Marlborough Stirling offers new pensions analysis option

E-commerce experts Marlborough Stirling are offering Thetar, their market-leading pensions transfer value analysis software, as a "free-standing" option for life and pensions providers.

The relaunched package has previously been available only as an integral case-processing element of Protea, the company`s outsourced transfer calculation and administration bureau.

Now Marlborough Stirling say that after investing a substantial amount of resource into the development of the software package they want to make it accessible as a separate, comprehensive product.

Operations manager Tim Lunn says confidence is high that Thetar will become accepted as the industry standard.

"The system is parameterised meaning that our clients will have all the benefits of customisation but not at the expense of core system support", he says.

"They can more readily adopt preferred approaches, and since the core system is standard across all installations they can also share and therefore minimise the cost of development.

"Another important benefit is that we at Marlborough Stirling can make upgrades across the whole client base in much shorter timescales."

Lunn stresses that clients can still benefit from Thetar through Protea, a cost-effective third party service that enables them to have key staff focus on core business.

"But we are always looking for ways of expanding our breadth of services and products, and we now want to offer Thetar as a separate entity while providing all the technical support needed to take it on board."

Thetar produces a fully compliant comparison between the projected benefits from an individual`s existing scheme with those available from a personal pension, including Stakeholder, and Section 32 contracts.

An integrated administration system provides users with the functionality necessary to manage the transfer process.

Widely acknowledged in the pensions transfer market as the most flexible software package available, it has a unique new feature enabling clients to provide sales forces and IFAs with an online critical yield calculator via the Web - an award-winning concept that combines desktop functionality with Internet accessibility.