With mandated electronic lodgement coming into effect in Victoria on 1 October, the market leader of searching and settlements services in Australia, InfoTrack has released SettleIT – a breakthrough settlement service will take pressure off conveyancers struggling to come to grips with the new regulatory regime.
Effective 1 October, practitioners In Victoria must lodge certain conveyancing transactions using an Electronic Lodgment Network (ELN) unless they qualify for an exception. “We are currently travelling around the country to speak with conveyancers who have confirmed that these new regulations and processes are generating increased pressure and risk. There is a real call for help to deal with these changes which our clients feel have been thrust upon them.” says InfoTrack CEO, John Ahern.
A recent web poll of legal and conveyancing professionals in Australia revealed, that although the majority plan to tackle the challenging transition to processing settlements in-house, 11% plan to use an agent to complete their settlements, 15% are too busy to deal with the changes that come with the mandate and 7% plan to stop doing conveyancing work altogether.
“We feel that InfoTrack’s role is to champion the needs of practitioners and support them through this transition to digitisation. InfoTrack already has a highly experienced network of settlement staff across Australia that serve over 7000 clients and process an average of 200,000 settlements per year. It is a logical step to combine the knowledge, expertise and service of our settlements team with our innovative technology to take some burden off our clients’ shoulders, and this is what SettleIT does,” continued Mr. Ahern.
General Manager, Product and Innovation at InfoTrack, Lee Bailie, says “We’ve created the SettleIT service to offer an accessible, affordable alternative to handling the settlement processing in-house. Conveyancers don’t need to change how they’re running their practice or register for an ELN, they simply provide us with their instructions and documents and we determine whether it can be lodged manually or electronically. The conveyancer approves all critical steps along the way and receives real-time updates while we work in the background to process the settlements and ensure that everything is running smoothly on their behalf. As our clients would be used to pre-mandate.”
“Within our business it’s essential that we are in constant communication with our clients. In using InfoTrack’s SettleIT service Speirs Ryan has been able to reallocate some of our administration team that were focused on the process steps of our settlements. Our team can now spend more time assisting and updating our clients through the conveyancing process. SettleIT has really enabled our business to focus on what our clients need most.” James Ryan, Partner, Speirs Ryan
Ahern says “we are receiving widespread feedback from clients at our Connect18 e-Conveyancing Roadshows that there is misinformation about what is and what isn’t electronic conveyancing. The transition to digital is not just about mandated electronic settlement and our roadshows are showing how all of the essential parts of the conveyancing process can now be done electronically; including verification of identity, contracts, exchange and settlement.”
SettleIT is immediately available to Victorian practitioners.
