News - press release

Dunstan Thomas wins contract to enable Friends Provident to offer drawdown

In the press - IFA Online
In the press - Money Marketing

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.”

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..”
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Notes to editors:
1 It is possible to build new functionality into existing systems by implanting systems which adhere with a service oriented architecture (SOA). The Dunstan Thomas pensions administration platform, Imago, has now been re-developed as a SOA solution. This, coupled with integration into Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) environments which are increasingly common in the pensions sector, makes the integration process much easier. ESBs help manage process hand-offs between legacy systems and newer systems which offer greater flexibility and functionality to existing products.

About Dunstan Thomas:
Dunstan Thomas is a pensions administration software and services provider offering a fully integrated range of components under the Imago brand. These components together provide the key back and front office administration tools needed by pension providers, third party administrators and financial advisers. Imago’s front office administration components include Illustrations, Reviews and stochastic models in Adviser Tools. Imago’s back office tools include Administration and Property.


For further information about Dunstan Thomas please contact:
Christopher Read, Chairman
Dunstan Thomas
Tel: 0239 282 2254
Email: cread@dthomas.co.uk

For Dunstan Thomas UK media enquiries please contact:
Miles Clayton/Simon Bennett
Agility PR
Tel: 01438 310 139/5
Email: miles@agilitypr.co.uk
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