NEWS ROOM

Royal London Group Selects Thunderhead to Streamline Communications

The UK’s largest mutual life and pensions company adopts Thunderhead to deliver adviser and policyholder communications

London, UK - 17 September, 2009

Thunderhead, recognized innovators in document automation and multi-channel communications solutions, today announced that Royal London Group has selected the Thunderhead NOW platform to manage the creation and delivery of communications to policyholders and their financial advisers for its Bright Grey brand, with the potential to extend to other businesses in the Group.

With group funds under management of £33.5 billion (approx: $55.2 billion USD), Royal London is the UK’s largest mutual life and pensions company. As a specialist financial services organization, Royal London Group provides life, pensions and protection products to its 3.6 million customers, operating through a number of brands including Scottish Life, Scottish Provident and Bright Grey.

Royal London Group chose Thunderhead to replace Bright Grey’s existing in-house system, mainly due to Thunderhead’s unique business user control and the scope of functionality offered by the Thunderhead NOW platform. With Royal London Group’s commitment to putting its customers first, Thunderhead will help the company ensure that all its customers are kept appropriately informed with accurate, relevant and easy to understand communications. 

“Bright Grey’s existing documentation systems were reaching the end of their shelf life and this presented us with an opportunity to re-evaluate our customer communication needs for the Royal London businesses today and moving forward in the future,” commented Brian Henderson, head of technical design, Royal London Group. “We believe that Thunderhead is best placed to meet those needs by providing a feature-rich solution, which enables us to consolidate our existing legacy systems on to a single platform to manage and control all Bright Grey’s adviser and policyholder communications. A key aspect of selecting Thunderhead was that it also provides us with a flexible and cost-effective opportunity to extend as an enterprise solution to other Group businesses in the future.” 

“Throughout the evaluation process, we were impressed with both the breadth and depth of functionality offered by the Thunderhead NOW platform,” stated Henderson. “In particular, Thunderhead’s Correspond NOW and Interview NOW modules will enable our customer service teams to operate more efficiently, while delivering a more personalized customer experience.”

“We are delighted that Royal London Group has selected Thunderhead as its strategic customer communications platform,” said Thunderhead CEO, Glen Manchester. “We are particularly pleased that Royal London has recognized the breadth and depth of our capabilities and that our solution will be a key component in fulfilling its commitment to put customers first. Royal London is an outstanding example of how Thunderhead NOW can increase operational efficiencies while also providing a more personalized, engaging experience for customers.”

About Royal London Group

Royal London Group is a specialist financial service provider. Its businesses focus on those sectors of the market which value quality propositions, operating through a number of brands:

• Scottish Life – UK pensions market
• Bright Grey – UK protection market
• Scottish Provident – UK protection market
• Royal London 360° – offshore investment markets
• RLAM – fund management
• RLAS – life and pensions administration
• Fundsdirect / Ascentric – funds supermarket; Wrap platform

Royal London also distributes life and pensions products through Abbey’s national branch network.

Royal London is the largest mutual life and pensions company in the UK with Group funds under management of £33.5 billion. Group businesses serve around 3.6 million customers and employ 2,840 people.  Figures quoted are as at 30 June 2009.