Features

Automating Land Registration in Denmark

2010 Chairman's Award Recipient

After using a paper-based land registry system in Denmark for more 450 years it was time to digitize the process.

Under the Danish Ministry of Justice, the Land Registry Court administers the registration of rights on all properties in Denmark, covering such things as ownership, deeds, easements, and mortgages. The system was time consuming, averaging two weeks processing time; managed a high volume (more than five million cases per year); and maintained an archive of 80 million paper documents. The information in the land registry books is legally binding and the Government of Denmark is liable and accountable for any mistakes.

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The objectives of the project were to modernize and improve efficiency by digitizing 100 percent of the process, automating 60-70 percent of the process within five years, reducing costs, and improving consistency. A CSC team, lead by Ulle Tonne Bech, Hans Jayatissa , Henrik Korsbæk and Claus Ljunggren, developed eTL, the Danish digital land registry system.

The system is an important part of a large IT ecosystem that supports the property sales and mortgage sector in Denmark. It is integrated with a large number of public systems, including the Danish PKI infrastructure to handle authentication and legal signatures. Based on an event-driven service-oriented architecture, the system uses secure Web services for its internal and external portals to address the needs of its various stakeholders, including caseworkers, citizens, and financial institutions.

CSC developers kept the architecture design simple, creating a system that was easy to deploy and maintain. eTL is built almost entirely on open source technologies on the Java/JEE platform using Oracle application server and database. Through agile principles and a test driven approach, the team have ensured a constant high quality of the produced code.

The workhorse of the eTL solution is its core engine, which handles legal decisions for 80 different types of cases, each of which had its own paper-based process.

Deployed on September 8, 2009, eTL has successfully met the project’s outlined objectives.

With eTL’s automation, self-service features and reduced process time (many cases are decided in milliseconds), Danish citizens are able to register rights on properties themselves and avoid costly lawyers’ fees and the need for interim financing. With online access to a single source of land registry information, citizens can also subscribe to the system to track a specific property.

The eTL system is a core part of the property sales and mortgage sector in Denmark. To take advantage of eTL, the Danish financial sector created a central hub, e-Nettet, to handle land registration data shared by the banks and eTL. eTL has enabled the financial sector, like Danish citizens, to be more self-sufficient, taking over certain work previously done by lawyers.

With the eTL project, the Danish government has made a tremendous breakthrough in its global digitization strategy and has vastly improved service for its citizens.