Recently, HM Land Registry announced that it would be publishing an all new Digital Identity Standard.

These guidelines not only provide conveyancers with powerful new means to ensure the identities of their clients, but also work to streamline and secure the entire home buying process for both customers and property sellers.

The timing couldn’t be better for an industry that has been somewhat hampered due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

As a result of trying to complete housing transactions remotely, the number of deals that have fallen through in the first two months of 2021, is up 37% year-over-year and 46% from 2019. While this can be attributed to several things, it is certainly not helped by the complex manual identity verification process.

But the Land Registry has recognised that there is scope for an alternative. The department now recommends a higher standard of identity check – one that uses biometric and cryptographic technology is defined and provides peace of mind that conveyancers have applied due diligence to identity verification within land registration applications.

Leveraging this new standard can make the entire process safer and speed up completion of transactions for owners, principals and directors of estate agents who are also involved in the proceedings.

With this new set of guidelines in place, customers will be able to use the biometric technology that they already have in their pocket, i.e. their mobile phone, to be able to quickly and safely confirm who they are.

Photograph test

But Land Registry’s standards are stringent and, after consulting with conveyancers and identity service providers last year, it now requires that a photograph, self taken at the time of verification, be compared to another photo that has been encrypted into the user’s UK-based biometric passport, as opposed to one simply printed onto an official document.

This entire process can be automated to take only seconds instead of the days or weeks that often have to pass for a similar process to be completed by hand.

Furthermore, this offers vastly improved security, as it is much more difficult to tamper with an encrypted image encoded onto a chip, than a printed or even unencrypted digital one. This should greatly aid in both the satisfaction of the customer, but also clearly smooths things out for the conveyancer as well.

As a matter of fact, it gets even better for conveyancers. As long as they do follow all of the proposed guidelines, then compliant entities are to be considered in a sort of “safe harbour” situation.

Seeing as they have done everything to stay in line with fairly strict practices, firms will not be held at fault if, at some point, their clients do turn out to be, in fact, fraudulent. Clearly, this is in part because of Land Registry’s inherent faith in the power of this new system.

It is driving forward greater potential for the use of Digital IDs through the need created in these modern circumstances and beyond, but it won’t be the end.

Alastair Johnson (pictured) is Founder and CEO of identity and payments platform Nuggets

Read more about the Digital Identity Standard.