PayPal was launched with the aim of making sending money as easy as sending anemail. It is nearly 25 years since the IPO of PayPal on Nasdaq and, at least as far as consumers are concerned, technological and regulatory changes in the interim mean payments are now easier than email. Getting credit has also become largely frictionless for many consumers, with one major exception: sorting out a mortgage and using it to buy a home.
Clearly, there are good reasons why getting a mortgage should involve a number of hurdles. However, the UK’s mortgage framework is based on the Law of Property Act of1925, which means it is bedevilled by time-consuming paperwork and work-flow duplication. A September 2025 report by Santander ‘Fixing the broken chain’ notes that: “someone buying their first home today will experience a process that’s almost identical to that experienced by their grandparents’ generation”. Santander estimates that £1.5 billion is lost to the UK economy annually through failed property transactions. It didn’t try to put a figure on the costs in frustration, and general angst, that come with creaking manual workflows.
The challenge for the mortgage market is, essentially, the same one that trade finance has been wrestling with for decades: how to get to a trustworthy, end-to-end digital system that all parts of the ecosystem can use at an affordable cost. In trade finance, current initiatives include the International Secure Trade Transfer Protocol (ISTTP),intended to let firms “connect once, connect everywhere…a secure, standards-based way to structure and exchange trade data itself”, and a drive by the ADB to persuade big tech firms to make it easy to create harmonised and trustworthy trade documentation in existing software packages like Excel and Google Sheets.
What could be done in mortgages? The UK government is consulting on how best to reform home buying and selling in the UK, where it takes, on average, five and a half months to reach completion on a home sale, according to Rightmove data . As things stand, the push for digitalisation could, the government says, include: supporting “the implementation of a set of data standards for governing home buying and selling data” and “field trials of a data trust framework to guarantee data provenance”.
Other countries have already made progress. It takes an average of just 47 days for Norwegians to go from a decision to sell their home to completion. Norway built a digital system that was co-designed by lenders, insurers, lawyers, and other stakeholders. Australia has also moved towards more digitalisation of the mortgage process, though that has largely been driven forward by one platform: PEXA, which offers e-conveyancing and “provides digital completion infrastructure, allowing automatic fund settlement and title registration to make the process more secure, seamless and certain” for all the parties in property transactions. In a submission to the New South Wales Legislative Council Select Committee enquiry into competition reforms, PEXA said that its platform “delivers net productivity improvements to the Australian economy of $390m per year, increasing the size of the economy by $480m per year”.
PEXA also operates in the UK and NatWest, which has 12% of the UK mortgage market, announced at the end of March that it has gone live with fee-assisted remortgaging on the platform. Sale and purchase transactions are to follow.
Five years to full digitalisation
Angela Hesketh, UK head of government and public affairs at PEXA, says that advances in technology mean that a digital mortgage market in the UK is now possible. “We’re looking at remoulding it with infrastructure in the middle…not tacking on different bits,” she says. “Significant digitalisation should be possible in the UK within five years.”
In Australia, PEXA is by far the dominant player and has been central to a heated debate around interoperability of platforms in the Australian market. “We have taken learnings from our experience in Australia, but it’s not a straight ‘lift and shift’, it’s bespoke to the UK system,” says Hesketh. “At the minute, people in the market have very limited information on property, they could find out something unfortunate only when they are far along in the process,” she says. “This is not just about one platform, it’s about the ability to move data securely and safely.”
Knowing what you’re buying and what’s happened to the money
The industry is working on what good property ID should look like, says Hesketh.“You’re bringing together information including the land registry title, the postal information, and how it is listed for council tax so it’s about which identifier would be the single thing the whole market could look at,” she says. She adds that the ID of the buyer, of the property being transacted and the details of the financing all have to be securely connected.
But conveyancing is not just about data transfer, Hesketh adds. “The essence of the job, says Hesketh is “’what advice do I need to give to the buyer and to the lender?’and that is not impacted by AI, because it’s a complex area.”
S&P points out that many Australians prefer to deal with another person for “this milestone purchase” and banks are still “wrestling” with legacy technology. (Over time, S&P argues, digitalisation may allow banks to lend directly, rather than through brokers.)
The role of AI
PEXA is using AI in “certain areas”, says Hesketh, particularly document checking and it is moving towards qualified electronic signatures. “Not all lenders will accept e-signatures,” says Hesketh. “AI is a layer that can be added to e-signatures to check that they are OK. It’s not about papering over cracks, it’s about making a real difference to the changes that are required.”
PEXA was selected to be part of the Bank of England’s Synchronisation Lab, to demonstrate the use of synchronised settlements within property transactions. Coordination between the reservation and release of lender funds and title lodgement could remove the gap between payment and security of ownership – cutting legal, financial and operational risk.
The UK government aims to use data from open finance to drive efficiencies across the economy and it sees providing digital information for homebuying as one of the best use cases, with an estimated £14.1 billion net present value. A March 2026 Department for Business and Trade research report ‘Understanding the costs and benefits of smart data use cases’, proposed using smart data to support “real-time, secure sharing of verified property information by providing digital property packs to homebuyers, property service providers and mortgage lenders”.
In particular, the government wants to make life easier for first-time home buyers. According to research from the Resolution Foundation, there are “8.3 million potential first-time buyer families – working adults aged 21–55who do not own a home”. What’s holding them back, the research says, is not that they don’t have sufficient income to cover mortgage costs, but not being able to save up enough for a deposit. The Resolution Foundation suggests a ‘starter deposit scheme’ to help those without access to a ‘bank of mum and dad’ to cover a deposit.
That will not be the only hurdle to overcome though. Hesketh says that, on average, people are only moving once in twenty years at the moment. Clearly, there are a number of factors in this, including demographic shifts, the lack of homes into which to downsize and housing costs in the South East that are completely out of kilter with average salaries, but Hesketh says the manual mortgage process itself is also part of the problem. “It’s a horrendous experience,” she says. “Nobody wants to go through it unless they have to.”