The Universal Electronic Conveyancing System ?

There is certainly no single universal digital / electronic conveyancing application. The fact is there will be many. But one thing is for sure. If they cannot interlink with the process that precedes it or that is next in line that application won’t form part of the digital conveyancing chain that will be a linear end to end digital conveyancing system. The systems by nature have to be collaborative. One black box has to be able to talk to the black box before and after it in the chain.

What will be common to all these systems – XML digital standards. Standard vocabularies. Standard schemas.

Electronic conveyancing has been with us for a while. The first application that is in use today are applications not being used by lawyers or the legal industry. No. The legal industry is yet to adopt digital or electronic conveyancing. The first application of electronic conveyancing which is XML based that is now being used widely is electronic lodgment of credit applications by mortgage brokers to financial institutions. Roughly 38% of all applications industry wide for mortgage finance are being lodged by mortgage brokers electronically. It used to be all applications were paper based and lodged via the fax. Not any more. Westpac has a policy of giving priority to electronic lodgment over faxed applications. Westpac’s average for electronic lodgment is close to 60% therefore being way ahead of the industry average.

Credit has to be given to LIXI an industry standards body being a non-profit organization whose membership are financial institutions, mortgage brokers, technologists and any entity interested in inter-company straight-through processing for mortgage and conveyancing. This body wrote the first standard for Credit Application Language (CAL) that has been the foundation for electronic credit application lodgment.

Credit applications and approvals are the first step. The standards established by the first step will form part of the cornerstone for intermediate applications to be established to ultimately interlink with the final step of NECS (stamping and registration as well as online settlements).

As I said at the beginning there will not be one single universal digital / electronic conveyancing application. There will be a handful of applications that will all be capable of interlinking, all based on the XML standard for data and document interchange. The technical standards are being formed. It is now important to create the business applications based on the technical standards. 247legal is an example of one application that deals with vendor disclosure and creates a digital conveyancing network between lawyers & estate agents, vendors & buyers. There will be many more applications to appear that will create the next link in the daisy chain.