Why Technology Alone Isn’t Fixing the Customer Journey

Claire Van der Zant

I am currently in the middle of a property transaction. A sale and an onward purchase, running in parallel. And the experience has given me a renewed perspective on the state of our industry that no amount of market data or conference panels could replicate.

Let me be clear from the outset: the professionals I am working with are excellent. Proactive, thorough, communicative and genuinely invested in getting the transaction through. This is not a piece about bad service. It is about something more structural and more important.

Because despite all that effort, despite all of the technology that has been deployed across the transaction, the experience of buying and selling a home in 2026 feels remarkably similar to how it felt a decade ago for me. Not because nobody is trying. But because the way the transaction is configured means that effort, technology and good intentions are not translating into a simpler, faster or more predictable journey for the customer.

The first thing that struck me was how the transaction chain shapes buyer behaviour before any formal process has started. Many estate agents wouldn’t arrange viewings unless we were already under offer on our own property. The logic is understandable; agents want to protect their sellers from timewasters and collapsed chains. But the effect is to enforce a rigid, sequential process on buyers. You can’t explore the market while you prepare to sell. You sell first, then look. It is a waterfall model imposed on a process that would benefit enormously from greater parallelism.

This matters for lenders because it reinforces the very chain dynamics that drive fall-throughs and extend timelines. By the time a buyer finds a property and the mortgage journey formally begins, weeks or months of sequential activity have already elapsed. The transaction is already long before the lender enters the picture, and already fragile.

Once the transaction is underway, the volume of technology deployed is impressive, but genuinely overwhelming.

Across the various participants in our transaction, I have so far encountered at least seven distinct platforms; identity verification, property information, case progression, chain management, onboarding and general communication, alongside email, phone calls and messaging apps. Several of these platforms collect overlapping information. None of them talk to one another. And at one point, we were asked to send identity documents via a consumer messaging channel; a request that, whatever the intention, sits uncomfortably alongside the industry’s growing conversation about trusted data and digital identity, as well as exposing the fragmentation gaps in digital maturity within the market.

I never know where to look for the most current information. I never know which update to trust. And I spend more time reconciling what I am being told across platforms than I do progressing the transaction. We talk about this often in the industry, but to experience this first hand provides a completely different view.

The technology is there. The coordination is not.

This is where the experience connects directly to the argument that Novus has been making across this edition of Digital Disruption, and, in truth, across the past year.

The property transaction does not have a technology deficit. Platforms exist for identity verification, for property data, for case tracking, for chain management, for communication. The industry has invested significantly in digitising individual steps of the journey. And many of those individual tools are genuinely good.

What the industry has not yet solved is configuration. How those tools connect. How data flows between participants without being recreated at every boundary. How a customer can see a single, coherent picture of their transaction rather than assembling one from seven platforms and multiple providers. How the effort that estate agents, conveyancers, brokers and lenders are each putting into managing the process can compound rather than conflict.

This is the configuration problem. And it runs in two directions.

Internally, each participant in the transaction needs to ask whether the technology they have deployed is configured into a coherent journey, or whether they are inadvertently adding to the customer’s cognitive load by layering platforms and channels without considered integration. The intent to provide visibility is right. The execution creates noise.

Externally, the end-to-end transaction needs an operating model that allows verified data and evidence to travel with the customer, rather than being gathered, verified, lost and gathered again as the transaction moves from one participant to the next. Identity verified once should mean identity verified. Property information submitted once should be available to every party that needs it, under appropriate data sharing frameworks.

These are not separate problems. They are two dimensions of the same configuration challenge, and they need to be addressed in parallel, not sequentially. That is precisely what Horizontal Digital Integration is designed to do: provide the operating model that connects the internal lens; how each organisation structures its own journey, with the external lens; how data, evidence and trust flow across organisational boundaries. HDI is the operating framework that turns isolated technology investments into a coordinated transaction.

Lenders sit at the centre of this. The mortgage journey touches every participant in the transaction, and the lender’s operating model either reinforces the fragmentation or begins to resolve it. How it ingests data, how it connects to brokers and conveyancers, how it manages the journey from application through to completion.

The opportunity is significant. Lenders who reconfigure internally by building coherent, outcome-oriented journeys rather than siloed process steps, will reduce their own operational friction. But lenders who also reconfigure externally by designing for ecosystem interoperability, trusted data reuse, and a transaction model where evidence compounds rather than resets, will unlock something larger: faster completions, fewer fall-throughs, and a customer experience that finally reflects the ambition the industry clearly has.

The technology exists. The willingness exists. What is missing is the configuration to connect them.

And from inside the transaction, I can tell you: the customer is waiting.