Recent Developments

RNS Number:3156R
Marlborough Stirling PLC
27 October 2003


For immediate release                                           27 October 2003



Marlborough Stirling plc

Recent Developments

Marlborough Stirling plc is hosting a conference entitled 'Vision 2003 - The
future for Life and Pensions providers' today. This conference will bring
together key players from across the industry with top quality speaker
contributors to discuss how to make our industry most relevant to the future.
The themes will combine our continuing focus on reducing the cost of
administration with the need to 'make end-to-end electronic processing of
transactions the norm in the industry - in particular full electronic interfaces
between advisors and providers' (Sandler review, July 2002).

There are a number of recent developments, which will be announced during the
course of today's conference.

Sun Life Financial of Canada (SLFoC)

A key milestone has recently been achieved with the successful completion of the
migration of SLFoC's 800,000 live policies to Marlborough Stirling's Lamda
platform. Together with the associated re-engineering of SLFoC's business
processes this has resulted in a 60% saving in their operating costs compared to
2000 while at the same time delivering improvements in customer service levels.
With overall costs now less than 0.6% of funds under management this provides a
clear benchmark for the efficiencies that can be achieved through combined
technology and process re-engineering.

Exweb E-Commerce initiative

Marlborough Stirling is announcing today a key industry wide e-commerce
initiative that creates a three-way partnership between product providers,
intermediary firms and a technology provider to enable end-to-end e-commerce
services between providers and intermediaries.

Agreements have been signed with Scottish Equitable, AXA, Friends Provident,
Norwich Union, Standard Life to participate in the initiative.  These providers
have signed medium term contracts for a combined value of #10-15m that relate to
the provision of future quotes and electronic new business transactions.

Twelve major IFA firms are also involved in the initiative, including Bradford &
Bingley, Inter-Alliance and Woolwich IFA Services. This will ensure the services
are tailored to add maximum value to the intermediaries' businesses.

The new version of the Exchange's portal will be branded Exweb Gold and be
available to IFA's at an increased subscription level.

The project involves an investment in 2003 of over #3m and a similar amount in
2004. Additional revenues will start to accrue in 2004.

Inter-Alliance

The Exchange has been selected by Inter-Alliance Group plc as its provider of
comparative quotations and electronic new business services. The Exweb Platform
will become an integral part of Inter-Alliance's technical solution with all its
1,200 registered individuals having direct access to the quote and new business
services. This is expected to result in a net increase of at least 750 Exweb
subscriber licenses as well as providing another platform to increase quote and
new business transaction volumes.

This arrangement further strengthens Exweb's position as the primary
distribution channel between product provider and intermediary firms and is
consistent with its strategy of being the independent portal of choice for the
intermediary sector.


Marlborough Stirling                                              01242 547000
Huw Evans, Chairman & Chief Executive
Bob Beveridge, Finance Director


Citigate Dewe Rogerson                                            020 7638 9571
Toby Mountford
Alex Brown


Marlborough Stirling (www.marlborough-stirling.com) is committed to play a
leading role in the transformation of Financial Services to a truly competitive,
consumer focussed and efficient marketplace. Its range of solutions covers a
complete range of direct and indirect sales support, back office administration
and the ability to join front and back office with seamless end-to-end
processing. The company's portal, Exweb, is the UK's leading information and
quotation service for independent financial advisors with over 18,000 paying
subscribers representing around 80% of the market.

The group employs approximately 1,700 people and has offices in Cheltenham,
Basingstoke, Brighton, Bristol, Cobham, Dudley, Hitchin, Dublin, Douglas in the
Isle of Man, Cape Town, Madrid, Milan, Toronto and Vancouver.


                      This information is provided by RNS
            The company news service from the London Stock Exchange
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