Safe Buyer costs £10 + VAT. This is in line with other similar risk products on the market.

Once you have invited the buyer to the Safe Buyer Scheme, they can browse to our website and search for their conveyancer. They will then decide whether to purchase Safe Buyer to protect themself from fraud by checking their conveyancer’s bank account details.

We have no plans to charge conveyancers a membership fee.

BE Consultancy is a privately owned company.

BE Consultancy was formed in 2006 by business partners Brad Marsh and Ed Powell to provide solutions to the property market. The company has developed its expertise in fraud prevention and has been working in this field with conveyancers, lenders, mortgage brokers, estate agents, regulators and fraud prevention agencies since 2012.

BE Consultancy is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.

No, Law Society of Scotland is currently out of scope, however we will be extending the Safe Buyer Scheme to Law Society of Scotland firms in due course.

We say 6-8 weeks to allow for a high number of applications at once. Applications have been taking on average 6 days to process but may take longer according to circumstances beyond our control such as press coverage highlighting fraud and 3rd party stakeholders requirements (e.g. lenders).

We cannot speak on behalf of lenders but we have been involved in discussions with the FCA who requires ‘firms’ (lenders and mortgage brokers) to protect their customers from foreseeable risks. Lenders have to demonstrate that they have robust procedures to mitigate harm to their customers. Accordingly, they have a duty of care to prevent harm to their customers who use one of their panel conveyancers.

We cannot comment on what lenders are going to do, however, we are in discussions with most of the major lenders and the CML who we have been working with in developing the Safe Buyer Scheme for a number of years.

The Safe Buyer Scheme has a full audit trail which records the lender and the mortgage application number for future reference.

These other tools solve a different problem. They allow a conveyancing firm to verify the bank details of another firm whereas Safe Buyer allows clients to verify the bank account details of their conveyancing firm.

Our software has been rigorously penetration tested by world renowned Nettitude, TrustedSec and First Data. In addition we have passed the Government backed Cyber Essentials Plus security standard and our business is ISO27001 accredited.

EU servers.

BE Consultancy runs the Safe Buyer Scheme using a very robust and dynamically updated information security policy, as part of our ISO27001 accreditation. We pay special attention to keeping data safe and secure. In order to provide the highest level of security, we have carefully set up effective equipment, as well as an arsenal of best practices at all levels of our organisation and infrastructure, so that the availability, integrity and confidentiality of content is of the highest quality.

Please see our Security Policy for details.

BE Consultancy has a £5m PI insurance limit for any one claim.