News

Dunstan Thomas and Digital Keystone join to support providers and platforms moving to a digital world

5 January 2016

Retirement solutions provider Dunstan Thomas has acquired a leading provider of technology and services to the wealth management and investment platform markets Digital Keystone, effective immediately.

The merged entity will offer a wider and more functionally-rich set of solutions to address the unprecedented opportunities and challenges faced by providers and platforms following the largest shake-up of the retirement and advice market in a generation.

Digital Keystone will become part of the Dunstan Thomas Group of companies and continue to be called Digital Keystone. Together with Digital Keystone, Dunstan Thomas will be able to provide more functionality to its front and back office capabilities to their combined customer-base. This development also means that the enlarged solutions provider will be able to offer tools, to address fresh market challenges and opportunities much more quickly than was possible before.
In the platform market margin pressure, combined with continued swelling of assets under management, is demanding increased automation to deliver much-needed efficiencies to protect profitability. Dunstan Thomas will now be able to partner more deeply with platforms to help address these challenges.

Increasing regulation also continues to demand new layers of transparency and more comprehensive disclosure to consumers. Dunstan Thomas will continue working closely with providers to ensure their regulatory reporting duties are discharged, while informing policy holders about asset performance and stimulating customer engagement, much of this through highly responsive online-ready apps which will be designed for interaction via mobile devices as well as desktops.

Chris Read, chief executive of Dunstan Thomas, commented: “By merging with Digital Keystone we put ourselves in a much stronger position financially and in terms of our technical know-how and sheer scale – giving providers greater reassurance. This means we can together address the many challenges which providers are facing since Pensions Freedom; while continuing to enable providers to meet new regulatory disclosure demands; and engaging policy-holders to a level where they are contributing adequately and making other sound financial choices – all paving the way to a comfortable retirement.”

Graeme Gets, founder of Digital Keystone, said: “By combining our businesses, we will be able to accelerate development plans for Digital Keystone’s Adaptive Portal, expanding the functionality and capability of this highly-regarded financial portal and workflow solution. In addition, the two businesses together offer a technology solutions power house for retirement market providers and platforms alike.”

Graeme Gets becomes the new chief technology officer of Dunstan Thomas following the merger.

Dunstan Thomas and Digital Keystone confirm that there will be no redundancies following the merger and both companies’ recruitment plans remain unchanged. Neither company will be relocating their offices. Financial aspects of the merger were not publicly disclosed. There are no plans to phase out the Digital Keystone brand at this stage.