Annalese Walmsley: Killing the Frankenstein Stack, One Workflow at a Time

In this episode of The Viking Chats, Kristjan Byfield is joined by Annalese Walmsley, Sales Director at Kotini, to explore one of the most overlooked parts of the property journey: onboarding.

While much of the UK’s PropTech conversation focuses on portals, valuations and back-office automation, onboarding - that crucial first stage where ID checks, AML, forms, PIQs and more collide - is often held together by digital duct tape. A PDF here. A link there. A dashboard somewhere else. Annalese calls it a Frankenstein tech stack.

And it’s killing agent efficiency, client confidence, and operational clarity.

In this frank, funny and fiercely insightful conversation, Annalese unpacks the chaos that agents, property managers and sales teams are forced to navigate daily - and offers a smarter, joined-up vision of how onboarding can/should work. If you’ve ever lost hours chasing signatures, onboarding vendors manually, or juggling third-party tools that don’t speak to each other, this episode is for you.

🧠 What You’ll Learn in This Episode

✅ Why current onboarding processes are broken - and what it’s costing you
From AML checks to PIQs and document chasing, most agencies are wasting huge amounts of time and energy just trying to get properties or applicants through the door. Annalese breaks down how this fragmented approach is not only inefficient but also creates stress for staff and confusion for clients.

✅ The power of a unified, white-labelled experience
With Kotini, Annalese and her team have created a clean, branded, CRM-integrated onboarding flow that reduces friction, speeds up time-to-market and boosts conversion. She explains how this isn’t just a tech solution - it’s a brand & business enabler.

✅ How smart onboarding supports better compliance and client trust
Gone are the days when compliance was a tick-box exercise. With increasing regulatory scrutiny and client expectations, having a transparent, auditable and user-friendly onboarding journey can mean the difference between a smooth instruction and reputational risk.

✅ Why monetising onboarding isn’t taboo - it’s strategic
Annalese shares how Kotini enables agents to charge onboarding fees in a transparent, value-led way - often turning a compliance headache into a new revenue stream. It’s about delivering service worth paying for!

✅ The leadership lessons behind building Kotini
We also explore Annalese’s career journey - from her early days in frontline agency roles to scaling with FlatFair and now leading sales and strategy at Kotini. Her take on building culture, trusting people, and navigating the messy middle of PropTech growth is pure gold for business owners and department heads alike.

🔍 Why This Episode Matters

Letting and estate agents are under pressure: to do more, with less time, under tighter compliance requirements - all while delivering exceptional service.

But service starts with systems.

If your first customer touchpoint is slow, fragmented or confusing, what does that say about the rest of the journey? In contrast, a smooth onboarding experience sets the tone for trust, efficiency, and partnership.

Annalese’s approach - and Kotini’s product - prove that with the right tools, agents can reclaim hours, boost professionalism, and even unlock new revenue opportunities, all while delivering a better experience for vendors, tenants, landlords and buyers.

🎧 Who Should Listen

• Letting agents and sales teams frustrated by slow onboarding
• Branch managers trying to improve team efficiency
• Ops directors and compliance leads juggling too many systems
• PropTech lovers looking for smart, practical tools that actually work