PEXA partners with NatWest to deliver 48-hour remortgage

PEXA Group has announced a strategic partnership with NatWest that will see the UK lender utilise PEXA’s digital property exchange technology to deliver 48-hour remortgage transactions to its customers.

NatWest then plans to extend its use of the PEXA platform to speed up the handling of sale and purchase transactions.

Established in 2010, PEXA has facilitated over 13 million property transactions worth circa-AUD $2 trillion in Australia. It has a bespoke platform for the UK housing market with an initial focus on digital remortgage and a sale and purchase platform due to launch later this year.

Earlier this year, Shawbrook became the first bank in the UK to offer limited companies the ability to remortgage using PEXA.

Miguel Sard, managing director of homebuying and ownership at NatWest, said good progress was already being made, having tested PEXA’s payment scheme with the Bank of England, and said the technology would help make the bank simpler and faster for its customers.

He commented: "At the heart of our strategy for growth is anticipating and meeting our customers’ needs, using data and technology to ensure we are simple to deal with. PEXA has already proven in Australia that remortgaging processes that ordinarily take months, can take just a couple of days, or even hours in some cases.

“We are delighted to be partnering with PEXA and will be working with the team closely over the coming months to help us deliver on our strategy by enabling its world-leading digital property exchange platform for the benefit of our customers and the broader UK property ecosystem."

Joe Pepper, UK CEO of PEXA, added: “As one of the UK’s major lenders, NatWest shares a common goal of driving digital innovation and transforming the customer experience to address the chronically long time it takes to transact property in the UK market, with all the associated pitfalls of transaction fall-through and stress.”

“The property settlement process in the UK is highly challenged. Relative to similar markets, transaction fail rates are unacceptably high and the time to complete transactions is overly long.

“We welcome the opportunity to work with NatWest Group and partner with a lender committed to solving these issues with us. We look forward to helping implement our technology to improve the NatWest customer experience.”