IRESSnet, powered by the Exchange, has been developed to underpin the adviser process for establishing and maintaining investment based products. The first service available is a new account opening service. It provides users with a two-way fully integrated quote and apply service for investment based products between IRESS' Adviser Office and Standard Life's Adviserzone. Standard Life's Retail SIPP and Active Money Personal Pension will be the first products made available. Standard Life will integrate its Wrap in 2014.

Account opening will improve efficiency and reduce costs for advisers with a saving of up to 50% of their time per case, due to increased accuracy and less time spent re-keying data. It also offers flexibility for users to part-complete and resume later. All documents produced by the quote and apply process are made available via an audit trail. The new account opening service will be available free of charge to advisers, available initially in Adviser Office 10.3. IRESS will integrate XPLAN to the new capability in 2014.

This new capability utilises the Flexible Integration Toolkit (FIT), a new Origo Standard that has been developed by IRESS, Origo, Standard Life and other providers. This offers the seamless exchange of data between advice technology and providers via the Exchange using its webservice interfaces. This new Origo Standard is expected to also be used by additional providers and software vendors.

Mark Loosmore, Executive General Manager, Sales (Wealth) & Marketing, IRESS said: "We believe our new integration and account opening service will provide a popular, time-saving addition to an advisers' toolkit. When we engaged with clients on the possibility of creating a new account opening service, three quarters of advisers told us they were interested in using it. We have listened to their feedback and believe the hub will help meet the evolving needs of the marketplace. By bringing together and combining di different elements of our own technology and integrated third party providers, we are delivering improved and innovative solutions and services for advisers."

Ross Dunlop, Head of Transactional Platforms at Standard Life added: 'This is another example of us offering long-term and sustainable solutions to advisers to help them make their business more streamlined and cost-effective. Advisers told us they wanted to avoid re-keying data and we have reacted to this by delivering the ability to integrate our quote and apply services on Adviserzone with their systems. We look forward to adding similar integration functionality to Standard Life Wrap in 2014."