Developed by its Investment Management Solution (IMS) business in conjunction with retirement specialist Billy Burrows of William Burrows Annuities, Retirement Options is designed to help advisers and clients identify suitable products in an ever increasingly complicated retirement market.

Key features of Retirement Options include:

• An innovative Retirement Signature tool matching clients to products
• A comparison of product features
• Comprehensive calculations on multiple economic bases comparing the performance of a range of products
• Support for a wide range of post-retirement products, including income drawdown, guaranteed annuities, variable annuities and investment linked annuities

Robert Childs, Head of Operations for Pensions and Actuarial Services (PAS) at DST Global Solutions, said: "The Retirement Options solution is designed to deliver a competitive advantage to advisers. It will give them tools to support their advice and explain their selection to the client. We are proud of the software solution that we have developed with Billy Burrows; the combination of his specialist knowledge and experience with our industry-leading technology enables us to deliver a scalable solution to manufacturers and distributors of post-retirement products. The launch of this solution demonstrates our commitment to innovation in the area of financial planning tools and the capabilities of our powerful calculation engine."

Commenting further, Billy Burrows said: "The challenge facing many professional advisers and their clients is how to understand and evaluate the risks and benefits of complex annuity and drawdown options. Retirement Options can help advisers meet this challenge by calculating the income from different options. Furthermore, the unique "Retirement Signature" tool will compare the key features of each product with the client's individual risk profile."

The DST Global Solutions IMS business line offers a comprehensive range of software supporting financial planning and pensions advisory functions.

Arun Sarwal, DST Global Solutions' CEO for IMS, commented: "Our development of the Retirement Options offering demonstrates our ability to be innovative in the markets in which we have expertise, and in being able to work collaboratively with other practitioners to add value to the solutions we offer our clients."

The PAS software is built around a comprehensive and flexible calculation engine and can be accessed via the Internet. The software is designed to offer the benefits of fast implementation, scalability and easy integration with other systems.