What has Residential Conveyancing have in common with designing and implementing systems in the financial sector? The answer is workflow processes, involving standards based electronic messages. Those who have had recent experience with manual conveyancing processes may be glad to hear that by the time they next move, the process will have changed substantially.
stpsolutions has had a major role in laying the foundations to make this possible. Following on from experience participating in industry committees involved in the design of the CREST securities settlement system and the EMX mutual fund trading system, Andrew Chilcott was retained by PISCES (Property Information Systems Common Exchange Standard) to project manage the Lenders Conveyancing Workgroup and the Residential Conveyancing Workgroup to develop the electronic messaging standards to be used in residential conveyancing in England & Wales. These have now been published and form the basis for electronic conveyancing projects currently in progress.
PISCES is an industry owned, not-for-profit organisation that has many leading property investment companies, developers, lawyers, agents as well as the RICS and various government departments and agencies such as Land Registry, Registers of Scotland, Communities and Local Government, the Valuation Office Agency and the Crown Estate amongst its executive membership. It is also part of an international standards body OSCRE ,covering global standards for the real estate industry.
The Lenders Conveyancing Workgroup was championed by HBOS and Nationwide BS who, together with other lenders and representatives from over a dozen firms of lawyers, defined the content and designed the workflow of electronic messaging required to cover all communications between lawyers and lenders in respect of new loans, re-mortgages and mortgage redemptions.
The Residential Conveyancing Workgroup was made up of fifteen firms of lawyers representing both large and small practices and dealt with defining the electronic counterpart to all the documents and informaton that flow between the lawyers acting for the Vendor and those acting for the Purchaser. These were then developed into a workflow of electronic messages.The complete process was mapped out by stpsolutions - view the document. For each of the information interchanges identified in this document a set of XML based electronic messages covering requests and various responses was built, with every data element being fully defined in a data model with some 1,200 components.