News - Press Release

April 2009

Dunstan Thomas wins Hargreave Hale contract for new outsourced pensions administration service

Demand for outsourced pensions administration accelerates as corporate SIPP market expands

Pensions administration solutions provider Dunstan Thomas, has secured an important new contract with leading stockbroker Hargreave Hale Limited for its new outsourced pensions administration service. Hargreave Hale will pass new SIPP client administration and employee benefits administration (including integration with payroll systems) for these policies to Dunstan Thomas. The service will go live later this summer.

Dunstan Thomas has already built a highly successful outsourced administration service for property management and provides bureau services for pensions and investment illustrations for its Imago Front Office and is now extending this Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) model into its core Imago Back Office administration platform.

Dunstan Thomas is supporting its expanding outsourced pensions administration service portfolio with a team of pensions administrators who are being recruited to work in its headquarters in Portsmouth, in anticipation of significant uptake of these services.

Chris Read, chairman, Dunstan Thomas explains the specialist outsourcing trend:

We are seeing some new entrant players as well as larger, more established pensions providers with sizeable SIPP books looking hard at outsourcing pensions administration tasks to specialists like Dunstan Thomas. Some want to use our service to move fast; others are recognising their strengths and looking to outsource what is not core; some others just want to de-risk the administration of more complex pension plans.

In a survey of leading pensions providers and administrators, commissioned by Dunstan Thomas in February 2008, some 63 per cent of the sample of 183 firms questioned said they were already outsourcing administrative tasks linked to property management in SIPPs; 37 per cent outsource SIPP investment management and the same number also outsource annuity administration. A quarter of the market still outsource the entire administration process around SIPPs and the same number (25 per cent) are also looking for suppliers for payroll administration linked to corporate SIPPs. Ten per cent of the provider community sees strategic outsourcing as the key route to growth this year.

Dunstan Thomas offers a comprehensive family of pensions administration software modules under its Imago product brand which together provide all the necessary functionality designed to enable pension policy holders to make better informed choices about their long-term investments, while enabling providers and administrators to lay out this information in a clear, concise, compliant way in order to meet the needs of all relevant parties.