July 2011

Hello and welcome to the new-look Airas Intersoft newsletter.

Thanks to all our treasured clients and for your feedback to our recent surveys, you can expect an increased quality and frequency of all our communications, including a regular newsletter. Please let me know if you have particular areas of interest, comments on these articles or just want a chat!

Our MD, David Truman, issues a rousing call to action and challenges us all to 'manage investments for the mass affluent' - an opportunity to grow your business in these challenging times. Which leads us neatly onto Andrew Hubbard's helpful article on 'reducing the resistance to change'. Another area of technological change gathering pace is around 'the cloud'. Sean Jacob, Operations Director, explores new hosted services and SaaS options from Airas Intersoft.

If you'd like to arrange a time to discuss how our software solutions can meet your business and commercial needs, please email me. For more information, visit our website www.airasintersoft.com

Making Life Easy!

Yours truly,

Steve Carr

Business Communication Manager

Airas Intersoft Limited

Managing investments for the mass affluent. A solution for Insurers to service existing customer demands and grow their business by entering new markets

By David Truman, Managing Director, Airas Intersoft Limited

For many years Life Assurers have provided a variety of different products from insurance bonds to unit linked wrappers, investment opportunities to meet the needs of their customers. The past decades saw further diversification as Insurers provided more sophisticated products, often in conjunction with in-house Investment Managers or Banks to provide wider fund choice with varying degrees of capital protection albeit usually within the confines of structured bonds or notes with minimum capital requirements and fixed terms.

With the growth of the mass affluent worldwide the potential customer base for Life Assurers has grown and the demand for investment choice previously limited to offshore or the bespoke custom solutions expected by the "seriously affluent" presents significant market opportunities. The issues of jurisdiction, tax mitigation, confidentiality, international access together with risk management & diversification are becoming relevant to a wider, wealthier and mobile base of potential customers than the traditional expatriate or Billionaire class.

Whilst expectations of a lower degree of customisation for the mass affluent is fair, there are increasing demands for bespoke custom solutions with multi currency & world class fund choice - all possibly on a global platform. Whilst the internet provides greater reach, brand choice whether for offshore or onshore solutions, remains a key factor. This together with the recent memories of 2008 that tested risk tolerances has provided product providers and technology platforms with greater challenges. The need for protection strategies is well known to Insurers but matching this with immediate liquidity, transparency and volatility reduction thereby minimising market timing risks, only enhances these challenges. At Airas Intersoft, we have with our partners created a range of product & service solutions that deal with this through a range of options without the need for significant technology investment and providing for rapid deployment.

Reducing the resistance to change- A twelve step process

By Andrew Hubbard, Executive Director, Airas Intersoft

"When the Wind of Change Blows ... Don't Build Walls Build Windmills" Chairman Mao Tse Tung

Whether we are living through social, economic, political or technological pressures, we are all facing times of change. How we handle these complex and challenging periods of change will determine how successfully we emerge from the other side.

I've been fortunate to have some amazing coaches over the years - none more than during my first job working at Hewlett Packard. There I met Rob Biggin - and his thoughtful and insightful words guide me still. If you have a few spare minutes and an interest in how you can prepare yourself for the changing world around you, I heartily recommend Rob's '12 Ways to reduce resistance to change'. Let me know what you think!

http://rainmaker-coaching.co.uk/12waystomanagechange

Andrew

Executive Director

Andrew.hubbard@airasintersoft.com

Taking IT off-site - The operational advantages of SaaS

By Sean Jacob, Operations Director, Airas Intersoft

We have recently commenced a partnership with one of the UK's leading data centre providers, who are providing a secure hosting environment for all of our IT, from our development and testing environments to our Exchange Server and accounts. As we work with more customers and extend our product range to embrace additional functionality (wealth management, medical, re-insurance, etc.) and new technologies (Java forms, mobile devices) the flexibility of operation and ability to add or remove environments quickly and reliably becomes ever more important.

This facility also gives us the scope to provide our clients with a hosting service. The advantages are direct and immediate: software utilization without extended implementation time frames, software modification without the IT bottleneck, world class infrastructure without capital expenditures and 24 by 7 uptime without around the clock staffing, just a few of the compelling advantages of us providing iGas to you as a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution. Other key benefits include the following:

• Low cost of entry and lowering the total cost of ownership (TCO) - elimination of capital expenditure and a dramatic reduction in IT salaries
• Mutual interests support successful application utilisation, backed up by agreed SLAs
• Reduced risk - faster implementations and the immediate availability of application and Db expertise dramatically lower risk
• A more powerful and secure IT infrastructure - the investment in platform and network technologies by our datacentre partner is part of the service so that your application is always running on the most current technology
• Test and Production Environments patched and maintained, with everything kept right up-to-date with the latest releases
• Operating System and Oracle patching and revisions also maintained for you
• Completely secure, with high availability and with a guaranteed back-up, to allow rapid data recovery and roll-back
• More time for your technical and business teams to spend on product development and enhancement
• Very flexible - increase or reduce user numbers, site installations, agents, etc.

Allowing Airas Intersoft to host your iGas application, leaves us to manage the back office and you to take control of the customer facing business systems.

Contact our Operations Director, Sean Jacob, to learn more about how this partnership could benefit you. Sean.jacob@airasintersoft.com