One network or two: where e-conveyancing competition stands

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Kooky

Builder of Shaka, the payment router that pays every agent their commission on closing date.

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Queensland law requires nearly every represented property sale to settle through an electronic network, and the registry has approved two operators to run one. On paper a solicitor or conveyancer has a choice. In practice the choice is rarely exercised, because a settlement needs every party in the same workspace, and almost everyone is already in one of them.

For several years the regulators' answer to that problem had a name: interoperability. In March 2026 they set it aside. This guide explains what the word meant, how the program rose and stalled, what was decided this year and by whom, what has happened to the smaller network since, and which rules now govern the price and reliability of the system that Queensland buyers and sellers must use. It describes the position as the public documents record it at the start of October 2026. It takes no view on what should happen next, which is a question for governments.

Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal, draft report on network operator service fees, 3 July 2026; registrars' council statement, 31 March 2026.

Two operators, one busy network

Titles Queensland's guidance on mandatory electronic conveyancing names two approved electronic lodgment network operators: Property Exchange Australia Limited, known as PEXA, and Sympli Australia Pty Ltd. Since 20 February 2023, professionals lodging a transfer, a mortgage or a release of mortgage over freehold land must use one of them.

The two are not close in size. The Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal's draft report of 3 July 2026, prepared for the national regulators, counts 3.95 million PEXA transactions in 2024-25 and 33,900 on Sympli. It gives PEXA 99 per cent of electronic conveyancing and 90 per cent of all conveyancing, paper included. PEXA's own announcements this year use the same 90 per cent figure for its share of property transfer settlements, and put its volume for the year to 30 June 2026 at 4.2 million transactions.

The company's results for that year, published on 28 August, describe its market coverage as 90 per cent and unchanged from the year before. The balance of the market has not shifted while the reform was debated.

The explanation lies in how a settlement is built. A typical sale has four participants: two law or conveyancing practices and two lenders. All four must be subscribers to the same network for the workspace to exist. A practitioner who prefers the smaller network can use it only when the other practitioner and both lenders can join it too. A network with most of the participants therefore attracts the rest, and a newer one starts each transaction needing three other parties to follow it.

The standard contract reflects the fact that a choice has to be made. Queensland Law Society's journal Proctor reported, when the contracts were revised for the 2023 mandate, that they introduced a procedure for selecting the network a settlement will use.

What interoperability meant

Interoperability was a design in which the networks would talk to one another. A buyer's solicitor on one network could settle with a seller's solicitor on the other, each lender staying on whichever it used, and the two systems would exchange the data, coordinate the financial settlement and lodge the documents as though everyone shared a workspace.

Banking Day, reporting the regulators' timetable on 6 October 2023, put it simply: interoperability enables more than one operator to host different parties within the same transaction.

The idea borrowed from other networks. A customer of one bank can pay a customer of another; a call from one telephone carrier reaches a handset on another. In each case the individual chooses a provider and the providers connect behind the scenes. The intended effect in conveyancing was that a practitioner's choice of network would no longer depend on anyone else's.

The difficulty was always in the detail of the financial settlement. The Reserve Bank of Australia's Bulletin described in March 2021 how the two operators already differed. PEXA acts both as network operator and as the administrator that sends settlement batches to the Reserve Bank. In Sympli's model, as the Bulletin described it then, a separate ASX company performed the batch role. Joining two such systems meant deciding which would reserve the banks' funds, which would lodge, and who would be responsible if a settlement failed halfway between them.

The program, from trial to pause

The national regulator is the Australian Registrars' National Electronic Conveyancing Council, made up of the land registrars of the states and territories. It writes the model operating requirements that bind operators, and each jurisdiction's registrar applies them.

Queensland was the proving ground for the first live test. Banking Day reported that a trial in September 2023 completed two refinancing transactions over Queensland properties across the two networks, with Commonwealth Bank and National Australia Bank as the participating lenders. Following it, the council set provisional dates: July 2025 for a limited group of banks to carry out interoperable lodgements of mortgages and discharges, and December 2025 for all subscribers to do so.

Those dates were not met. Broker Daily's account of the program, published on 27 May 2026, records that the regime had been due for completion by 31 December 2025 and that the council paused it in June 2024.

The reassessment left a paper trail. The council's list of publications includes a statement on next steps dated 19 February 2025 and an interoperability statement dated 23 December 2025. During the pause the council commissioned two independent reports, a functional requirements review and a cost benefit analysis, examining several models for competition. Its March 2026 statement names two of the models considered: direct connect, and practitioner choice.

What was decided in March 2026

The decision came in two steps a week apart.

On 24 March 2026 a ministerial forum on competition reform in electronic conveyancing met under the chairmanship of the New South Wales minister. The published statement lists the ministers present or represented, among them Queensland's, the Hon. Dale Last. It records that, without Commonwealth Government support, the council would not proceed with the interoperability program at this time, including the direct connect and practitioner choice models.

On 31 March the council issued its own statement confirming the position and giving reasons. There were four. Every model examined involved a high cost in time, money and complexity. There was significant uncertainty that interoperability could deliver meaningful long-term benefits or competition outcomes. The banking sector lacked an incentive to take part and cooperate. And the Commonwealth Government's leadership and support, which the council regarded as critical, was absent.

The statement did not close the question permanently. The council said it stood ready to support future reform when conditions improved, and that the states and territories would formally ask the Commonwealth and its agencies to engage, particularly on what it called regulatory gaps in banking financial settlements and in national oversight of competition.

