Rob: Well, it’s brilliant to have you here. And I just want to start by asking, how did you get from growing up in Kadina all the way to running a national electronic signing platform?
Lara: Oh, you could almost say, Rob, I ended up here in some ways accidentally. It was back in 2014, I think it was, that we co-founded what was a digital identity company. It was actually for the family business, for a digital ID solution with new verification of identity rules, and then we saw an opportunity to help others in the industry.
We basically spent the next few years scaling that and growing it. About three or four years, I think, into our journey, the company actually got acquired by a major legal tech company. I went and worked in that company for some time. And that’s how I’ve basically ended up working in digital identity and this whole, what was a brand new industry for me. And now I’m fortunate enough to lead the team and the company at Livesign.
Rob: Thank you for that overview there. So, what’s your role with regards to technology? Are you the one that pioneers new things or are you the one that understands the market and gets your tech people to build them?
Lara: It’s a real blend, I’d call it, Rob, multifaceted.
While the role is strategic, I’m actually also quite hands-on with much of the tactical on-the-ground work. I love doing that, but I think it’s also really important to get out from behind the desk and be speaking directly to our clients. To our industry partners, which, for me is a key way in which we need to be doing that to grow our client base and really establish and work on those strategic industry relationships.
From that work being done is we’re now Pexa’s Digital ID partner, which has been fantastic for us. We’re working with and have a lot of integrations into several property and legal tech platforms, including REISA Master Forms and others which is really beneficial and hopefully especially for customers by bringing some of those streamlined integrations into the market.
Rob: Now, if we look at signing, just reflecting on this this morning—back in the old days, people couldn’t sign things hundreds of years ago.
They’d leave a mark, maker’s mark, and you can see that chiseled onto cathedrals around Europe. And then when people learned to read and write, finally, they could write a name and that would become their signature as such. But that could easily be forged. So then you’d get witnesses involved and witnesses would also sign that they saw someone else sign things. And that’s how we’ve basically rolled for hundreds of years.
Until we’re getting to a point now where we can move to digital. But of course if I receive an email telling me to sign this, no one knows it’s actually me clicking on that link and signing it. So verification of ID and digital signature are super important to go hand in hand, aren’t they?
My question to you is, for Real Estate in particular, Anti-Money Laundering legislation, which gets enacted next July will place compliance requirements on real estate agents to do more due diligence, make sure that they’re talking to the people who they think they’re talking to, and they get the right signatures. How do you see agencies being proactive, staying ahead of the game, and not creating an extra burden on themselves when this legislation does kick in?
Lara: All right. Really good question.
If we think about the old world, with witnessing, you are always in front of someone, you could actually see who was signing those documents, especially when it came to high-value transactions.
And it’s all great that everyone’s jumped online. They’ve adopted signing technologies and other tech. However, what got lost—and many people haven’t thought about along the way—is the fact that that whole witnessing component has actually gone. So if we’re thinking about a real estate transaction usually involving hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, forms or contracts are getting sent out to be signed and the agent can’t hand on heart look someone in the eye and say, “Yes, I know that was Rob that signed that form.” So that’s where we saw a real risk in the industry in which we operate. So we decided to close that gap by offering what we almost call a digital witnessing solution.
And there’s proof that that was actually Rob, not someone else logging in and signing things that you might not be aware of. So what we’ve developed is we can send out a form, any forms, get those signed with our e-sign technology, and do the verification of identity check at the same time.
And then that all comes back as a package. And that’s to negate a lot of that risk of not knowing in the digital world who your signer is.
With Tranche Two coming with AML, as you already mentioned, Rob, coming into play next year, agents need to lean into the changes. They’ve really got a unique opportunity here to lead by adopting tools and technologies—and there’s so many out there—that can help them lean into that. So they themselves are managing risk appropriately.
They are giving that assurity to their clients that they are also protecting their data and doing all the things that they can to mitigate anything going wrong during that transaction. Because at the end of the day, it’s a very stressful time for the clients who are selling and buying properties, and they just want that to be done seamlessly.
Rob: Yeah, that’s a really good point because it does enable the currency of trust, which was a handshake and a look in the eye, to be transferred into digital space by saying, “Hey, our compliance is a competitive advantage,” as opposed to it being a pain in the bum. And let’s be honest, no one, apart from compliance companies, likes compliance.
Lara: Oh look, I’m the first to sit here and say, who loves doing ID checks? No one. They sit there and they think it’s a pain in the bum. And I probably think the same around when the AML Tranche Two rules come into play. But again, what I would say is, there’s people out there like us and others who have these tools to help you get there quickly and easily and also—really importantly—provide or conduct those checks where it doesn’t cause friction for the client. You want it to be really seamless also for them. So yeah, embrace it.
Rob: Embrace it. I agree. And one thing that’s happening with Livesign is it’s built into REISA Master Forms, which is this embedded compliance. So the compliance a lot of the time can be invisible. An agent can go through their normal workflow. And just by doing so, because the right platforms have been put into place by the agency, the compliance is embedded and they can tell their customer that it’s all compliant and it’s top tier, but it doesn’t actually mean that they have to do too much different to what they did before.
But help me understand this. For agencies that are doing new things—and with AML Tranche Two coming on next year, there will be a lot of work to be done—how do you approach an agency that has a broad spectrum of digital literacy amongst their staff? How do you embed new platforms into existing businesses?
Lara: I often refer to the fact that there’s fatigue in the industry. For real estate agents, there are so many options out there in terms of all the tech tools that are available and it can almost be quite overwhelming trying to navigate your way through, looking at them all.
Doing assessments, and for many, they may not know what they don’t know. And nor do we—we are learning too. We’re all in this together because there’s so many emerging new techs that we’re constantly having to learn about and keep pace with. I do think though it’s a matter for each business to work out, “What do we need to comply with?”
Really take the time to understand what legislative changes may be coming into place, and then understand what your role in that needs to be to reach compliance. And then assess what options are out there in the market—different things will appeal to different businesses from different tech tools that are out there.
But try to think about what do I really need, what’s going to work for my business? What’s easy for them to understand, to use, because a lot of the success of these tech tools being successful within a business is the internal adoption. So lean into your staff’s early adopters that embrace new tech and get them to be your internal advocates and help your staff internally. And that rubs off on everyone—they can help do the training and get them to understand the benefits by working together. And then obviously those benefits then also impact your customers.
All agencies need to be doing that these days to remain competitive, and be seen to be innovative because I think we have a much more sophisticated level of customers and clients out there now who themselves are looking into technology and wanting agencies and their local real estate agents to be embracing it too.
Rob: Well said. And there you have it folks. Here we have Livesign. Built up here in Australia, taking on the big guns around the world, the likes of DocuSign, trusted as PEXA’s partner, trusted by REISA to be the partner for REISA Master Forms as the AML requirements start really coming out. We’ll see, I’m sure, Livesign be front and center. Thank you for your time today, Lara. Really appreciate your perspectives on this important subject.
Lara: Thank you so much, Rob, for having me and viewers as well.
Note: This transcript has been edited for clarity.
