Freedom of Information Request reveals slow pace of adoption
Only five e-signatures have been used at Land Registry in the first quarter of 2026, according to a Freedom of Information request.
Only one had been used by the end of last year and only two businesses have started submitting Qualified Electronic Signatures (QES) since HMLR invited conveyancers and others to start using them last August, according to the request.
Novus Strategy, which submitted the Freedom of Information Request, believes the slow adoption should ramp up to a ‘hockey stick’ pattern of exponential growth eventually, but that businesses need to look more deeply at their operations before adoption.
Claire Van der Zant, CEO of Novus Strategy, said: “You can’t just flick a switch and start using QES tomorrow. QES is just one of the components that unlocks interoperability in the property transaction.
Assessing the customer journey stages
“Lenders, conveyancers and every organisation involved should be actively assessing where data and processes cause friction and break the customer journey. Only once you do that, both internally and externally, can you build the foundations that unlock solutions such as QES, and start to tackle the fall-throughs and excessive completion times that plague industry.”
She called it a “configuration conundrum”, saying that firms must first redesign the customer journey to make the most of new digital components, Smart Data and orchestration infrastructure.
“This is why QES was never going to be an overnight success and why we’ve always said that rising QES use will signal that much more is going on behind the scenes. This isn’t a question of willingness to adopt, it’s a symptom of ability to adapt.”
Even if the two businesses were using QES regularly, adoption would still only be 0.03%. HMLR did not confirm the two customers were conveyancing firms, though these make up the majority of its clients.
The need to embrace HDI
She said a lack of digital ID options was also a challenge and that organisations were required to embrace Horizontal Digital Interaction (HDI), the operating framework that connects individual pieces of infrastructure into a coherent whole.
The findings come after the Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology (CFIT) published its Open Property roadmap last month, underlining how the use of Smart Data is at a crucial but early stage.
Van der Zant said: “We reported earlier in the year that adoption was slow and there continue to be reasons why this is the case. The important thing right now is not to get too tied up in the numbers.
“Yes, they’re still low, and yes, they’re rising slowly, but this is how it starts. If we look at the uptake of Open Banking to draw parallels on the pace of adoption, the first three years yielded around 6% uptake, versus around 20% seven years from launch.”
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