It also said what it would do in the meantime: strengthen the existing framework through closer oversight of operators, compliance monitoring and enforcement, national consistency, consumer protection and improved resilience across the industry.

What happened to the second network

Two months later the smaller operator's ownership changed.

Broker Daily reported on 27 May 2026 that ASX Limited had reached an agreement in principle to sell its 49 per cent stake in Sympli to its joint venture partner, ATI Group, for a nominal amount, subject to regulatory approvals. ASX told the market it would recognise an after-tax loss of about $12 million on the sale and that, once it completed, it would stop recognising its share of Sympli's operating losses, which had been $4.4 million after tax in the first half of its 2026 financial year.

Reactions differed. Broker Daily quoted a Sympli spokesperson saying customers could continue to expect the same service, innovation and competitive pricing from its team under the new ownership. The same report quoted Ian Perkins, managing director of Lawlab, saying of the sale price that "the market has given up on competition."

For Queensland practitioners the practical position did not change with the sale. Both operators remain approved by the registry, and either may be used where all parties to a settlement are subscribers.

What now governs the dominant network: price

With competition between networks not being pursued for the present, the regulators' attention has turned to rules that apply regardless of how many networks there are. The first is price.

At the council's request, made through the New South Wales Government, the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal has been reviewing the fees operators charge. Its draft report of 3 July 2026 makes nine recommendations. The first is that PEXA's transaction fees should continue to be regulated because the market is highly concentrated. The same recommendation would remove price regulation from Sympli.

The draft proposes setting PEXA's fees from its actual costs, fee by fee, for four years to 30 June 2031, keeping them the same in every state and territory. On the fee schedule the draft publishes for New South Wales for 2026-27, the charge for a transfer with financial settlement over one title would fall from $146.30 to $92.71 from 1 July 2027, with other fees rising only with inflation.

PEXA has responded. It told the stock exchange on 18 August that it had lodged a submission with independent expert reports proposing other methods of assessing fees and returns. On 4 September it announced that the tribunal's deadline for its final report had been revised to 30 October 2026. The council then decides whether to change its operating requirements. Until it does, the draft is only a draft and current fees apply.

What now governs it: reliability

The second set of rules concerns what happens when a system on which every settlement depends stops working.

The concern is not abstract. On 27 January 2026 an outage at the Reserve Bank interrupted the exchange of payment files between banks for much of the day. The Reserve Bank's statement of 29 January said property settlement was extended to 10:45 pm that night and that approximately 500 property transactions could not complete before the deadline. An earlier interruption, on 16 May 2025, was on the network side: The Adviser reported that a fault in mobile signing affected PEXA subscribers for about three hours, with the operator estimating that fewer than 10 per cent of settlements in that window were delayed and none missed.

The council's response is in a proposed eighth version of its operating requirements. A stakeholder briefing dated 17 June 2026 lists the main changes for operators: certification to the international information security standard ISO 27001, annual testing of business continuity, annual independent expert reviews of an operator's financial, technical and organisational resources, monthly progress reports on essential recommendations until they are carried out, and higher insurance, with professional indemnity cover of not less than $20 million in aggregate and $5 million per claim and new cover for cyber incidents and business interruption. Submissions closed on 17 July 2026.

These requirements apply to every approved operator. They are the regulators' way of managing dependence on shared infrastructure directly, by raising the standard each operator must meet.

The arguments on each side

The public record contains a real disagreement, and it is fair to set out both parts of it.

Those who wanted interoperability to proceed argue from concentration. One operator carries almost all settlements, so an outage there affects almost all settlements, and a practitioner dissatisfied with price or service has little practical alternative. After the May 2025 interruption, The Adviser reported the Australian Institute of Conveyancers' national body saying that "any outage, no matter how brief, can have far-reaching consequences for consumers and conveyancers alike."

The regulators' reasons for stopping are about cost and proof. Their statement of 31 March rests on the independent reviews they commissioned, and says the expense and complexity of connecting the networks were high while the benefits were uncertain. They add a point about who must take part: banks are in every financed settlement, and the council concluded they had no incentive to rebuild their systems for a second connection without the Commonwealth and its agencies requiring or supporting it.

Both positions accept the same facts about the market. They differ on whether the remedy is to change its structure or to regulate it as it is. The decision of March 2026 chose the second for now and left the first open.

What it means for a Queensland sale

For someone buying or selling this spring, very little turns on any of this in the short term.

The settlement will take place on whichever network the practitioners and lenders have in common, since all of them must be subscribers to it. The network's fee appears as a disbursement on the client's account. That fee cannot change under the review before 1 July 2027. The requirements for verifying identity, authorising the practitioner and moving the money are the same on either network, because they come from the national participation rules and not from the operator.

The questions that remain for a client are narrow and practical ones about their own matter: which network the settlement will use, what the fee is, and how the practitioner would handle a system that is unavailable at the booked time.

What to watch

Three items are on the public calendar or pending.

The tribunal's final report on fees is due on 30 October 2026, followed by the council's consultation and decision. The eighth version of the operating requirements has been consulted on and awaits publication in final form. And the states and territories have asked the Commonwealth to engage on competition and on the regulation of financial settlement; no response has been published in the documents reviewed for this guide.

Queensland approves two networks and uses mostly one. The regulators have chosen, for now, to govern that fact through rules on price and resilience and to leave the structure as it is.

Kooky, from Shaka

Kooky edits Queensland Estate and builds Shaka, the payment router he made for Queensland property professionals. One payment comes in, and every agent, agency and party in the deal receives their signed share on closing date.

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