A Guildford solicitor has helped develop a new online tool to streamline conveyancing, enabling the mortgage lenders’ compliance process to be completed in ‘five minutes’.

Julian Sampson, a partner at Wright & Wright, created the ‘Jet’ programme with Alan Dring, the former director of online conveyancing referrer eConvenyancer, and with input from other property solicitors.

Jet is a web-based programme that contains the lending instructions and rules from the CML Handbook and top lenders.

It incorporates the 22,000 plus elements of the CML Handbook and converts the handbook’s queries into tailored concise and understandable questions.

Sampson said it will enable mortgage lenders’ compliance requirements to be carried out by more junior staff within firms, and reduce the time taken from 45 minutes to a little as five minutes.

Once the questions have been answered online, Jet will determine the correct lending criteria and provide an audit trail to save in case management software.

The product is designed to help firms reduce costs, improve risk management, and comply with the new outcomes focused regulatory regime, and to help lenders develop their conveyancing panel criteria.

Sampson said: ‘When the CML Handbook was first launched it was heralded as a welcome consolidation of lender instructions. Its introduction was designed to expedite and simplify the relationship between conveyancer and lender.’

But he added that, over the years, an increasing number of ‘non-intuitive’ questionnaires and checklists had made the handbook difficult to use and raised problems for conveyancers, particularly when it came to managing the flow of data and instructions.

‘The development of an IT platform which streamlines the process has become imperative to make the conveyancing easier, while bolstering the integrity of firms’ risk management processes,’ he said.