'Simplifying the Taxation of Pensions', the name given to the new legislation, was amended in the budget of 17th March 2004, with an implementation date now set for April 2006.

The UK pensions industry is about to go through its biggest change in the last 50 years, bringing welcome relief to everyone who finds the concept of 8 different pensions regimes in one small country difficult to grasp.

To summarise the new pensions regime, some of the main rules are as follows:

• Maximum fund size £1.5 million, growing to £1.8 million by 2010
• £215,000 or gross salary, whichever is the lesser, may be contributed each year
• Up to 25% tax free cash draw down upon retirement
• Commencing benefits retirement age raised to 55 by 2010
• Beneficiaries can work and draw retirement benefit at the same time
• Single set of rules replaces all current rules
• Income draw down may extend beyond 75 under certain circumstances
• Extra annuity flexibility

Paul Foll, Sales Director of Wealth Management Software said, "The new pensions regime presents a great opportunity to launch a new tax-deductible investment proposition to private and corporate clients of all types, and is perhaps the greatest new business opportunity for retail financial services institutions since the launch of PEPs."

Paul Foll continues: "Our aim is to launch a competitively priced software solution to administer this new pension scheme, with the aim of replacing the myriad of different pensions administration systems in use today, each servicing one segment of the market."

"Our software is suitable for in house use, and for use by third party administrators. We are also launching a hybrid ASP service that will allow us to offer a software rental model to those people who do not wish to worry about computer hardware issues."