Looking for information about your firm's panel status?
April Mortgages Conveyancing Panel: Recently Asked Questions
In appealing a decision by April Mortgages, it may be useful to provide the following information:
- Full account of your firm’s conveyancing history
- Your COMPLETIONmonitor reports, assuming you use the Lexsure software
- Your recent claims history
- comprehensive details of all staff in your firm and their position.
- Note down if a solicitor has been admitted to the role on completion of the Qualified Lawyers Transfer Test.
- Forward copy practising certificates, the firm's current professional indemnity policy and your accountant's certificate, calculating what % of the firm's gross fee income is generated from residential conveyancing transactions
It is encouraging that some firms have been able to regain membership to panels notwithstanding the policy by the respective lenders to refuse panel membership to firms with certain profiles or characteristics. The success is primarily due to the firms’ ability to persuade the lender to make an exception if there is sufficient evidence to reassure them that the firm has a healthy attitude towards risk mitigation.
These risks are exacerbated by the lack of a comprehensive set of data on all conveyancing firms (which, for the avoidance of doubt, would include solicitors and conveyancers across the UK) which is in a readily accessible format. Currently, lenders vet the suitability of their panel firms against a variety of disparate, incomplete and potentially inaccurate sets of information. One top 5 lender pointed out to us that it is almost impossible to track individual fraudsters who move from firm to firm, especially where they are no longer registered or no longer hold a valid practicing certificate.
April Mortgages and other lenders are in varying stages of reviewing their approach to vetting firms on their conveyancing panels, to ensure their ongoing exposure to unsuitable firms is reduced. There is also regulatory impetus on lenders to ensure that they have satisfactory oversight of their third party panels, including a due-diligence process.
- Analysis as to the nature of clients (e.g.existing/new/seen in person)
- Disclosure/Notification to Lender analysis indicating frequency and nature of disclosures - to include benchmarking analysis against aggregate data
- Evidence of undertaking logs
- The percentage of the firm’s business which is conveyancing (broken down into sale/purchase and remortgage)
- Number of conveyancing cases by lender
- lack of transactions
- the lawyer is a sole practitioner
- as part of the HSBC panel reduction.
Find a Lawyer on the April Mortgages Conveyancing Panel
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2025 | [no data] |
2024 | [no data] |
2023 | [no data] |
2022 | [no data] |
2021 | [no data] |
2020 | [no data] |
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