UK fully digital mortgage tie-up

Lloyds Banking Group, Connells Group and LMS said on April 21 they are launching a fully digital homebuying service across England and Wales. (lloydsbankinggroup.com) The tie-up links a mortgage lender, an estate agency group and a conveyancing provider in one process, with data shared through LMS’s National Property Transaction Network. (lloydsbankinggroup.com) The companies said the current homebuying process in England and Wales takes an average of five months to complete and still relies on repeated checks, emails and paper-heavy handoffs. (connellsgroup.co.uk, hoa.org.uk) Their new model moves key checks earlier. Sellers are made “sale ready” with property, identity and material information gathered up front by Moverly, while buyers’ source-of-funds checks are run earlier through Armalytix. (connellsgroup.co.uk) The same release says identity verification should only need to be done once, instead of being repeated by separate firms later in the transaction. That is aimed at cutting duplicated work between agents, lenders and conveyancers. (connellsgroup.co.uk) This push comes after a live pilot run by LMS and industry partners in September 2024. LMS said pilot cases saw a 35% reduction in time from sale agreed to exchange, a 17% faster path from instruction to completion, and 43% fewer cancellations. (lms.com) LMS said that pilot led to the launch of the National Property Transaction Network as an “open, agnostic and secure” platform, meaning firms do not all have to use the same software to join it. (lms.com) The backdrop is a UK market where more than 1 million residential property transactions complete each year, but government-backed research has long described the buying and selling process as lengthy, uncertain and prone to fall-throughs of roughly one quarter to one third. (gov.uk, gov.uk) The UK government has also been pushing its own homebuying reforms. In October 2025, it said failed sales cost the economy £1.5 billion a year and said planned changes could speed up transactions by around four weeks. (gov.uk) For Lloyds, the launch extends a broader mortgage digitisation drive. The bank said in 2025 that some remortgage and product-transfer journeys could already be completed digitally in as little as 15 minutes. (lloydsbankinggroup.com) The immediate test is whether more lenders, agents, surveyors and law firms join the network. The April 21 launch is described by Lloyds and Connells as the first phase of a wider national system rather than a finished rebuild of the market. (lloydsbankinggroup.com, connellsgroup.co.uk)