The pilot for Land Registry Portal has now concluded and has been evaluated. As a result of this evaluation a number of changes are being made to our processes around bringing on new customers.
We have over 180 Business Unit Administrators signed up so far and feedback has generally been positive. Land Registry (LR) will shortly be implementing a full migration strategy to enable users to move from Land Registry Direct to Land Registry Portal.
Late last year the eDS1 service was launched through the Portal. To date we have received over 16,000 e-DS1 applications via Portal.
In December the final developments were made to enable an electronic application to register a charge in standard form (e-CSF). This application would be via the Land Registry Portal and the borrower would sign using the Portal. Work is underway with a number of lenders and conveyancers to lodge early e-CSF.
The next major LR release will be the Business Gateway remortgage solution in Spring 2009. Timescales remain as mentioned in the last report and LR is progressing on the design and schemas.
Since the meeting it has been confirmed that LR will host a technical meeting to discuss Business Gateway on 23 February at Croydon Office and all companies who had previously expressed an interest, following a newsletter article issued in December 2008 to all of our contacts, have been invited to this. The invitation also included the Pilot Selection Criteria for pilot participants. If any Developer wants to view the Pilot Selection Criteria please contact SDS team and we will arrange for this to be made available.
LR hopes to make a decision by the end of February as to who the pilot participants will be.
LR has commissioned a private research company to investigate the e-TR1 further. This follows feedback received at a number of insight meetings, which made it clear that the proposed delivery with e-TR1 as part of a bigger conveyancing process may not have the desired market appeal. We need to make sure that we are developing an e-TR1 that our customers want to use.
LR has provided details of 7,500 customers and the independent research company will contact some of these. It is expected that this research will be completed by April 2009. If the results require a change to the specification of the e-TR1 then we will have the opportunity to consider whether alternative releases may be moved forward.
The Land Registry board has considered the research on the Chain Matrix and EFT and a press release was issued on Wednesday 11 February 2009. Full details of this can be found at: Chain Matrix and Electronic Funds Transfer - statement by Land Registry.
