Boss revamp attracts IWL

Provider of wealth management software IWL has confirmed Boss Software International’s decision to overhaul its products was a main driver of its purchase of the risk software business for $2 million.

Boss is best known for its risk insurance software that has been interfaced to work with major financial planning software packages VisiPlan, owned by IWL, and Coin, owned by Macquarie Bank. It is unknown, however, whether the organisation will continue to trade a separate entity after the purchase.

IWL now intends to move away from the interface structure, preferring to fully incorporate the Boss risk insurance features into the VisiPlan suite of products as a separate module.

“We envisage to have it as a phased approach. There’ll be additional features coming in over the next few weeks and then it will probably be phased in over a six to 12-month time frame,” IWL executive general manager financial advisory strategy Phillip Thomas said.

He confirmed the Boss products would still be available for Coin users but said Coin was already in the process of developing its own risk insurance offering with Mercer.

Thomas said the redevelopment of the entire Boss product suite announced in February 2005 was one of the main drivers of the acquisition but was now under review by IWL.

“The redevelopment was part of the reason we acquired the Boss assets. They’ve been working on redevelopments under the Microsoft.Net technology, which we’ve also been working with so we recognised some synergies there,” he explained.

The redevelopment had been performed on a piece by piece basis, with the Life Research product being completed first and the overhaul of Multi Dimension product now a large way through, leaving the Risk Dimensions offering as the final component to be worked upon.

“We’ll probably do a review of it to see whether or not we continue. There’s some discussion now as to whether we continue with their four products, or whether we transfer some of the clients on those over to our other products like VisiPlan,” Thomas said.

The consideration for the transaction is to be earnings accretive over the first year of operation with a forecast additional $2.1 million in revenue to be generated during that period. The deal is to be finalised on April 28, 2006.