The number of e-signatures used at Land Registry has exploded in the latest quarter — jumping more than ten times in just three months to 643, Novus Strategy can reveal.
Qualified Electronic Signatures (QES) are a central plank of the revolution unfolding in homebuying because they reduce friction and save time.
It’s a combination of QES, Smart Data and digital ID that will unlock faster transactions and lower fall-throughs with huge gains for lenders, as well as agents, conveyancers and mortgage brokers.
Use of QES had got off to a slow start after Land Registry began accepting them within applications in August last year, accumulating just three by the end of the year. But adoption is now catching up.
The number of applications using QES rocketed 1,069% in Q3, according to the latest HMLR data released under the Freedom of Information Act. There have now been 706 examples of them being used in total, 91.1% of them arriving in the latest quarter.
Novus, the transformation consultancy for the mortgage and home buying industry that works predominantly with lenders, had forecast that adoption would suddenly accelerate and ultimately come to resemble the ‘hockey stick’ pattern of exponential growth after a slow start, which is what the latest data shows.
The 643 QES recorded in the third quarter of the year are up from 55 in Q2 and just five in Q1. Momentum is set to continue accelerating because HMLR data also revealed that only three customers used QES in September, the latest month covered by the research. Though not identified by Land Registry, they will likely be large lenders and conveyancing businesses. In February, Nationwide announced it was the first lender to allow mortgage deeds to be signed digitally and then, in October, conveyancing services provider LMS3 also rolled out QES for mortgage deed signing for lender and law firm customers.
Slow adoption pre-Q3 was part of what Novus called the ‘configuration conundrum’ in which the different aspects of Horizontal Digital Integration (HDI), the interoperability operating framework that connects individual pieces of infrastructure into a coherent whole, need to move in lockstep.
Only by working together can Smart Data trust frameworks, digital ID, QES, reusable permissions and upfront information allow evidence, decisions and information to flow seamlessly across organisational boundaries. This is what the Government’s homebuying reforms aim to achieve.
Chris Williams, Transformation and Strategy Partner at Novus Strategy, said: “This is the moment we’ve been waiting for. Adoption of QES has exploded in the third quarter and it’s the best indication yet that HDI is gathering pace.
“We know how important QES are to lenders and other businesses in homebuying because we had someone from a major building society explicitly address this on stage at a Novus event last month. We knew this to be the case and have been tracking the growth in these numbers since the very beginning.
“The momentum is certainly building now and it’s very exciting because it indicates that there’s much more going on behind the scenes, as lenders and others involved in homebuying build interoperability into the entire homebuying journey. For lenders, this starts with redesigning the mortgage journey but every actor in a transaction has an important part to play.”
