InfoTrack and Decision First: What the 90% Interoperability Claim Actually Means

Thought leadership by Olivier Jauniaux Founder of NestLink

“On 6 July, 2026, LMS, Landmark Information Group, InfoTrack and Decision First announced they would work together to let trusted information move between lenders and conveyancers through the systems those firms already use. This is perhaps the most important thing to happen for UK property transactions all year. But also, the least verifiable. The four claim that they collectively support more than 90% of UK lenders and residential conveyancing firms. The initial targets are digital identity, mortgage offer distribution, redemption statements, certificates of title, electronic signing, charge registration, and funds settlement.

Details of how anyone actually participates will follow in due course. Note the wording carefully: ninety percent of lenders and conveyancing firms is a statement about organisations served, not about transaction volume, revenue, or daily usage. It is a genuinely impressive figure. It is not a market share. What has been announced, then, is an intention. There is no published architecture, no commercial model, no timetable, no named pilot lender, and no measurable target.

For an industry that has spent fifteen years being sold various competing platforms, an initiative whose entire proposition is that you do not have to buy a platform is either the most sophisticated thing anyone has done in this market, or a very well-attended meeting. The distinction will not be settled by the press release.

The industry does not have a software problem

Every professional in a residential transaction already has software. The agent has a CRM, the conveyancer has case management, the lender has an origination stack and a panel portal. Conveyancers still use the old scanner on a daily basis, but things are changing, even for them. Yet, property chains still take months. This is because the expensive work does not happen inside any of those systems.

It happens in the gaps between them, where a human being downloads something from one screen, checks it, and types it into another. Where responsibility for the next step is ignored or at worse, unknown. The last decade of digitisation happened without interoperability and simply moved the re-keying from the filing cabinet to the second monitor. 

The alliance’s implicit claim is therefore more interesting than its explicit one. It is not saying the sector needs better tools. It is saying the sector’s tools are fine and the connective tissue between them is missing, which is an unusually honest thing for four software companies to admit in public. Interoperability is a governance problem wearing a technical costume

The Digital Property Market Steering Group’s Smart Property Data Trust Framework is fairly blunt about what a shared rulebook actually has to establish: who is allowed in, which data can be relied on, where it came from, when it was last updated, what the consumer has authorised, and, most awkwardly, who is liable when a field is wrong.

HM Land Registry’s own business planning points in the same direction, toward common data standards, reusable digital identity, and wider use of UPRNs as the key that lets records find each other. None of that is an integration task. It is a constitutional one. Open Banking is the analogy everyone reaches for, and it flatters property. Open Banking had a handful of regulated institutions, one regulator with a mandate, and a single canonical fact per customer. Property has hundreds of data sources, a dozen liability regimes, councils at wildly different stages of digital maturity, and facts that are genuinely contestable. A bank balance is either right, or it is a scandal.

A flood risk rating is a predictive opinion with a timestamp and a different insurance rating depending on who you speak to. Unless the property is literally under water, no one knows.

This produces the question the new “big four” have not yet answered: a conveyancer may soon receive an identity result or a title field in seconds without being permitted to rely on it. The Conveyancing Association has already pressed for clarity on liability, data reliability, and the extra-legal work earlier information tends to create. Faster delivery of information that still has to be independently re-checked is not interoperability. It is a courier service.

The gatekeeper question

Reach is the scarcest asset in this problem, and the four have it. There is also a version that goes quietly badly. A shared connection layer built by four commercial companies with existing paid integrations between them can produce something that looks like an open standard but behaves like a toll road: bilateral APIs presented as a network, access priced as a partnership, third-party participation available in principle but awkwardly expensive in practice.

Nobody would need to be acting in bad faith for that to happen thus creating a UK PropTech cartel. It is simply what incentives do when left unsupervised. The tell will be in the details when they arrive. Will it be published, open specifications like those of the OPDA, or an onboarding form. Will they allow for equal commercial terms for competitors, or a tiering table.

Will an audit trail travel with the data, or will the data rich log that stays secured and possibly licensed inside each company’s own estate. These are not pedantic questions. They are the entire difference between a public road and a toll gate network.

Nothing announced on 6 July touches the part of the process where buyers and sellers actually live

The seven initial workstreams are almost entirely lender and conveyancer plumbing. Property preparation, buyer comprehension, offer readiness and chain coordination. The entire question of whether the consumer understands what they are agreeing to sits outside the scope and will keep sitting there. Trusted data moving faster underneath a transaction does not, by itself, explain anything to the person signing for it. It just delivers the confusion earlier, faster and in a better file format.

This is precisely the seam NestLink and a few other incumbent proptech companies have been building toward from the opposite end: for NestLink a consumer-facing intelligence layer in KnowYourNest, and a coordination environment intended to hold buyer, seller, agent, solicitor, and lender in one view rather than five fill a much needed gap in consumer engagement and education.

The coordination layer is still months from full release, which is worth saying plainly, and which is also why the timing is interesting rather than awkward. A company designing an orchestration layer in 2026 gets to assume the rails will improve. A company that built one in 2019 had to assume they would not and built accordingly.

OpenMoove and A-Door are working adjacent ground; Coadjute and PEXA have long been arguing that the network matters more than the interface. The category is real. What remains open is where the seam between the rails and the journey gets drawn, and who gets to draw it.

Nobody has ever chosen a bank because they admired its underlying payment infrastructure. The user interface, however, has made the difference between Monzo and other digital banking apps you have never even heard of. But also, nobody has ever built a good consumer product on infrastructure that did not work.

In the future of Proptech, the most valuable company of the next decade may be the one that nobody outside a conveyancing firm can name. The second most valuable will be whoever finally translates what it carries and figures out how to sell that value to the consumer from dreaming, listing and through to living. May the race begin.