The bank is using the Australian homemoving hub’s property exchange technology to speed up house transactions.     

NatWest managing director, homebuying and ownership, Miguel Sard says Pexa has already tested the payment scheme with the Bank of England.  

Sard adds: “At the heart of our strategy for growth is anticipating and meeting our customers’ needs, using data and technology to ensure we are simple to deal with. Pexa has already proven in Australia that remortgaging processes that ordinarily take months, can take just a couple of days, or even hours in some cases.”  

Pexa UK chief executive Joe Pepper points out: “As one of the UK’s major lenders, NatWest shares a common goal of driving digital innovation and transforming the customer experience to address the chronically long time it takes to transact property in the UK market, with all the associated pitfalls of transaction fall-through and stress.”  

“The property settlement process in the UK is highly challenged. Relative to similar markets, transaction fail rates are unacceptably high and the time to complete transactions is overly long.”  

In October, Pexa agreed to buy UK rival Smoove for £30.8m to boost its footprint in the UK marketplace.    

Pexa said the acquisition of the Aim-listed business will give it access to around 7% of British remortgages that flow across Smoove’s platform.