Overview

Imago Front Office is a flexible and scalable solution for delivering illustrations and reporting solutions to meet the unique needs of product providers, platforms and advisers for the pensions and savings market.

Imago Front Office is built on a service oriented architecture providing a common calculations and quotations engine to deliver robust and scalable illustration capabilities for the provision of advice, product analysis and cost comparisons, illustrations, reviews and SMPI reports.

Imago Front Office supports illustration solutions for SIPP, SSAS, grou,p personal pensions, bonds, ISA's, and general investment accounts.

Analysis

Imago Front Office is an analysis tool allowing illustrations to be re-modelled, to view information on charges, income, fund growth, effect-of-deductions, lifetime allowance and more. You can manipulate or 'tweak' your illustration basis to instantly see the effect it will have on your pension arrangement - see how taking a smaller income, retiring later or deferring for instance going into drawdown will affect your fund.

Annuities

Support for annuity calculations.

Application forms

Supports for on-line self-servicing in both Imago Front Office and Imago Back Office operations. Imago has a number of online application forms that are customised for individual clients. Online application forms are then supported by a straight through processing capability to deliver data into Imago Back Office and other administration systems.

Calculation Engine

Imago Front Office calculations are delivered with a web services architecture. This means Imago Front Office can be tightly integrated into host systems. The request and response messages that are used in the call of Imago Front Office are based upon ORIGO schemas for Quotes/New Business. However, as these schemas are not exhaustive in scope, significant use is made of the Trading Partner Specific (TPSDATA) elements. Additional integration points can be created in the user interface to collect member data, fund section and fund charges via web service calls.

Charting

Ability to display calculation results in a richer, more visual way than ever before. Web based graphics enable bar and column graphs, pie charts and line graphs to much more quickly and easily convey your clients illustration information.

Contributions

Enables user to enter multiple contributions both single and regular with different payment frequencies and tax free cash  (PCLS) percentages.

Contributions Level

The contributions level calculator enables analysis of lifetime allowance and contribution levels to reach a required income level. To establish result sets, physical contributions can be inputted either as a percentage of salary or as a specific amount, together with employer’s contribution. Other parameters can be inputted including projections for annuity values and interest rate growth based on changing market conditions. Tax relief on contributions can also be applied. The tool ensures that minimum contributions based on income level have been met or exceeded. The calculator offers the flexibility to cope with monthly, quarterly as well as annual contributions and escalating contributions as desired. The tool calculates required contributions based on delivering a specific income through an annuity or draw-down of tax free cash lump sums.

Critical Yield

Supports for Type A and Type B.

Drawdown

Support for Capped Drawdown and Flexible Drawdown.

Drawdown Income Level

The drawdown income calculator enables checks that any change in a client’s income requirements still remain within the limits set down by HMRC.

Funds and fund charges

Enables the configuring of funds you use and any associated management charges. The user can select the funds the member would like to invest in and allocate a percentage to each fund as well as modify the charges for the fund/investment. Imago Front Office also supports fund-specific growth rates where needed, and funds can be logically grouped together to allow for easier selection when creating quotes. Fund definitions (including associated charges) can be easily exported and imported by system administrators to allow for configurations to be easily moved from a test to live environment.

Goal Seek

Instead of specifying contribution levels, Imago enables the specification of retirement income goals, Imago then works out the contribution strategy.

Integration

Integration is enabled via Web services to the presentation or business services layers. For instance the presentation layer allows for single sign on via external systems, and methods on the business services layer allow the calculation engine to receive messages from external systems and the reporting engine to receive web calls from external calculation engines.

Lifetime Allowance

The lifetime allowance calculator provides calculations of fund values, taking into contribution decisions and comparing it against the projected lifetime allowance.

Member search facility

A search facility allows the user to find an existing member using his/her name or/and surname. This provides quick access especially when the system is data intensive.

MI Reporting

An integrated management information reporting facility.

Output

Output from the calculation engine can be delivered as a PDF or a full set of results from the calculation process can be delivered as an XML message or Excel file.

Product Analysis Tools

Imago Front Office provides a solution for product cost comparisons. The Reduction In Yield (RIY Plus)calculator was initially designed to support advisers in the process of moving legacy assets into higher performing, more versatile and diverse pensions offerings, and specifically to help them migrate legacy assets onto the most suitable platform. RIY Plus also supports providers in enabling them to monitor RIYs on their products against competitor offerings. In addition, providers are using Dunstan Thomas’ tool to run RIY checks before stimulating customers on their legacy products to migrate to newer and more attractive pensions offerings.

The calculator works by conducting a ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ facts-based calculation of the costs of different but comparable schemes. Once the calculation has been carried out the tool is able to generate a suitability letter for presentation to the client.

Product charges and administration charges

Capability  of utilising a wide range of investment types each with their own distinct charging structures. You can add as many or few charges as is required to define your product. Charges can be predefined with a default amount which can be modified on a quote by quote basis, or configured in a tiered structure. Charges can be set up to be applied either as an amount or a percentage of the plan value at the time of deduction. The frequency and timing of applying them can also be changed. This means you can have initial charges, monthly, annually, in arrears or in advance. Product definitions (including associated charges) can be easily exported and imported by system administrators to allow for configurations to be easily moved from a test to live environments.

