Nationwide Building Society has partnered with Experian to automate the checks needed to verify income for mortgage applications.

The building society is using the credit agency’s income and employment verification service to digitally confirm declared income for homebuyers, removing the need for applicants to provide manual income proofs, like copies of their payslips.

Henry Jordan, Nationwide director of home said that the move is an important step for the company's mortgage application process.

“Removing the need to provide proofs and introducing automated verifications will make it quicker for brokers and customers to move from a decision in principle to getting an instant offer," he continued.

Paul Speirs, managing director, consumer information services at Experian UK&I said that it has worked closely with Nationwide for over two years on the project, developing a full payslip categorisation capability so data can be managed consistently.

The move comes after Nationwide joined the Open Property Data Association (OPDA) in July.

The OPDA aims to improve the homebuying process by sharing digital property information across the mortgage market. It implements open data standards and encourages data sharing across the property industry through the use of open source tools.

Homebuying current takes an average of 22 weeks to reach the completion stage, with less than one per cent of property information available digitally.

The OPDA claims that those using its data standards for digital property packs have seen time reduced from mortgage offer and purchase accepted to exchange of contracts within 15 days.

Several other UK financial institutions have recently joined the Association including NatWest, which announced its membership in September, HSBC, which joined in August, and Lloyds Banking Group, which signed up in March.

The organisation is also calling on the government to deliver digitised property data at source which includes information from the land registry, planning permissions, building safety, and local authority searches.

---