How PEXA is delivering on safety, reliability, and efficiency

As Chief Technology Officer at PEXA, I have the privilege of overseeing the network that sits at the heart of the Australian property industry. We currently handle more than 90% of all residential property settlements, which means that every week we are helping tens of thousands of Australians in a pivotal moment of life’s journey as they buy or sell their home. 

It’s our responsibility to make that experience as safe, secure and seamless as possible for our customers – the array of conveyancers, lawyers, banks and government bodies that sit behind every property transaction – so they can serve best their own customers.

Late last month, we launched eConveyancing in Tasmania, bringing the benefits of digital settlement to Tasmania’s property transactions. Over 100 Tasmanians have already benefited through the platform, enabling settlement and title confirmation within minutes compared to days or weeks previously. The Northern Territory is due to come onboard later this year – completing our national coverage.

Preparing to bring the final State on board feels like a perfect moment to reflect on how far we have come since eConveyancing started replacing the old paper-based system in the mid-2010s, how reliable the system is today, and how our culture of continuous innovation will make it even better in the future.

PEXA has invested more than $650 million into building and running what was the world’s first – and remains the world-leading – digital conveyancing platform.

We understand that even a minor service disruption can negatively impact customers. That is why we work diligently to ensure that the PEXA Exchange is highly resilient. While the core Exchange maintains 100% uptime, disruptions to services still occur. To help minimise customer impact we have various fail-safe mechanisms for some service disruptions to ensure that completion is not impacted. This enables most property settlements to take place on the day they were scheduled.

The Australian eConveyancing experience is in stark contrast to the current experience of British homebuyers and sellers, where the manual conveyancing process means a sale-and-purchase transaction takes 12-24 weeks and results in a staggering 31% of transactions falling through.

In Australia, PEXA’s digital platform has removed the manual effort and rework, bank cheques, and frequent requisitions that used to plague our paper property settlements.  The PEXA Exchange provides increased certainty for home buyers and sellers, and PEXA works hard to maintain customer satisfaction levels, currently close to 90%.  

Investment in the platform never stops. In the past three years, PEXA has invested more than $100 million into its Australian platform to reduce disruptions, tighten system security and improve functionality for customers. Features like Auto Balance, Mobile Signing and a new suite of APIs were developed in collaboration with our customers.

PEXA’s ongoing investment and commitment to cyber security has ensured there have been no major security breaches despite more than 1.4 million malicious intrusion attempts every year.

An early adopter of the Cloud, PEXA has continuously collaborated with industry leaders to build leading resiliency practices. Additionally, last year, we signed a company-wide partnership with cyber security experts CyberCX to further strengthen the security and resilience of the platform in an increasingly hostile digital world.

PEXA Exchange is a unique platform and unlike an electricity or telecommunications networks, which involve point-to-point connection, our platform orchestrates a complex transaction between multiple independent parties. There are up to nine parties to a transaction, including financial institutions, the Reserve Bank, practitioners, land registry and revenue offices whose activities all need to be coordinated to achieve settlement.

In such a complex network, and with participants who are themselves dependent on their own internal systems, it’s inevitable that disruptions will occur. Most disruptions are resolved quickly, and only very rarely is a settlement delayed to an alternate day due to platform disruptions.