With its fully digital customer journey that delivers increased efficiency for solicitors, lenders and RoS alike, the Digital Discharge Service (DDS) has been one of the earliest success stories in our digital transformation. It’s been just over a year since its official launch, and we’ve continued to reach new milestones, bring new firms on board and add new features to the service.

20,000 discharges and welcoming another lender

DDS is increasingly becoming the service of choice for discharging standard securities, and its popularity was reflected recently as we reached another big milestone: 20,000 discharges successfully processed.

We’re also delighted to welcome another lender to the service, with Virgin Money joining in late June. They’re in the top ten of lenders in terms of discharge volumes, so it’s great to see them joining the likes of Lloyds Banking Group, RBS and Clydesdale Bank in using DDS.

Avoiding duplicate requests

Our latest update helps prevent users from creating duplicate discharge requests. If a user now tries to create a new application for a security that already has one active, they’ll receive a pop-up alert like the one below, advising it’s a duplicate.

With this new feature, DDS now catches all instances of duplicated applications, and also stops a user from progressing with a duplicate application without deleting the first one.

New record locking feature

We’ve also introduced a new feature during the approval of the discharge, based on customer feedback. DDS now has a record locking feature that prevents more than one user working on the same discharge at the same time, to avoid duplication of effort within an organisation.

With the new feature, when lenders access their approval queue, all requests currently being worked on by other users in the organisation will be shown as locked. The ‘Approve’ and ‘Decline’ buttons will not be visible for a locked request, which prevents another user from viewing, approving or declining the request.

With the locking feature, a request will remain locked until:

• It’s approved or declined
• The user navigates back to the approval queue without completing the process
• The approval process isn’t completed within three hours

When this happens, the request is immediately unlocked and can be accessed by other users.

Daily summary page

Another new feature for lenders you may have noticed is the Daily Summary page. It’s been created around user feedback too, and is designed to assist in the daily management of discharges. It’s a personalised summary of your Approval Queue, allowing you to see how many discharge requests are outstanding, and on what day they were received.

 Find out more

To learn more about DDS, visit our website.