Projections

Provides projections of benefits, funds etc using FSA rates as well as rates set to model the performance of a specific asset class.

Projections Analysis

Together with the contribution levels calculator, the Imago Front Office projections analysis tool illustrations, by providing an environment where illustration parameters can be adjusted to meet different needs.

Protected rights

Support for Protected Rights and Non-Protected Rights.

Protection

Enhanced, primary and fixed protection support.

Reports

The illustrations are produced in PDF format. Each illustration has a unique name and is stored for future auditing and reference.

• Point of Sale illustrations
• Production of acceptance letters
• Production of post-sales Key Features Documents (KFDs)
• Customer requests for projected (what if) policy values

Result sets from the calculation process can be used either for further analysis such as graphing or can be integrated into other platforms to provide a constituent element of a straight through processing solution.

Illustration types include the following:

• Pre-sales, new business
• Post-sale, new business
• Top up, existing business i.e. change of contributions or fund re-alignment
• Review, existing business, annual projections
• Ad-hoc, existing business
• SMPI, existing business
• Flexible drawdown illustrations
• Capped Drawdown illustrations
• Backward basis support through “goal seek capability”.
• Re-run, illustrations can be re-run at any time showing the inputs at the time of original entry
• Save, recall, amend, copy, rerun facilities
• Integration into host administration system for the provision of policy valuations. This can be driven from the Imago Back Office through a “push” approach or can be initiated through Imago
• Front Office through a “pull approach.
• Imago Front Office has a web based user interface allowing flexible usage to call centres, advisers and clients alike.
• Imago Front Office can be integrated into portals and aggregators as a calculation engine solution that is integrated through messaging architectures.
  

RDR

Commitment to suppoert new disclosure requirements for RDR.

Reviewsa>

Imago Front Office provides exisitng business review capabilities as part of Imago Back Office or as a stand-alone function that can be used as part of a third party administration system. Features inclcude:

• Annual allowance checks
• Lifetime allowance checks
• SMPI reports
• Review reports
• Drawdown (USP)  to drawdown transfers

Security

Enables  an administrator to add, modify and delete individual user accounts. Each user logs in to the system by providing a unique username and password. Only registered users will have access to the system providing security to the application.

Single sign on

The platform has a configurable single sign on capability for integration into portals and web sites.

Straight through Processing

Imago Front Office supports web services to provide interfaces to other systems. The constituent components of Imago Front Office can be de-coupled to give a truly integrated solution. For instance, the underlying calculation engine is serviced through a web services interface which means that it can easily be integrated to other environments such as adviser and corporate extranets

Tax Free Cash

he tax free cash calculator provides comparisons of USP arrangements, comparing full versus phased drawdown, including the supportable levels of income and the relative tax-efficiency of each income vehicle.

Test Harness

Imago has over 500 different  test cases running different scenarios. These can be delivered automatically through the Imago calculation engine for verification and compliance purposes. It facilitates the input of predefined test data into the calculations engine so the resulting data can be easily compared against a set of predefined expected results.

Tools

• Annuities calculator - enables the calculation of future annuity rates using the latest FSA mortality basis.
• Contributions levels calculator - Enables the analysis of contributions levels so that they remain below lifetime allowances, achieve a fund of a certain amount, or assessing the most appropriate contributions level for the level of income required.
• Drawdown income level calculator  - enables income levels to be modelled.
• Lifetime allowance calculator - enables lifetiem allowance limits to be modelled  with contribution levels and fund valuation adjustments.
• Projections analysis calculator - enables  charges, income, fund growth, effect-of-deductions, lifetime allowance and more to be modelled to provide what-if analysis.
• Tax free cash analysis - examine the merits of full versus phased drawdown, including the supportable levels of income and the relative tax-efficiency of each income vehicle.

Imago has a set of adviser and consumer facing tools to provide support in advice. These include:

• On-line application forms
• Cost comparison tools
• Risk profiling and asset allocation
• Stochastic modelling tool
• Maximum income requirement tools
• Level V Escalating Annuity tool
• Cost of delay tool
• Contribution levels calculator
• Quick quotes for consumer usage
  

Validation

Imago validates user input values as data is entered and as users navigate between screens. Additional validation is performed before a quote is calculated.

Users and Security

With the ability to group Imago users and hide quotes created by one group from another, coupled with the ability to assign different levels of authority to change data, Imago can be deployed centrally whilst still being able to service all of the differing requirements of your separate (internal or external) business areas.

White labelling

Imago Front Office supports web services to provide interfaces to other systems. The constituent components of Imago Front Office can be de-coupled to give a truly integrated solution. For instance, the underlying calculation engine is serviced through a web services interface which means that it can easily be integrated to other environments such as adviser and corporate extranets.