A result of a power collaboration from HM Land Registry, the Bank of England, the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) and Coadjute, has seen the development of fintech prototype Project Meridian – a digital system designed to synchronise payments against delivery of assets.

The platform will essentially be an all-encompassing operator for the property completion process, whereby money, land registry and delivery of deeds will happen simultaneously.

Project Lead & Chief Operating Officer of Coadjute, John Reynolds said: “The current process for settlement is highly manual, making it inefficient and prone to error and fraud. What the Bank of England and the Land Registry have done with this project is build a fully digital process.

“This means money is moved, the digital deed is issued and the land register is updated in one step, all programmed and locked in place using a new infrastructure. In future, this has the potential to bring real transparency and certainty to the settlement process, making completion day a much less stressful time for anyone moving home.”

A simple property transaction process

Breaking it down, the system ensures the purchase funds are reserved in the buyers bank until an agreed time when the operator will begin the payment process for the funds to be transferred into the seller’s bank. At the same time, documents are electronically signed in order to transfer ownership to the buyer.

The documents will have been completed in advance by the legal representatives on both sides which provides the necessary information to automatically update land registry and delivery of deeds to the new owner.

Head of the BIS Innovation Hub London Centre, Francesca Hopwood Road said:

"Project Meridian demonstrates the potential to improve the functioning of existing financial market infrastructures with new technologies such as DLT. As central banks periodically update their settlement systems, the project's insights will support the analysis of synchronisation's benefits and shape how that service should be designed."

Other applications of Project Meridian

Project Meridian is scalable – it could handle the purchase of multiple properties simultaneously. It may even be accessible to other types of transactions where synchronicity would benefit the process such as currency exchanges and protecting against financial crime using digitalised documentation.

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