What’s important to our legal practitioner community as we head into 2022
Delivering genuine choice and competition to conveyancers and legal practitioners is one of our core missions at Sympli. It is only through speaking with and listening to many lawyers and conveyancers from across the industry, that we are building an e-Settlements and lodgement experience to truly deliver on the promises of eConveyancing.
Throughout 2021, Sympli has surveyed legal practitioners across Australia to find out what is on your mind with respect to your own practices, the eConveyancing journey, and how we at Sympli can continue to innovate and improve.
Settlement Certainty
In our surveys, we asked you; when you think ahead to 2022, what is keeping you up at night in relation to your own practices . You told us your key business concerns are:
- Settlements occurring on time
- Workload
- Staffing / Capacity
We also asked you what you felt was the #1 unsolved challenge you continue to face in eConveyancing.
You told us that the single biggest challenge remaining in eConveyancing is lack of settlement certainty.
We understand the devastation that can result from missed settlement deadlines in what is the most emotionally charged financial purchase most of us will ever make.
Sympli is committed to working collaboratively with banks, practitioners, land registry and revenue authorities as well as other industry stakeholders to achieve settlement transparency, certainty, and timeliness.
Competition
When we asked you about your expectations of competition, you told us choice and greater efficiency were the most important benefits to be delivered through competition.
Your desire for efficiency gains is a recurring theme, and a key consideration in deciding which ELNO to use in a truly competitive market. This is why the team here at Sympli is so focused on more efficient:
- document creation for all users;
- comprehensive integration with practice management systems to avoid errors and time lost in re-keying data
- task-based workflows which guide you through the sequence of settlement tasks.
Interoperability
We asked you about your level of concern around the progress of delivery of Interoperability. Most of you (a massive 81%) told us you had some level of concern around the time it is taking to deliver Interoperability. This level of support for Interoperability is again driven by your desire for increased efficiency, simplicity, innovation, and value for money.
We also asked how you feel about the prospect of having to purchase and maintain multiple digital certificates in an Interoperable competitive market. For many of you, this is a barrier to switching ELNs and thus a barrier to competition, citing concerns around costs, and the inconvenience of managing different renewal dates and terms.
“closed certificates do not support the flow of Interoperability” Four Points Conveyancing
Sympli supports the use of open digital certificates which can be used in multiple ELNs as a significant enabler of competition.
We are listening
Your feedback helps us drive better outcomes for practitioners as we continue our mission to bring genuine choice to eConveyancing.
2022 is shaping up to be a watershed year for competition in eConveyancing as momentum builds towards key milestones in the Interoperability delivery timeline, starting with e-Conveyancing reform and regulation expected in early 2022, through to the phased roll out of remaining Interoperable transactions across jurisdictions commencing from mid-2023. For the lawyers and conveyancers who are the backbone of Australia’s $9 trillion property market, choice cannot come soon enough.
2022 is a critical year for the Sympli family too as we continue to extend our platform to meet the needs of the practitioner community and grow our business, in particular the Practitioner Services team. We’ll be working closely with our incredible product team to keep talking and listening to lawyers and conveyancers across Australia – join our Customer Reference Group, Early Onboarding Program, take part in our surveys, and come talk to us at industry events (Click here to register your interest).
Here’s to an exciting 2022!
By Denise Farmer
General Manager, Practitioner Services
