If you have ever remortgaged your home, you will know the feeling. The lender approves your new deal in days, sometimes hours. Then begins the long, unexplained wait. Weeks pass. Emails go unanswered. You chase your solicitor, who chases the lender, who chases someone else entirely. Six to eight weeks later, you finally complete. The whole experience feels like it belongs in the 1990s. That is because, in many ways, it does.
The UK remortgage process has barely changed in decades. Despite advances in technology across almost every other industry, the legal steps involved in switching a mortgage remain stubbornly manual. Solicitors still rely on email chains, Word documents, PDF forms, and phone calls to move a transaction forward. Each step in the process depends on a human remembering to do something, checking something, or waiting for someone else to respond. It is a workflow built around people, not around efficiency.
Consider what actually happens during a remortgage. A solicitor receives instructions from the lender. They verify the client’s identity, review the title at the Land Registry, check for any issues, prepare the legal documentation, coordinate the redemption of the existing mortgage, and arrange completion. None of these steps are inherently complex. Most of the information already exists in digital form somewhere. Yet the process still takes weeks because the systems connecting these steps are fragmented, manual, and slow.
The problem is not that the legal work is difficult. It is that the workflow surrounding it is broken. Every handoff between systems, every manual check, every email that sits unread in an inbox adds delay. Multiply that across thousands of transactions and you have an industry where the average time from instruction to completion is six to eight weeks, even though the actual legal work involved could be measured in minutes rather than hours.
At LEXcelerate, we asked a simple question: what if we rebuilt this process from the ground up? Not by bolting technology onto an existing workflow, but by designing the workflow around the technology. By treating every step as a data problem to be solved rather than a task to be performed, we believe remortgage completions can be reduced from weeks to days.
The answer is not more people working harder. It is smarter systems doing the repetitive work so that qualified professionals can focus on the decisions that genuinely require their expertise. The remortgage market in the UK is worth over a billion pounds a year in legal fees alone. It is time the process reflected the century we are living in.
In the posts that follow, we will share how we are building LEXcelerate to do exactly that.