Finance firm speeds up pensions process

Online portal for advisers boosts Friends Provident sales

Financial services company Friends Provident has increased the market share of its Individual Personal Pension products following the launch of a £1.2m application processing system.

The company has worked with Indian IT offshoring firm Wipro to develop a web portal for independent financial advisers (IFAs) and has overhauled back-end systems to automate the processing of pensions applications.

Rather than completing application forms by hand, staff at IFAs are now entering information into a secure web portal, reducing inaccuracies in data-inputting in the process.

‘It speeds up the whole process and reduces cost. It also puts the IFAs in control of what they are doing,’ said Mike Shapland, head of IT solutions delivery at Friends Provident.

The system validates data entered by the IFA via the internet portal, then back-end systems automate the creation of a pension policy.

Inaccurate or half-completed applications cannot be entered, as the system only accepts correct and verified information.

‘There has been a real push to bring the charges down in this area and the only way to do that is through online data capture and automation at the back end,’ said Shapland.

Friends Provident has been working with Wipro since 2001, but this is the first project that the outsourcer has managed from inception through to completion and support.

‘We have a permanent development shop in-house. However, the marketing department wanted to relaunch and build up the market share in this area quite quickly and we would have struggled to do it that quickly in-house,’ said Shapland.

By combining the skills of its own in-house application development team with additional support from Wipro, Friends Provident says it can now scale IT operations up and down depending on demand, and bring in extra skills when needed.

‘This gives us flexibility with resourcing when we need it, and it also gives us the opportunity to reduce cost by offshoring,’ said Shapland.

Business analysis, design and reporting of the project was carried out in the UK, but application coding was offshored to India, he says.