December 2008

Dunstan Thomas extends Imago Back Office to support
SIPPs, SSASs and group schemes - Version 5

Dunstan Thomas, a leading provider of technology for the pensions and investments market, has launched Imago Back Office Version 5. The new version of its market leading Imago Back Office solution offers administrative support for SIPPs, SSASs and group schemes plus property portfolios within these types of pension arrangements. Version 5 now provides an enhanced administration platform for drawdown, annuities and scheme pensions, incorporating automation to improve scalability and process efficiencies. Additional benefits include improved HMRC reporting capability, provision of consolidated views across product and tax wrappers to deliver data aggregation as well as totally integrated workflow across pensions schemes.

Imago Back Office Version 5 is also designed to support and track Third Party Administrators’ (TPA) Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Key Performance Indicators being increasingly demanded of them. This degree of transparency also extends to effective auditing and reporting of SLAs and this evidence could be used to support FSA Treating Customers Fairly (TCF) enquiries. It also offers enhanced automation around the management of external data feeds from fund managers and banks, for example, as the pensions industry strives for Straight Through Processing (STP).

Imago Back Office is unique in that it is built with a model driven services oriented architecture with highly scalable and robust technologies. Imago Back Office is frequently deployed into environments where it augments an existing policy administration and / or investment administration infrastructure. The capability to integrate into other systems is built into the design with extensive use of XML and web services. Version 5 continues this leading edge technology approach with the incorporation of its own document and content management system that also supports high levels of integration with external systems.

Christopher Read, chairman, Dunstan Thomas, commented:
“Version 5 is ideal for administrators and companies running a mixture of retirement products, especially those that are handling larger and larger volumes of transactions and requests which they can no longer support through older SIPP and SSAS administration systems with labour intensive manual processes. The increasing pressure on administrators to report, trace and store key documents means that the market for Imago Back Office is growing rapidly.”