Co-operative Insurance Society (CIS) has developed an online
stakeholder pension service in a multi-million pound implementation
based on pension administration software from Marlborough
Stirling.
The 10-month implementation, worth £3m, allowed CIS to accept
stakeholder pension applications from the new pension's launch date
last month.
While many pension giants have chosen to develop stakeholder
systems in-house, CIS said it was cheaper and more efficient to
develop a stakeholder pension based on a product from a
supplier.
CIS used Marlborough Stirling's pensions administration system,
Lamada, to handle stakeholder pension applications and queries
through its Web site and call centre.
The software package also includes a calculation engine to ensure
consistent calculations across the stakeholder service.
With strict limits placed on stakeholder charges, pension providers
are keen to use the Web to cut administration costs and avoid
crippling overheads
Under government regulations pension companies can only charge
customers a maximum of 1% of the total value of the stakeholder
funds' total value.
Steve Fox, life and pensions new business administration manager at
CIS, said, "We went with the Marlborough Stirling package because
it had a lot of established life and pensions functionality and we
felt that it was a more cost-effective solution to go
externally."
A number of other pension providers, including Clerical Medical,
are using the Marlborough Stirling system for stakeholder services
according to Fox.
He added, however, that the CIS stakeholder offering was still able
to offer different functionality to rivals using the same
software.
"Stakeholder is a generic type of product. In Lamada there is a lot
of core functionality, such as administration and investment
processing," Fox said.
The CIS stakeholder service required more than 20 interfaces
between existing CIS IT systems and the new pension system.
Marlborough Stirling developed one of the key interfaces for
uploading customer application details from the Web site and sales
force laptops to back-office systems.
The remaining interfaces - mainly overnight and batch-based - were
developed in-house by CIS.
"We did most of the integration with our existing systems. We
identified a number of areas which required customisation on taking
the [Marlborough Stirling] package. However we tried to limit the
amount of customisation," added Fox.
Nick Huber
nick.huber@rbi.co.uk