E-signature use at Land Registry surges amid homebuying reform

The number of e-signatures used at Land Registry has surged in the latest quarter — jumping more than ten times in just three months to 643, Novus Strategy analysis reveals.

Qualified Electronic Signatures (QES) are a central part of homebuying reform as they reduce friction and save time.

A combination of QES, Smart Data and digital IDs are expected to 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.

The 643 e-signatures recorded in the third quarter of the year are up from 55 in Q2 and just five in Q1.

In February, Nationwide announced it was the first lender to allow mortgage deeds to be signed digitally and then, in October, conveyancing services provider LMS 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. 

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.”