Overview

The Imago Front Office includes Imago Illustrations, Imago Reviews and Imago Advisor Tools (IIIR). IIIR has a web based user interface allowing flexible usage to call centres, advisers and clients alike. IIIR can work online or offline. IIIR can be integrated into portals and aggregators as a calculation engine solution that is integrated through messaging architectures.

Imago Illustrations is a browser based platform for delivering new business illustrations, quotations and projections for pensions and investment products. Used throughout industry, Imago Illustrations is a truly flexible and scalable solution for delivering pre and post sales illustrations.

It can be delivered to provide single product or multi product consolidated illustrations across a collection of different asset classes. It is highly configurable, enabling you to create and model your own products. The platform supports both single and group / corporate business. All product parameters, validations and calculation rules are fully configurable

IIIR consists of four distinct components:
1. Web based user interface,
2. Calculation engine,
3. Product definition, validation and database
4. Reporting .

The web enabled user interface supports:
• Acess to external users via the web
• Wizard driven illustrations to assist the adviser on the required details
• Easy deployment on one server
• Easy ‘look and feel’ changes through style sheets
• Web services to get data from third party systems
• Single sign on functionality to easily integrate it into other web sites and portals
• Support for Windows and Active Directory authentication
• Flexible user security based on the user group, available products and advisers
• Configurable product, charge and investment options

The calculation engine supports:
• Calls by external systems and third party systems, such as administration systems or batch processes
• Projection figures calculated on a month by month basis
• Parallel processing
• Multi-threaded use
• Ability to add custom calculation handles into particular calculations

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

The product definition, validation and database supports:
• Product set up – multiple product wrappers are support
• Rules definitions
• Projection definitions
• Asset class groupings
• Risk profiling
• Model portfolio setup
• User and security management
• Performance monitoring
• Clustering to increase capacity

The reporting service supports:
• Generation of PDF files that are saved to the file store
• Illustration types
o Pre-sales, new business
o Post-sale, new business
o Top up, existing business i.e. change of contributions or fund re-alignment
o Review, existing business, annual projections
o Ad-hoc, existing business
o SMPI, existing business
o USP to USP transfers, existing business
o ASP illustrations, new business
o Forward basis support
o Backward basis support through “goal seek capability”.
o Re-run, illustrations can be re-run at any time showing the inputs at the time of original entry
o Save, recall, amend, copy, rerun facilities
o Integration into host administration system for the provision of policy valuations. This can be driven from the Administration platform through a “push” approach or can be initiated through IIIR through a “pull approach.

• Output to be distributed through Windows print services, such as printer, fax, XPS document, XML, or any other document format that is supported under Windows
• Ability to easily change and update illustrations
• Illustrations showing complex tables and charging structures
• conditional text and figures based the ability for customers to support their own illustrations
• MI reporting

Drawdown and at retirement scenario planning - drawdown illustrations across complex investment scenarios are a key feature of the system. It is designed to produce illustrations for:
+ Full Drawdown
+ Phased Drawdown
+ Part Drawdown
+ Pre-Retirement (accumulation)

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.

Features

Analysis - hand in hand with our Advisor Tools, Imago Illustrations provides and analysis tool. For instance, analyse your illustrations at the click of a button, 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.

ASP – ASP are supported

Charting – Imago is able 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 - Imago allows the user to enter multiple contributions both single and regular with different payment frequencies and tax free cash percentages.

Critical Yield – Imago supports Type A and Type B.

Funds and fund charges - Imago allows you to configure the 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

Goal Seek – instead of specifying contribution levels, Imago enables the specification of retirement income goals, Imago then works out the contribution strategy.

Integrated User Interface – the current version brings together all of the Dunstan Thomas front office products, including Illustrations, Reviews and Advisor tools and presents them as an integrated platform for pensions and investments professionals.

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.

Other - Civil Partnerships become a valid marital status. Respective
adjustments to annuity calculations will be made.

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 charges and administration charges - Imago is capable 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.

Projections - Imago provides projections of benefits, funds etc using standard FSA rates for the current plan value until age 75 (or the chosen final annuity or ASP date). The system also shows the affect of inflation on the benefits (i.e. real rates of return as defined in CP134).

