SignFast is not an ordinary brief but a partnership: we are building the platform together with people from the sector itself. It is aimed at estate agencies that draw up sale agreements and have to work with notaries, buyers and sellers to get them done. That is the heaviest piece of admin in a sale, and the point at which a file most often stalls.

The challenge

Every agreement started from scratch. Names, addresses, amounts and clauses were retyped by hand from a stack of documents that was rarely complete: title deeds, energy certificates, soil certificates, land registry extracts, proof of identity. Slow work, and work where a typing error has legal consequences.

Then came the second problem. The draft went to the notary as an attachment, came back with comments in a different document, and went out again. Attachments went astray, versions ran into one another and deadlines slipped. Buyer and seller were meanwhile ringing the agent, because they could see nothing at all.

Our approach

We started with the documents themselves. Drop a file into the case and you do not have to say what it is: the system recognises forty document types used in Belgian property sales and pulls out what the agreement needs. And that is where it stops. The agreement itself is assembled from fixed templates, and the agent confirms or corrects every field. A document people put their name to should not contain wording nobody wrote.

Around that file we put every party. The notary responds clause by clause rather than by email, with a version history and a clear approval step. Buyer and seller get a page of their own with a checklist and upload their documents there. Signing is digital and legally binding.

The result

What used to be retyping is now confirming what is already filled in. And the back and forth is gone: the notary's comments sit with the clause they are about rather than in yet another attachment, buyer and seller can see how far along the file is, and the question of which version is the latest no longer comes up. If a required document is missing, the agency knows before the notary does.

Where it goes from here

Three agencies are using it today. The platform is not publicly available yet: we are building it out around what those agencies run into daily, working towards a wider launch.