Competition doesn’t mean a war on price

InfoTrack chief executive John Ahern has consistently maintained that competition is good for our clients and is not concerned with another title search provider entering the marketplace.

“There are already ten reputable providers of Title Searches in Australia all of whom have been challenging one another for years and ensuring the market is already extremely competitive”, Mr Ahern says.

InfoTrack started out as a Title Search provider 18 years ago and invested significantly in understanding their client’s workflow and building a bespoke platform for lawyers and conveyancers. Today, they are a service-based business that integrates with over 30 practice management systems.

“Our unique value is our legal-tech capability, over 4,500 products offered on the one platform (a title search being just one of them), our industry expertise, incredible team of staff and excellent customer service. These days we are an integrated service and workflow provider and not a title search provider. We worked out a long time ago that clients don’t like to rekey data, misplace searches and that integration to the law firms and conveyancers billing systems is essential”, says Mr Ahern.

Despite robust competition from all competitors, InfoTrack’s plan is to continue to focus on delivering value to their 8,800 clients through client feedback. “The exchange of land is a complicated issue and requires conveyancers in the process to make it more efficient. We rely on our clients to tell us what they need so we innovate and build new services to better support them. Over the past 12 months we have onboarded an additional 1000 law firms and conveyancers, which highlights that firms see value in our competitive offerings”, says Mr Ahern.

In 2018 InfoTrack executives travelled on road to 42 locations across Australia for their Connect18 roadshows. John Ahern says that “we wanted to meet with our clients face-to-face to ask how they were feeling about the e-settlement mandate and how we could help them with their transition to e-conveyancing. Many of our rural clients said we were the first technology service provider to visit them in person. The type of practitioner insights we received you just can’t get via an online community.”

Key practitioner insights from Connect18

  • Across QLD, VIC and NSW, security is now a real concern for the profession. InfoTrack clients shared extensive stories of settlement and deposit funds going missing. One client had a copy of an ASIC extract that had been tampered with to show a Director that didn’t exist. Another client shared fake SMS messages attempting to intercept bank details.
  • When it comes to new e-settlement entrant Sympli (a collaboration between InfoTrack and the ASX), clients want increased competition, innovation and choice. Sympli has since received Category 2 approval from the Australian Registrars’ National Electronic Conveyancing Council (ARNECC) and have now successfully had their first transaction in Queensland and in Victoria as recently as yesterday.
  • By the time InfoTrack spoke to clients face-to-face in Victoria, the e-settlement mandate was already in place there and clients were dealing with the change that has been forced upon them. In contrast NSW, clients are really starting to feel the pain of the upcoming e-settlement mandate. In QLD the e-settlement mandate is still too far away for concern.  In all three major states, the introduction of a competitive ELNO is a real relief for the industry that wants choice along with a service provider that understands the industries requirements.

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