PEXA Group is progressing a strategic partnership with NatWest that will see the lender use PEXA’s digital property exchange technology to deliver 48-hour remortgage transactions to its customers.

It will then extend its use of the PEXA platform to speed up the handling of sale and purchase transactions.

Miguel Sard, managing director, homebuying and ownership at NatWest, said: “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.

“We are delighted to be partnering with PEXA and will be working with the team closely over the coming months to help us deliver on our strategy by enabling its world-leading digital property exchange platform for the benefit of our customers and the broader UK property ecosystem.”

Joe Pepper, UK CEO of PEXA, added: “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.

“We welcome the opportunity to work with NatWest Group and partner with a lender committed to solving these issues with us. We look forward to helping implement our technology to improve the NatWest customer experience.”