News - Press Release

May 2009

Ascentric selects Dunstan Thomas to help expand its product range and service offering

Dunstan Thomas, the pensions and investment administration solutions provider, has integrated its Imago Front Office and Imago Back Office software into both Ascentric’s investment administration and core wrap platform. Ascentric launched its own SIPP, Ascentric Pension Account, earlier this month.

Dunstan Thomas Front Office supports all four stages of financial advice from fact find through to completion, submission and review for the purposes of re-balancing portfolios.

Imago Back Office provides great flexibility for retirement options such as drawdown with a fully integrated and automated payroll. It also enables the provision of consolidated views across product and tax wrappers to deliver data aggregation as well as totally integrated workflow across pensions schemes.

Imago’s double entry accounting module allows for automatic reconciliation saving time and delivers up-to-date cash positions to be available to clients. It also enables the level of transparency required to support FSA Treating Customers Fairly (TCF) enquiries. Both solutions offering will be managed and supported remotely by Dunstan Thomas in this pioneering Sofware as a Service (SaaS) deal for the UK software and consultancy firm.

Dunstan Thomas’ use of such a mature and full functioning set of tools, together with the very latest web services technology and software development techniques, enables its customers to move quickly and cost effectively to introduce new offerings to differentiate its services from competitor platforms.

Dominic Ventham, head of marketing, Ascentric, said:
“The launch of the Ascentric Pension Account supports our primary aim of giving IFAs and their clients the widest possible selection of products to choose from. Our use of Dunstan Thomas technology marries a simple, low cost SIPP with a market leading web service giving IFAs more reasons to place pensions business with us.”

Chris Read, chairman, Dunstan Thomas added:
“We are seeing an increasing number of wrap platform providers coming to us to help them: to expand their range of tax wrappers; to underpin in-house product offerings; and to extend their service offerings this year. As wrap platforms increase their assets under management and move into strong profitability we will see an increase in the deployment of our tools as they look to fill out their service and product portfolios.”