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# More than one million buyers and giftors have now used Thirdfort to verify their source of funds

Published July 28, 2026

![The phrase "1 million and counting" is displayed on a dark background with scattered gold coins..](/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fa.storyblok.com%2Ff%2F171201%2F904x403%2Fb07aee90e2%2F1-million-and-counting-1.png&w=3840&q=75)

Since launching our Source of Funds feature in 2019, we’ve helped verify the funds over one million, buyers, sellers and giftors across the UK. Source of Funds is now part of Thirdfort’s Client Due Diligence Platform, replacing the slow back-and-forth of emailing bank statements and chasing explanations, with a single flow that your client completes on their phone.

Let’s take a look at what this huge amount of data tells us about how people are buying, selling and transacting property in the UK, where funds are coming from and where the risk is.

## How Thirdfort Source of funds works

Buyers and giftors work through a questionnaire and answer relevant questions, based on their situation and previous answers. The app captures how they are funding the purchase, whether that is a mortgage, savings, a gift, an inheritance, rent, dividends or something less common like cryptocurrency. They are then prompted for documentary evidence to support what they have told us, and asked to connect their bank account via open banking so their statement data can be reviewed directly.

If they can’t use open banking, we use machine reading to extract the transaction data itself, whether a buyer uploads a PDF export or a photograph of a paper statement. Deposit amounts, dates, and the accounts funds are moving between all get pulled out automatically. That is what lets your team see the pattern in a client's finances instead of scrolling through pages of statements looking for one, and it is what has let us build a data set at this scale in the first place.

With more than one million verifications behind us, three things stood out.

### Overseas funds keep to five familiar addresses

Around 1 in 10 buyers (9.71%) are using funds originating overseas to fund all or part of their purchase. The five most common source countries are:

1. India
2. USA
3. Hong Kong
4. Italy
5. China.

We looked at this same question two years ago, and the picture is largely consistent. Most of the same jurisdictions still appear, in a similar order. The one real change is that China has moved into the top five, taking the place France held previously.

We also track funds coming from jurisdictions on the Financial Action Task Force's (FATF) lists of High-Risk Jurisdictions subject to a Call for Action, and Jurisdictions under Increased Monitoring. Narrowing the data to just those countries, the five most common are:

1. Bulgaria
2. Kuwait
3. Kenya
4. Iran
5. Monaco.

![World map highlighting top overseas fund source countries in green and high-risk jurisdictions in orange.](/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fa.storyblok.com%2Ff%2F171201%2F1920x993%2Ff154d53a7b%2Fsof-1million-regions.png&w=3840&q=75)It is worth being clear about scale here: funds from these jurisdictions make up a tiny fraction of the overseas total, and funds from overseas are not in themselves a sign of anything wrong. But it does point to the fact that conveyancers are commonly needing to trace money across jurisdictions.

### Cash and alternative currencies: cash is easing off, crypto never took off

Cash use in society is declining, but it has not disappeared from property transactions. 9% of buyers have made more than 10 cash deposits into the account funding their purchase in the past six months, and 8% have a median deposit value in excess of £500\. For conveyancers, that is exactly the pattern that means a conversation with the client: understanding why cash is going into an account frequently and sometimes in large amounts, is part of the job.

However, the trend is moving in a reassuring direction. High cash deposits, meaning a median deposit over £500, have fallen steadily: 9.47% of Source of funds verifications met that threshold in 2023, 9.52% in 2024, 7.54% in 2025, and 6.99% so far in 2026\. Frequent cash deposits, more than 10 in six months, have stayed considerably more stable across the same period, which tells us the habit of depositing cash regularly is proving stickier than the habit of depositing large amounts of it.

![A bar chart with stacks of coins shows cash deposit percentages from 2023 to 2026: 9.47%, 9.52%, 7.54%, and 6.99% respectively.](/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fa.storyblok.com%2Ff%2F171201%2F1920x1080%2Fe89cef4afe%2Fsof-1million-cash.png&w=3840&q=75)Cryptocurrency, meanwhile, is having a limited impact. About 0.1% of buyers and giftors have funds coming from cryptocurrency, and that figure has held steady since 2024\. Whatever the headlines suggest about crypto's growing role in personal finance, it is not showing up in how people are funding property purchases.

### Gifts are the norm, not the exception

Since we started tracking this in 2023, the proportion of transactions involving a gift has risen every single year. It was 19.65% in 2023, 20.05% in 2024 climbed to 21.02% in 2025, and so far in 2026 it sits at 22.32%.

![Graph with gift-shaped bars representing transaction percentages from 2023 to 2026, showing an increase from 19.65% to 22.32%.](/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fa.storyblok.com%2Ff%2F171201%2F1920x1080%2F0e984141fb%2Fsof-1million-gifts-alt2.png&w=3840&q=75)That steady climb matters because of the additional work this creates. Work that, rightly, many conveyancers charge for. Bringing a giftor into a transaction means bringing them through the same identity and source of funds verification as the buyer, so their money gets the same scrutiny. As gifted deposits increase, so does the volume of giftors who need verifying alongside the buyers they are supporting.

## What a million verifications add up to

Our data points to a market where most buyers are funding a purchase in ordinary, explainable ways, and a smaller, identifiable set of transactions that cause the biggest headaches: money crossing borders, cash moving in patterns worth understanding and more gifts arriving.

We are glad to have reached this milestone with the buyers, giftors and firms who got us here, and we’ll continue to bring you insights about the next million.

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