The lender will use Pexa’s digital property exchange platform to enable a remortgage within two days. Natwest will then extend this to the handling of sale and purchase transactions.
The Australian company launched in the UK in 2022, with a view to transform the property exchange process by enabling documents and information to be shared digitally to speed up transactions.
Miguel Sard, managing director of homebuying and ownership at Natwest, said good progress was already being made with Pexa, having tested Pexa’s payment scheme with the Bank of England.
Sard said the technology would help make the bank simpler and faster for its customers.
He added: “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, said: “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.”
Last month, it was reported that Natwest’s gross mortgage lending nearly halved in Q1.
