Nucleus Financial are a retirement-focused adviser platform for larger adviser firms in the UK. Nucleus administer over £83 billion worth of assets, across 250,000 customers and 5,000 advice firms. Nucleus acquired Curtis Banks Group in 2023.
Dunstan Thomas has worked with Nucleus to extend its range of technical product resources for advisers with the addition of several updated pension tools. These are designed to free up advisers' time by making pension calculations easier, helping them keep up to date on the multitude of complex pensions and other policy changes.
Advisers should be able to work out a client's annual allowance, including any available carry forward, and also demonstrate how salary sacrifice can boost pension savings.
Imago Tools
As part of Nucleus’ commitment to being fully Pensions Dashboard-ready in advance of its guidance connection date, the group conducted an extensive evaluation of integrated service providers (ISP) for its multi-system platform landscape.
We are pleased to announce that, following this review, Nucleus Group has selected Imago Connect by Dunstan Thomas to power its entire platform estate. This comprehensive integration spans multiple regulated entities and encompasses proprietary backend technology as well as solutions provided by Bravura, Delta and FNZ.
Paul Muir, Chief Product Officer at Dunstan Thomas, commented:
“We’re delighted that Nucleus has selected us to provide this critical integration and support their journey towards Pensions Dashboard readiness. The partnership is an exciting opportunity to deploy our solution at scale to one of the UK’s leading retirement focused adviser platforms.”
Following changes to the AS TM1 v5 standards for Statutory Money Purchase Illustrations (SMPI), Nucleus approached Dunstan Thomas to replace their proprietary illustrations engine with Imago Illustrations.
Michael Milner, Head of Product Integration, Nucleus Financial:
“We have been delighted with the service that we have received from Dunstan Thomas and the quality of the illustrations provided through Imago Illustrations. They have significant domain expertise and provide an easy to integrate solution which offered us significant flexibility in the types of illustrations we need to provide, and the information and context contained within it.
“We have significantly improved the quality of our illustration output through onboarding Imago, and the information this provides our customers, through clear to read and digestible documents. This has made onboarding new changes like the SMPI upgrade simpler and provided an opportunity for us to expand our service to users. We are very happy with this new service and would highly commend Dunstan Thomas and its Imago Illustrations offering to our peers.”
Curtis Banks' Salary Sacrifice pension calculator page is now the second biggest driver of search engine traffic to the Curtis Banks website with over 2k visits per month. The pension calculator is usually holding the number 2 spot in Google search results, ahead of some of the top 5 investment organisations in the UK.
This calculator is designed to help individuals consider the potential impact of giving up some of their salary in return for a pension contribution. It aims to do this by considering the impacts on income tax and national insurance. For the salary sacrifice scenario, you are also able to specify the % of Employer NI savings that are given to the employee as increased pension contributions.
Dunstan Thomas is pleased to announce that, following the acquisition of Suffolk Life by Curtis Banks, Imago Illustrations will now be rolled out across the entire Curtis Banks group, building on its successful adoption by Suffolk Life in 2016.
Dunstan Thomas Imago will drive pre- and post-sale illustrations, review Statutory Money Purchase Illustrations (SMPIs) as well as Drawdown reviews for all adviser-facing pension offerings from Curtis Banks.
Will Self, Chief Executive Officer, Curtis Banks, added:
“Enhancing the tools at advisers’ disposal is important for our business and provides yet more evidence of the fast progress we’ve made since joining the Curtis Banks Group. This delivery improves our proposition and functionality for advisers.”
The retirement solutions specialist and fintech innovator Dunstan Thomas, has implemented its Integro CX portal technology to provide an adviser portal for digital access to Curtis Banks’ new ‘Your Future SIPP’ pension. Dunstan Thomas provided the integration and market expertise needed to deliver seamless digital customer journeys for the new SIPP.
Dunstan Thomas’ Integro CX portal technology provides the presentation layer which enables advisers to register to use the portal and then complete new business applications for the SIPP. The portal also provides users with a slick client on boarding process without the need for paper. Straight through processing is supported by electronic application forms and e-signatures.
Advisers can also use the portal for secure messaging and review number of investors as well as in progress, cancelled and completed applications in their personalised dashboard.
Chris Read, Group Chief Executive, Dunstan Thomas Group, added:
“For over ten years Suffolk Life, and now Curtis Banks, has been a great client for us. Suffolk Life was the launch client for our now widely used Imago Illustrations Version 5. Our expertise in the SIPP, retirement and platform market of over 30 years has now been augmented by the addition of our powerful Integro CX portal technology.
Dunstan Thomas, the retirement market solutions provider, announced today it has won a major contract to provide pension illustrations to Suffolk Life’s advisers, business partners and pension administrators. The system will provide enhanced access to Pension Freedoms-ready pension illustrations for all Suffolk Life self-invested personal pensions, including MasterSIPP and SimSIPP, for advisers and in-house pension administrators.
Chris Read, Group Chief Executive, Dunstan Thomas Group, added:
“Suffolk Life is our first major customer to go live on Imago Illustrations which was launched four months ago. The successful deployment for a major provider of diverse and complex self-invested pensions such as Suffolk Life shows the versatility, scalability and robustness of our Imago platform.”