Protected rights - Minimum age for Protected Rights reduced to equal that for Non-Protected Rights. New revised GAD tables will provide a uniform basis

Protection - enhanced and primary protection support.

Reports - The illustrations are produced in PDF format. Each illustration has a unique name and is stored on a server 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

Security - The system allows 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 – by using the latest SOA and web service technologies, Imago is better than ever at integrating into your companies back-office systems.

Test Harness - Imago has over 200 different  test cases running different scenarios. These can be delivered automatically through 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.

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.

Technology

Architecture - High level of architecture independence. Component based design (allows integration into internal / external systems - use your annuity calculator with your own systems, or plug it into Imago Illustrations and generate tailored annuity rates for increased realism in immediate values / critical yield reporting)
Integrates with legacy database systems

Business services - Imago implements its calculation engine as a separate component from the user interface to enable distributed processing or the ability to utilise the underlying calculation technologies separately (e.g. back-office systems integration).
The Imago Business Services layer has been implemented as a C# based ASP.NET Web Service, using XML based SOAP messages over HTTP to execute all illustration, annuity, projection, lookup, and analysis functions.

Communications - By default, the client web browser uses conventional HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) messages to request and receive pages from the Imago server. Alternatively, these communications could be encrypted and transmitted using a secure (HTTPS) protocol to increase privacy.

Database - SQL Server 2003 by default. Imago has been implemented on a number of other database platforms as well, from non persistent environments, through to text files all the way to Oracle.

Data reuse - data reuse is a achieved through an XML web services interface running over http. The Imago Illustration calculation engine can be called by an external request.

The request will contain:
i) The type of illustration requested.
ii) All data to be used in the calculation of the illustration with the exception of charge definitions
The Imago Illustration service will validate the supplied XML. Pre-population from the incoming message, of data items within the Imago Illustrations UI can then be completed. The user may continue with the completion of the illustration.

The request and response messages that are used in the call of Imago Illustrations will be based upon the corresponding Origo schemas for Quotes/New Business. However, as these schemas are not exhaustive in scope, significant use will be made of the Trading Partner Specific (TPSDATA) elements are used.
 

Inputs - Users can access Imago using a browser. Imago can also be implemented without a Dunstan Thomas UI via portable, XML driven inputs.

Minimum server requirements:
 Hardware
Pentium 4 processor running at 2 GHz or faster
512 MB of RAM or more
At least 10 GB available disc space
(highly recommended) data backup facilities

Software
Microsoft® Windows 2000 Server Service Pack 4 or
Microsoft® Windows Server 2003
Microsoft® SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 4
Microsoft® .NET Framework 1.1

Outputs - PDF report generation.

Presentation layer - The Imago user interface has been constructed as a Microsoft® ASP.NET Web Application consisting of a series of ASP.NET Web Forms and server-side C# program code.

Security - Imago Illustrations is a web based platform with a web services interface. It can be called either as a service or can be initiated through a URL.

Imago Illustration implements four methods for user authorisation, so as to enable integration with as wide a selection of other systems as possible:

• Standard ‘Forms’ authentication
• Single-Sign-On (SSO) using Windows authentication, matching domain user credentials against the Imago data store.
• SSO using web-services to generate authentication tickets, passed as cookies which can be used to integrate with web servers on the same domain (intranet model).
• SSO using web-services to generate authentication tickets, passed within the request string in order to integrate with servers on different domains (internet model)

Imago can be configured to return to a ‘calling’ website after running a quote, optionally passing back a token which can be used to re-create the security context information on the server which generated the original request.

Imago employs Microsoft ASP.NET Forms based user authentication to ensure that only genuine recognised users are able to access the Imago system. Imago stores all user credentials in its database. These credentials must be authenticated before ASP.NET will allow access to any Imago functions. Once a user has been authenticated, ASP.NET will allow client page requests to be processed. From this point on, which pages a user can access is managed by the Imago application. The application functionality (e.g. access to illustration analysis functions) is determined by the properties of the installed Imago licence key. The permissions to access / update specific data are determined by a users attributes as read from the Imago database.