The PEXA Group Ltd (ASX: PXA) share price has jumped 10% after the digital property exchange and data insights S&P/ASX 200 Index (ASX: XJO) stock announced an update with NatWest.
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Strategic partnership
The company announced it is progressing with a strategic partnership that will see the major UK bank utilise PEXA's digital property exchange technology to deliver 48-hour remortgage transactions to its customers. The PEXA platform use will then be extended to speed up the handling of sale and purchase transactions.
The NatWest managing director of homebuying and ownership, Miguel Sard, said good progress was already being made with PEXA, having tested PEXA's payment scheme with the Bank of England, and said the technology would help make the bank simpler and faster for its customers.
Sard then said:
At the heart of our strategy for growth is anticipating and meeting our customers' needs, using data and technology to ensure we are simple to deal with. PEXA has already proven in Australia that remortgaging processes that ordinarily take months, can take just a couple of days, or even hours in some cases.
We are delighted to be partnering with PEXA and will be working with the team closely over the coming months to help us deliver on our strategy by enabling its world-leading digital property exchange platform for the benefit of our customers and the broader UK property ecosystem.
PEXA reaction
Investors seem to like the news from the ASX 200 stock, with the PEXA share price jumping in response.
The UK CEO of PEXA, Joe Pepper, said he was excited to work with NatWest, with it being one of the UK's biggest lenders and having a "common goal of driving digital innovation and transforming the customer experience".
Pepper noted the "chronically long" time it takes to transact property in the UK market, with the associated pitfalls of transaction fall-through and stress. Pepper said:
The property settlement process in the UK is highly challenged. Relative to similar markets, transaction fail rates are unacceptably high and the time to complete transactions is overly long.
We welcome the opportunity to work with NatWest Group and partner with a lender committed to solving these issues with us. We look forward to helping implement our technology to improve the NatWest customer experience.
Recent performance by the ASX 200 stock
The ASX 200 stock continues to scale. In the first half of FY24, total business revenue rose by 16% to $163.3 million, and operating earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA) grew by 12% to $58.8 million. PEXA Exchange revenue increased 11% to $149.6 million and PEXA Exchange operating EBITDA rose 17% to $82.9 million.
As we can see on the chart below, the PEXA share price is up more than 22% since the start of 2024. The ASX 200 stock has dropped 0.4% in the 2024 calendar year to date.
