The surge in property transactions has placed huge pressure on conveyancing firms and their staff, a subject which is being shared widely on Today’s Conveyancer and throughout social media.
One of the areas of concern for practitioners is the growth of scam and fraud alerts, a significant risk in conveyancing given the large volume of transactions, the pressure and higher risk of human error and the value of the reward on offer for successfully infiltrating a transaction and redirecting funds.
One organisation helping conveyancers battle the risk is Cashroom, where the recent acquisition of technology business Kanbaro will help clients improve efficiency and reduce risk.
Today’s Conveyancer caught up Kanbaro’s directors, Paul O’Day and Steven O’Day.
Tell us a little bit about yourselves and who Kanbaro are.
Steven O’Day (SD): I’ve spent 13 years working in technology, mostly in banking and financial services, most recently at Virgin Money, building and running the underlying platform for the bank’s digital offering.
I’m a founding director of Kanbaro, where we have been building the portal that Cashroom customers use.
Paul O’Day (PD): My background is in software engineering where most recently I managed a team where we created a dashboard and reporting platform used by over 2,000 companies worldwide to analyse their customer experience data.
Like Steven, as the other founding director of Kanbaro, my evenings and weekends over the last 5 years were taken up with building the Cashroom portal. We’re delighted to now be a part of the team full time.
PD: There was too much room for human error; incorrect email flags, errors in assigning the work, and of course the risk of cyber fraud with phishing attacks.
How has the portal developed over the past 5 years?
PD: We’ve also built in a whole series of approval workflows. For example, Partners and Directors have the option to approve requests before they are actioned and are notified via the Cashroom Portal of any payments that require authorising at the bank.
This means that nothing actually comes to the Cashroom until it’s been signed off by the law firm. The portal provides that complete transparency with a documented audit trail; so when it comes to ensuring compliance with the firms Solicitor’s Accounts Rules the portal allows you to track each payment request from creation to authorisation at the bank.
Online security is a growing problem for law firms and the focus of the SRA’s recent thematic review. Clearly funds transfers are a major talking point… what does the acquisition of Kanbaro mean for Cashroom on that front?
SD: The development of the portal was done with security at its core. We’ve been through Cyber Essentials Plus and undertake rigorous penetration testing. We both now work full time at Cashroom which also ensure that extra level of robustness.
What is the impact of you being in-house and how will this benefit Cashroom and their clients this year?
SD: We reached a landmark recently where we had our one millionth request through the portal, and we now deal with around 45,000 requests a month. Around 50% of those payments now go through an automation process. The automation processes are open banking and bulk export and import. By using these processes there is no possibility of human error, either accidentally or criminally intentionally.
PD: We’re also looking at integrations with Practice Management Systems. Cashroom is system agnostic and there are around 35 PMS’s we currently work on. We will be looking to provide benefits of automation by integrating with PMS’s to continue to provide efficiencies for clients looking for outsourced legal and cashiering services.
