After months of careful development, we gave the green light and our Digital Discharge Service (DDS) went live. It’s already proving a great success with our customers, with over 100 users signing up to the system since launch.

DDS offers a vastly improved service compared with the existing paper-based process. All steps of the discharge, encompassing the activities of solicitors, lenders and RoS, are centralised in a dedicated online portal that’s hosted on our existing online systems. The resulting service is faster, more secure and more efficient.

With DDS, we’ve worked alongside a number of solicitors and lenders on processing actual applications, during which time we were able to gain insightful feedback and make a number of improvements to DDS. The end result is an optimised service that has been developed with users, for users.

It’s been a real pleasure to work alongside these solicitors and lenders, and the feedback throughout beta has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic. All sides of the discharge process have wholeheartedly welcomed DDS, and commented on how the improved functionality and efficiency will markedly improve their regular interactions with RoS and the discharge process. The list of active users continues to grow; these include lenders such as Royal Bank of Scotland and Clydesdale Bank.

DDS has been a great success, but we don’t consider our work to be done. We’ll continue to improve the service based on feedback from customers, to ensure DDS consistently meets their needs. There’s a feedback link within DDS itself – registered users can access it through the eServices portal. Additionally, we’re already thinking about our next projects. We’ve learned a lot during development, which will play a major part as we progress with the rest of the transformation that will see RoS become a digital-first organisation by 2020.

Later this year, we’ll be bringing you news on our next registration project: the digitalisation of securities applications. Like DDS, we’ll be developing this alongside our customers – if you’d like to be involved, please join our user experience panel.

Want to know more? Then simply visit our website – here you’ll find more information on DDS, including the benefits of the service, a list of firms already on-board, and how to sign up.