up more time to spend elsewhere. Overall, it saves time and helps eliminate errors”.
The positive benefits were echoed by Shawbrook who consider that “whilst it’s still early days, we’re starting to see benefits where we have certainty and speed of payments being processed swiftly via PEXA Pay and a much closer understanding of the progress for each completion via our jointly owned workspace with our conveyancer partner”. They also received feedback from their brokers who “are excited by the potential that PEXA brings and that they can share the digitalisation benefits”.
The PEXA team is here to support
We take pride in recruiting and developing team members from diverse professional backgrounds, and with deep domain expertise. Creating and maintaining relationships with customers is at the core of what we do, which has been noticed by Pure Law.
“It has been a pleasure to work with the PEXA team. They are very attentive and supportive, but also open to suggestions. Every member of the team has been extremely helpful. They are very responsive to feedback and issues are resolved immediately. They are very clear in their explanations and training and always happy to jump on a call to help. It has been painless dealing with them”.
We are thrilled to receive such positive feedback which followed from Shawbrook, with Paula sharing “the team has been fantastic, we very much approached the implementation as a partnership, working together to make it a success”.
We’re looking forward to working with more lenders and law firms and other industry participants as the PEXA network expands in the UK.
Written by Andrew Lloyd, Chief Customer Officer (UK), PEXA.
This article was submitted to be published by PEXA as part of their advertising agreement with Today’s Conveyancer. The views expressed in this article are those of the submitter and not those of Today’s Conveyancer.
