A practical look at how real-time financial data, payments, and integration workflows are implemented in PropTech and conveyancing platforms
UK property transactions are running on infrastructure that would be unrecognizable to any other regulated financial sector.
A £500,000 deposit still moves through the same manual processes it did two decades ago. Account details shared via email. Payment instructions entered by hand. Settlement via three-day BACS transfer.
The cost of this friction is measurable. Between April 2024 and March 2025, payment diversion fraud cost UK property buyers £11.7 million across 143 reported cases, according to City of London Police. The average residential victim lost £78,393.
The time cost is arguably worse. UK property transactions now take 120 days on average from instruction to completion, up 60% since 2007, according to Landmark Information Group data. Only 29% of transactions complete within 12 weeks in 2024, down from 78% in 2016, Propertymark research shows.
By international standards, the UK is an outlier. Listing to completion takes 179 days. In the United States, it takes 53 days.
The Bottleneck: Document-Driven Workflows
Conveyancing and property management operations remain constrained by manual document collection.
Source of funds checks require buyers to download bank statements, convert them to PDFs, and email them to solicitors. Legal teams then manually review these documents to trace deposit origins. The process typically takes three to five days and relies entirely on documents clients provide.
This creates two structural problems.
First, it introduces delay. The average time between enquiries raised and replies received has more than doubled since 2007, rising from 26 days to 52 days in 2024, according to Landmark’s transaction analysis.
Second, it creates vulnerability. Property fraud value more than tripled between 2013 and 2017, rising from £7 million to £25 million, Law Society data shows. By 2022, property fraud had increased 84% year-on-year, Title Guardian reported.
The rental sector faces identical friction. Tenant referencing continues to rely on manual income verification. Letting agents processing high volumes of applications cannot easily scale document review.
Properties are now letting 20% faster than in 2018-19, according to Savills data. Verification processes have not kept pace with this acceleration. Average time to find a tenant has risen to 20 days, Zoopla’s March 2026 Rental Market Report shows, up from 13 days in 2022.
How Open Banking Addresses These Gaps
Open Banking provides an alternative to paper-based workflows by enabling direct connections to financial institutions.
With client consent, platforms can access verified, timestamped transaction data directly from banks. For source of funds checks, legal teams receive categorised data showing the origin and accumulation of funds over time. The data is bank-authenticated rather than user-submitted.
- Identity verification becomes embedded in the data access process. Platforms can confirm account ownership in real time, helping to verify that the person submitting an application is the legitimate account holder.
- For tenant affordability checks, platforms can access transaction histories showing income deposits, recurring expenditure, and financial behaviour patterns. In many cases, this can reduce approval timelines from days to minutes or hours for straightforward applications.
- For payments, account-to-account infrastructure allows property managers to initiate rent and deposit collection directly through banking channels. This reduces reliance on card networks and their associated processing fees, which can range from 1.5% to 3% depending on the provider.
- For conveyancers, payment initiation can help secure the settlement process. Funds move between authenticated accounts using Strong Customer Authentication at the bank level. This can help reduce the risk of payment diversion fraud.
The Delivery Challenge: Why Deployment Still Slows Platforms Down
Property platforms already recognise the value of Open Banking. Tenant affordability checks, rent collection, and source of funds verification are established use cases.
The challenge is not awareness. It is how these capabilities are implemented in practice.
Many Open Banking integrations have historically been designed around large financial institutions. As a result, deployment timelines, pricing structures, and compliance processes are often aligned with enterprise requirements.
For a PropTech company operating with lean teams and faster release cycles, these models do not always translate easily into day-to-day operations.
In practice, platforms managing tenant onboarding, rent collection, and contractor payments often work across multiple systems:
- A data provider for income verification
- A separate payment provider for account-to-account transfers
- A third-party solution for KYC and AML compliance
Each system introduces its own integration timeline, data structure, and operational dependencies. Reconciliation across these tools can remain manual, and the overall experience becomes fragmented for both teams and end users.
Finexer: Open Banking Infrastructure for Real Estate and Conveyancing Platforms
Finexer is an Open Banking infrastructure provider supporting Proptech and conveyancing platforms.
The platform provides a unified API covering both real-time financial data access (AIS) and payment initiation (PIS), with broad coverage across major UK banks.
How Finexer addresses the deployment gap:
- Deployment speed: Implementation timelines are often 2-3x faster than traditional enterprise-focused providers, typically measured in weeks rather than months.
- Unified infrastructure: A single API layer covers data access, payment initiation, and compliance support, replacing the need for multiple vendor relationships.
- Usage-based pricing: Pricing scales with platform growth rather than fixed enterprise contracts, making Open Banking accessible to growth-stage companies.
- White-label capability: Platforms can maintain their brand experience while running on FCA-authorised infrastructure.
- Compliance support: Finexer supports platforms in meeting regulatory requirements by managing bank integrations, security protocols, and audit-ready data flows at the infrastructure level.
Real-world applications:
- Tenant verification: Platforms can verify income using bank-authenticated transaction data rather than self-declared payslips or credit scores.
- Source of funds checks: Conveyancing platforms can trace deposit origins through categorised bank data, creating auditable trails for AML compliance.
- Rent collection: Property managers can initiate Pay by Bank rent collection with real-time payment confirmation, reducing reliance on card processing fees.
- Contractor payments: Real estate operators can process bulk payouts to contractors and suppliers through a single API call.
Ravi Ranjan, CEO of Finexer, frames the opportunity in infrastructure terms: “PropTech platforms don’t lack demand for Open Banking capabilities. They lack infrastructure built for their deployment realities. Most legacy providers optimised for enterprise complexity. We’re built for speed, operational simplicity, and scalability.”
The Regulatory Context Driving Adoption
The shift toward Open Banking in property is being accelerated by regulatory pressure.
Industry estimates suggest money laundering costs the UK economy more than £100 billion annually. The conveyancing sector remains a crucial component in AML efforts.
One law firm was fined £20,000 for failing AML checks in a single transaction. Regulators have made it clear that weak manual processes will not be tolerated.
Platforms using bank-authenticated data for source of funds verification can create more secure, auditable trails. This addresses regulatory expectations without adding manual overhead.
The private rental sector has doubled in size over the last 20 years, according to Social Market Foundation research. HomeLet now references over 1 million tenants annually.
At this scale, manual verification workflows create operational bottlenecks that Open Banking infrastructure can help resolve.
What Changes for Platforms Using Finexer
Conveyancing firms can reduce source of funds review time from days to minutes, improving operational efficiency.
- PropTech platforms can access and assess tenant income instantly which can reduce processing time from days to minutes for straightforward applications.
- Real estate operators collecting rent via Pay by Bank can reduce payment processing costs and improve cash flow visibility.
The platforms adopting these workflows early are not testing experimental features. They are replacing foundational infrastructure.
The operational advantages they build now may prove difficult for competitors to replicate later.
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