October 2011

Dunstan Thomas helps IFDL to white label its platform technology to large advice firms including Openwork

Platform software provider and retirement planning software specialist Dunstan Thomas has completed a wide-ranging project in which its Imago Back Office and Imago Front Office software has been heavily used within Investment Funds Direct’s (IFDL) technology platform which has now been white labeled and customised for use by some of the largest UK financial advisory firms including Succession, Chartwell, Towergate, Intrinsic and Openwork.

Dunstan Thomas Imago underpins IFDL’s pensions policy administration functionality as well as front office illustrations supporting retirement planning and investment product wrappers. The Ascentric Pension Account (APA) is underpinned by Dunstan Thomas Imago Back Office which provides key parts of its administrative capability. Dunstan Thomas Imago Back Office is a highly configurable pension administration platform designed to handle the most complicated SIPP, group schemes as well as personal pensions.

Denise Gravatt, Head of SIPP Administration, Ascentric, explained why Dunstan Thomas was also selected to support administration of the APA: “Dunstan Thomas won out against 10 other competitor systems because of the comprehensiveness of its pensions administration capability, combined with the company’s clear market knowledge, proactivity and technological flexibility. “We have primarily used Imago’s Transfers In and Workflow modules as well as payroll administration for our APA. Importantly, Imago offers the flexibility to integrate tightly with our own investment platform as well as with its own Imago Front Office Illustrations module to ensure that we can create illustrations for our clients that are fully compliant with new Disclosure rules.”

Dunstan Thomas Front Office, also deployed by both Ascentric and IFDL, enables 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.

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 their services from competitor platforms.

Chris Read, chief executive, Dunstan Thomas commented:
“The fact that our Imago suite sits behind such a significant platform, that has been so widely and successfully white labeled and deployed to large adviser-bases, illustrates that our technology has the flexibility and robustness to be tuned to meet the needs of a large range of platform propositions.

Chris Read added:
“We are seeing an increasing number of 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. As 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.”