Drowning in Faxes

The Spanx Solution to bank mortgage settlements

How many people use floppy disks these days? The 3.5" disk has been replaced by the USB stick, the CD as well as ubiquitous email. As technology advances so do clients, businesses and industry.

A client called upon me to help with a "complex" refinance for a partially completed development. I suspected we were all in trouble when he pulled out the 3.5" floppy disk. Not since email took off a few years ago has there been much exchange of information using the floppy disk. Even the CD has been relegated to coffee coaster status.

The client's problem was compounded when I discovered all the floppy disk contained was a couple of MS Word documents. Embedded in those two Word documents were extensive tabulated tables of line by line details of building works yet to be done and current and future valuation calculations. I gasped at the inanity of his even attempting such a task using Word with what is really a glorified typewriter. Why would you not use an Excel spreadsheet which is tailor made for the job? His attempts were crude and failed to take in the logic, that when you change just one item, a spreadsheet will update all sum totals automatically, magic like.

Just as the floppy disk and CD have been relegated to history, what is the fascination the legal and mortgage industry have with the fax. It's a love affair that just wont die.

The Age Good Weekend carried a feature story on a former Disneyland chipmunk whose underwear range has made the VPL and the question "Does my bum look big in this?" nigh obsolete thanks to Spanx supremo Sara Blakely. Two quotes in the article ran like this -

Quoting Spanx supremo Sara Blakely

"If Blakely has come up with the idea of matronly support hosiery in France, I suspect she'd still be selling les fax machines"

"My favourite part is that I am exposed to more now.
I wasn't running into Richard Branson or Oprah Winfrey selling fax machines."

The legal and mortgage industry desperately need a Sarah Blakely and make the fax obsolete. We need to put a little bit of the Spanx philosophy into how conveyancing is done and into the back office of the banks' retail lending departments.

The banks obviously must be drowning under faxes, compounded by the fact that we conveyancing practitioners quite often fax and re-fax the same documents twice and three times over. But what other choice do you have?

Just what would the numbers look like for a major lender?

The estimated combined number of purchase and sale property settlements across all States is 1,000,000 per annum. Assuming a major lender has 20% market share, per annum, a bank will handle 200,000 settlements. On a sale file, a practitioner will send a minimum of 3 faxes and probably an average of 6. On a purchase file it will be a minimum of 2 but an average of 4. An overall industry average is 5 faxes per file. A major lender will therefore receive 1 million faxes per annum. On any working day the bank across its network will have to process 3,846 incoming faxes. Wow. 3,846 faxes per day every day.

3,846 faxes per day is symptomatic the industry has a problem. Like the floppy disk, the fax has had its day. The problems and the inefficiencies of the industry cost my firm and probably every other law firm and conveyancing company a minimum of $50,000. That is the cost of employing one conveyancing staff member too many. Do the maths and this is a big cost issue for the whole industry. The industry needs to implement an industry wide - industry led solution. Such a solution would save big bucks. If the solution saves my firm $50,000 just think of the back office savings for a major bank.

If only we could eliminate the fax by replacing it with a scan, and replace the call centre with a web service? I think I need to get hold of Sara Blakely. I might just try sara@spanx.com and see if I get a reply!

June Newsletter | Brett Hayton | 247legal