Boss Software International and Plan for Life have teamed up to form Planned Research, a joint venture company that will provide the financial services industry with information and software.
Boss and Plan for Life directors Daryl Currie and Simon Solomon will head up the organisation which will service life companies, master funds, dealer groups, advisers and ratings agencies with information relating to risk, investment and superannuation.
Managing director of Plan for Life, Simon Solomon, says that the new company has been created to address the apparent lack of evaluation given to information and research products available to the financial services industry.
“The joint venture can do interesting things such as the evaluation of various products which never really get assessed as entities. We will be assessing the entity that provides the product and the actual product in the one package,” he says.
“It’s a form of rating in effect, though we doubt whether we’ll be going as far as allocating stars to products.”
It is understood all information will be offered electronically in the form of reports, data and software. Boss and Plan for Life’s specialisation in the risk market and funds management markets respectively will provide the impetus for the information produced by the new company.
Not surprisingly, software will feature as a strong component in the Planned Research’s itinerary of products to roll out during the year. The Planned Research Benchmarking Series is a product scheme that will release 11 software products.
The first one off the rank will be the Group Life Benchmarking Module which offers electronic delivery of the latest premium rates, information about the group risk markets, analysis of retail sales and assists advisers in building recommended lists and meeting CLERP 6 requirements.
The company says the second product, the Individual Risk Benchmarking Module, will be available in March.
Solomon says the software products offered by Planned Research will differ from those offered by Boss in that they will be more generic, and used as applications, which could then lead the user to Boss’s products devoted to a more specific area down the track.
