Using Open Banking and Data Technologies to prevent money-laundering in the UK property market

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UK property is increasingly becoming the 'money-laundry' of choice for the world's criminals _(BBC-Panorama-'Following-the-drug-money'-2019)_. Transparency International pinpointed £4.4billion of UK properties bought with laundered funds, a sum it said was "the tip of the iceberg"_(Financial-Times-2019)_.Property provides a safe harbour for fraudsters to integrate large sums of 'dirty money' into the legal economy in a single transaction, fuelling crime throughout the UK and internationally. Consequently, regulators have ramped up oversight and pressure on property professionals (lawyers/estate-agents/mortgage-brokers/mortgage-lenders) leading to slower property transaction times and worsened experiences for professionals and homemovers.The gatekeepers to prevent money-laundering in property are property-lawyers. Money-laundering regulations require them to combat money-laundering by completing detailed and costly checks to confirm homemovers' identities and sources of wealth/funds.These checks are performed manually, which is slow (20-days), costly (£150) and ineffective. Lawyers spend £150 of time collecting ID-documents, bank statements and supportive evidence from homemovers, then assessing them to establish if they are using non-laundered purchase funds. This is very difficult to do smoothly and accurately.With no technological solution, property-lawyers have no alternative other than to throw more manual processes at preventing money-laundering. These processes are ineffective at stopping money-laundering because falsifying any document is easy to do and hard for the untrained eye to detect. Frustratingly for the homemover, manual information gathering cannot be securely shared with others who need it, such as estate-agents, mortgage-brokers and mortgage-lenders, meaning they must have their financial affairs assessed from scratch multiple times.Thirdfort is changing this. After a friend was defrauded out of £25k during a property purchase and having been through painful anti-money-laundering ("AML") checks multiple times, co-founders Jack and Olly set up Thirdfort to streamline identity and AML-checks in UK property. Thirdfort has built a mobile-app to automate ID-checks using electronic verification and will now automate these painful and manual money-laundering checks. Using Open-Banking technology, Thirdfort will enable instant access and analysis of bank statement data. A report is then generated for the property-lawyer to assess and share with estate-agents/mortgage-brokers/mortgage-lenders.Thirdfort will relieve property-professionals of the manual burden of collecting documents and provide a better, more accurate way to identify illegitimate funds. The checks can be done without the need for paper, empowering homemovers to carry out checks via their phone, speeding up property transaction times and reducing legal fees. This frees up lawyers to give better service and provides a robust tool for preventing UK property money-laundering.