Original text here from Patrice Bernard (LinkedIn)
The startup Coadjute has recently secured a £10 million investment round, with participation from three major British financial institutions (Lloyds Banking Group, Nationwide, and NatWest), to incorporate mortgage processes into its real estate buying and selling integration solution.
The approach is reminiscent of Arkéa's implementation through its subsidiary Teamzy, but with some notable distinctions. It aims to bring all participants in a transaction into a common environment and provide them with unified tools, including communication tools, to streamline processes that currently take several months, often delayed by various processing hold-ups, document transmission times, and unnecessary back-and-forths.
Aware of the challenge in changing the habits of involved intermediaries, the startup has adopted as transparent an approach as possible by creating connections between its platform and the main software tools they use in their professional activities. In this way, everyone continues to work as they always have, but every event, action, and document is automatically and instantly shared with other (authorized) parties.
Coadjute has enhanced its offerings with a secure messaging service (like all its components, and the touted use of blockchain in this aspect is, as always, merely an annoying joke), and a few connections to essential systems in a real estate transaction, such as the national land registry and the energy certificate database, whose information can then be directly incorporated into the records.
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At its core, Coadjute provides a simple platform meticulously tailored to a specific use case and its various participants. At first glance, there seems to be no provision for managing processes, which appears to remain the responsibility of the involved entities (admittedly, this prevents any disruption to their practices) but could likely evolve in the future. Such an overview starkly highlights the profound deficiencies affecting the real estate market and, conversely, the immense opportunity that lies in initiatives to enhance the buyer's experience (among other benefits).
This is naturally very attractive to banks, which play a significant role in the value chain and are often the source of the most frustrating frictions. However, as understood by the three brands now engaged with Coadjute (and Arkéa, to its extent), the skills needed for success are too far removed from their core activities to be tackled internally, and the best option is to collaborate with specialists.
