The launch of Sympli, an emerging joint venture between ASX Limited and InfoTrack - a wholly owned subsidiary of Australian Technology Innovators Pty Limited - was announced one week ago. The venture has the stated aim of automating the conveyancing process completely from start to finish. If it succeeds, Sympli would become the first fully integrated system of its type in Australia, and steal a march on the rest of the sector, notably PEXA, which relies on InfoTrack for the initial document search processes.Now ratings agency Moody's has released a report on the joint venture."The establishment of the Sympli JV comes amid a shift to electronic settlement, from paper-based settlement, in the Australian conveyancing industry," Moody's said.Most state governments, notably Western Australia, New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria, aim to run 100 per cent electronic settlement transactions by December 2017, July and August 2019, respectively.PEXA, which conducted its first settlement in late 2013, has this year passed a couple of milestones, with "more than $100 billion in property value settled", while in April it said "it has now completed more than one million property transactions, with over half of those transactions occurring in the last ten months."In practical terms Sympli - which can call on InfoTrack and its range of digital property search software - needs to acquire an e-settlement licence for the last stage of the conveyancing process within the next few months. Moody's said this trend towards complete digitisation of the process would further benefit incumbent PEXA, as well as the hopeful challenger, Simpli. And it will come at the expense of service providers "with a large reliance on traditional information brokerage and manual property settlements," such as SAI Global.Another aspect of one-stop shops is that structural changes in "adjacent" sectors, such as payments, will also be hastened.While commentators such as Moody's corporate finance analyst Shawn Xuiong, co-author of the Sympli report, are not calling the end of days for cheque-based settlements, the countdown is well underway."If all the parties that are part of the process agreed to use the digital process [it will be cheque free]'" Xuiong said.Anthony Walsh ,banking and finance partner in the Australian operations of Dentons, the world's largest global law firm by headcount, is already seeing a trend away from cheques towards digital payments."In terms of bank cheques, Dentons has been planning for a digital end-to-end solution for some time, which means that our business (as are many other businesses) are already using nearly half as many bank cheques as we used 12 months ago around property settlements," Walsh said. "This will only decrease further as other digital solutions become available to us and our clients in this space."While old style property settlements using cheques are a sliver of the remaining cheque volume in Australia, banks are forever seeking a means to phase cheques out once and for all.Around 17 million cheques were presented to banks over the three months to March 2018. Annualised, this comes to fewer than 70 million. Over