The number of e-signatures used at Land Registry has risen to five in the first quarter of the year in a sign the ‘configuration conundrum’ is proving challenging for firms, say experts.
Just two businesses have started submitting Qualified Electronic Signatures (QES) since HMLR invited conveyancers and others to start using them last August. Just one e-signature was used by the end of 2025.
Novus Strategy, the transformation consultancy for the home buying and selling industry, uncovered the HMLR figures using a Freedom of Information request.
Though still very low, Novus CEO Claire Van der Zant believes the figures don’t tell the whole story, and predicted that adoption would follow the typical ‘hockey stick’ pattern of exponential growth after a slow start.
Van der Zant said: “You can’t just flick a switch and start using QES tomorrow. QES is just one of the components that unlocks interoperability in the property transaction.
“Lenders, conveyancers and every organisation involved should be actively assessing where data and processes cause friction and break the customer journey. Only once you do that, both internally and externally, can you build the foundations that unlock solutions such as QES, and start to tackle the fall-throughs and excessive completion times that plague industry.
“This is the configuration conundrum all firms are having to navigate. It’s less about whether the technology is fit for purpose, and much more about redesigning the customer journey to leverage new digital components, Smart Data and orchestration infrastructure.
“This is why QES was never going to be an overnight success and why we’ve always said that rising QES use will signal that much more is going on behind the scenes. This isn’t a question of willingness to adopt, it’s a symptom of ability to adapt.”
Even if those two businesses were using QES regularly, it would put adoption at 0.03%. HMLR did not confirm the two customers were conveyancing firms, though these make up the majority of its clients.
Slow take-up illustrates how the mortgage and home buying industry has a configuration problem rather than a technology problem, which can’t be solved piecemeal. Firms need to redesign their operations and customer journey, reimagining how to connect with the wider ecosystem and solving issues like interoperability, trust and liability simultaneously.
The market for digital ID solution providers also needs to mature, because the number that integrate with qualified e-signature solutions are still few in number.
Solving these challenges requires organisations to embrace Horizontal Digital Integration (HDI), the operating framework that connects individual pieces of infrastructure into a coherent whole where evidence, decisions and data flow seamlessly inside and across organisational boundaries.
Ultimately, lenders, conveyancers, brokers and estate agents need to work together on HDI to harness the full potential of Smart Data and property data trust frameworks to bring down time to completion and reduce fall throughs.
The findings come after the Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology (CFIT) published its Open Property roadmap last month, underlining how use of Smart Data is at a crucial but early stage. Novus was involved in the preparation of the roadmap as part of a coalition of property and digital transformation specialists across the public and private sector.
Van der Zant said: “We reported earlier in the year that adoption was slow and there continue to be reasons why this is the case.
“For one, there’s still a dearth of integrated digital ID solutions, which is what conveyancers need if they’re to use QES. The important thing right now is not to get too tied up in the numbers.
“Yes, they’re still low, and yes, they’re rising slowly but this is how it starts. If we look at the uptake of Open Banking to draw parallels on the pace of adoption, the first three years yielded around 6% uptake, versus around 20% seven years from launch.
“What you’re witnessing here is the birth of a new way of executing the most complex consumer transaction on Earth, and QES is just one small part of that.”
