Case Studies

Friends Provident - Imago Front and Back Office

Solutions

Dunstan Thomas, a leading provider of technology for the pensions and investments market, has won a contract, to provide systems which will enable Friends Provident to give its New Generation policyholders access to a range of integral income drawdown options as an alternative to standard annuity settlements at maturity.

Augmentation work will also include building Dunstan Thomas’ own Imago Administration, Imago Illustrations and Imago Reviews modules into Friends Provident’s existing New Generation pensions administration platform enabling Friends Provident to offer more flexible functionality in its pensions products.

Christopher Read, Chairman, Dunstan Thomas, commented:
“Friends Provident rightly recognised that it was not necessary to implement a totally new administration platform to cope with the demand from customers for more flexible pensions. With new platform roll outs much of the cost and time is taken up in data migration which can take over a year and costs millions of pounds. We are able to deliver systems with the same functionality for a tenth of the cost and in a quarter of the time through use of some of the latest technology for building software and integration.”

Natanje Holt, Operations Director and leader of this project at Dunstan Thomas, explains:
“We build systems which adhere with a SOA (Services Oriented Architecture) and integrate into ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) environments1. These tools simplify the process of creating and integrating new tools into existing administration platforms.”

“Use of these techniques also makes it possible to support STP (Straight Through Processing) so a Dunstan Thomas-created illustration system at the front-end can push data straight through to Friends Provident’s pensions administration system in the back office, with only one single piece of integration work.”

Advantages

Key advantages of the augmentation approach are:

• Legacy familiarity – there are heavy costs involved in building user acceptance of new administration platforms which can be eliminated by augmenting a system which is already well accepted and efficiently used.
• Reduced time to market – as the market remains competitive, time to market with a new product is becoming a larger issue, administration system augmentations can take a matter of a weeks as opposed to months, making it possible for providers to bring new offerings to market within a much shorter time period.
• Reduced cost – new platforms can cost millions of pounds to create and to gain user acceptance on whereas augmentations can be delivered for a fraction of this cost.
• Extension of life for existing products and technology platforms – increasing the return on investment on legacy platforms.
• Cost reduction of integration – use of the latest technologies reduces cost of integrating legacy with new administration systems considerably and eliminates the often costly and risky process of migrating data from one system to another.

Jeremy Ward, Head of Pensions Marketing, Friends Provident commented:
“A-Day has created an expectation of greater flexibility amongst policyholders which we wanted to respond to quickly. We are delighted to be working with Dunstan Thomas in the development of a new Drawdown proposition which will link into our award winning New Generation administration platform..”