Dunstan Thomas partners with Altus to automate e-filing of
1st May '07
Dunstan Thomas, a leading provider of technology for the pensions and investments market, has partnered with electronic filing specialist Altus to enable its pensions administration platform Imago to offer automation of Accounting for Tax Returns, Event Reports and Pension Scheme Returns for pensions third party administrators (TPAs). Altus will also provide automation of PAYE annual returns for policyholders deriving income through their pension policy’s income drawdown facility.
Dunstan Thomas is seeing increased demand for administration of income drawdown from providers as they move to build income rawdown functionality into their core pension product portfolios. A recent survey of pension providers, conducted by Matrix-Data and commissioned by Dunstan Thomas, found that 71 per cent of providers were actively looking at building income drawdown capability into their core pension schemes.
Christopher Read, chairman, Dunstan Thomas adds:
“This trend, together with an upswing in demand for more flexible and sophisticated pensions products including SIPPs, is also creating greater demand for automation of pension scheme reporting to make it easier and quicker to administer this new breed of schemes. Because the demand is there for these products, providers and TPAs are opening up their wallets to augment their back office pensions administration platforms. In this context Altus’ HMRC reporting tool is likely to find strong demand.”
The Government itself is also stimulating demand for automation of returns. Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC) is calling for universal delivery of all business taxation returns by 2012 and has gone further to make electronic filing of pension tax returns compulsory from 16th October 2007. For the first time, TPAs will have to file all their quarterly Accounting for Tax Returns, annual Event Report returns and annual Pension Scheme Returns electronically from this date.
Ben Cocks, product manager, Altus limited, explains:
“We know of many scheme administrators still doing paper returns who will need to type in hundreds or even thousands of returns and submit them via the Government Gateway for the first time this autumn. The realisation of the sheer manual workload involved, together with the danger of loss of data during the process, is likely to prompt demand for automation of these returns which the Altus Pensions Gateway solution can deliver.”
Altus has already extended its e-filing platform beyond pensions reporting and is seeing strong demand for other modules in the large corporate market. The ability of Altus Pensions Gateway to provide an audit trail around all returns is proving very attractive to companies looking to reduce the risks of loss or corruption of data associated with electronic filing.
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