Tim Steele

Leading corporate compliance and legal document provider NowInfinity, has announced a multi-year program of enhancements to deliver greater productivity for accountants, financial advisers and legal professionals.

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Kate Anderson

Leading cloud-based corporate compliance and legal document provider NowInfinity has introduced a Recognised Overseas Pension Scheme (ROPS) compliant SMSF Deed, expanding its comprehensive legal document suite for financial professionals.

ROPS are a type of overseas pension plan recognised by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) in the UK. The new SMSF Deed assists financial professionals with clients who are Australian residents and aged 55 years or older, to transfer their UK pension into an Australian SMSF.

Previously, obtaining a ROPS-specific deed required legal review so the trust deed could be tailored for this purpose, adding time and cost. Now, financial professionals can access the compliant SMSF Deed directly via NowInfinity, simplifying the process.

NowInfinity’s General Manager Kate Anderson commented: “Many Australians have lived and worked in the UK, and it can be complicated to transfer UK pensions to Australia, NowInfinity is helping to simplify this process for our clients and their customers.”

This release is complimented by significant enhancements to NowInfinity’s SMSF pension documentation, offering:

• a more flexible pension commencement document package (which includes a pension agreement and product disclosure statement) for both Account-Based Pensions (ABP) and Transition to Retirement Income Streams (TRIS), and
• Aa new annual pension payment document package (which includes documents such as the member request letter, letter from the fund acknowledging the request, minutes etc) to streamline the management of annual pension payments.

“These enhancements further simplify solving our client’s need for accessible and compliant documentation enabling NowInfinity clients to efficiently service their customers,” said Anderson.

With one in four new SMSFs in Australia established using NowInfinity’s SMSF Deed, these updates reinforce its position as a leading provider of SMSF documentation – ensuring compliance, flexibility and ease of use for professionals managing SMSFs.

“The addition of the ROPS-specific SMSF Deed demonstrates NowInfinity’s ongoing commitment to provide legal documents and compliance solutions that drive productivity and empower financial professionals to better serve their clients,” said Anderson.

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“The partnership and merger provide accountants and bookkeepers, financial advisers, SMSF specialists and adminstrators and legal firms with a whole new level of solutions,” said NowInfinity CEO, Amreeta Abbott. “It enhances the NowInfinity platform, enabling members to efficiently create, collaborate and manage specific governance and life events for their clients.”

Ms Abbott said View Legal is a well-recognised legal firm that truly understands what matters to end clients. “View Legal’s team of lawyers, their processes and their non-traditional approach will also make legal advice more accessible to NowInfinity members and inspire them with the confidence to offer cradle-to-grave advice.”

Over the past four years, NowInfinity has delivered huge cost efficiencies via data automation and systems integration. “This has been magnified by the recent release of the NowInfinity Entity Management Suite, which provides corporate compliance, including ASIC lodgements; trust management and SMSF Compliance.”

Similarly, View Legal has created a disruptive and innovative way to offer legal services, with a particular focus on tax and estate planning by, amongst other things, introducing a fixed pricing model, actively collaborating with other professionals and creating an array of online and automated solutions.

Ms Abbott said that together, NowInfinity and View Legal will continue to innovate with the objective of delivering technology and services that underpin the rapid and required change within the accounting, financial advice and legal industries.

“First cab off the rank will be a new estate planning solution designed to eliminate the traditional barriers that have previously limited end-to-end client advice between accountants, financial advisers and lawyers,” she said.

Director of View Legal, Matthew Burgess said, “Leveraging technology to allow advisers to facilitate client solutions is the centrepiece of the View platform. Our partnership and merger with NowInfinity, the leading provider in this space, is exceptionally exciting and exemplifies the true meaning of synergy.”

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Significant changes to SMSFs legislation on June 30 make the updates to trust deeds imperative.

NowInfinity is urging advisers to review and update their clients’ trust deeds now in order to meet the new super reforms that will be effective from 1 July 2017.

NowInfinity CEO, Amreeta Abbott, says significant changes to self-managed superannuation funds (SMSF)s make the update imperative. “Not since 2007 has Australia seen such wide-sweeping changes to superannuation, so now is the time for advisers with SMSF clients to review and update SMSF trust deeds,” she says.

Ms Abbott says it is imperative that advisers and accountants understand how any regulatory changes must be implemented into the SMSF’s governing rules which reside in the SMSF trust deed and its ancillary documents – that is, investment strategy, pension documents, etc.

“It cannot be assumed that if a transaction is allowable under the legislation that it will be allowable under the trust deed,” she says. “To make that assumption can be a very expensive process especially with the trustee administrative penalties and charges.”

The trust deed is the most critical document in terms of stipulating the governing rules of an SMSF and as such, NowInfinity has launched a new comprehensive SMSF trust deed that not only accommodates all the new super reforms but also adds a strong focus on the estate planning protocols and mechanics available to the fund.

It accommodates all the new super reforms (including but not limited to):

• Introduction and administration of the $1.6 million superannuation transfer balance cap
• Changes to the concessional and non-concessional contribution caps
• Allowing catch up concessional contributions
• Changes to transition to retirement income streams (TRIS)
• Allowing for the CGT transitional provisions

In relation to estate planning some of the new key features are as follows:
Certainty is provided around the priority between pension interests and death benefits. This allows members to create a wide variety of estate planning priorities during lifetime and through their estate.

All decisions in relation to interpretation and application of death benefit processing is reserved to the member’s chosen Alternate Decision Maker, it is not left to the discretion of the balance of membership. The Alternate Decision Maker is a person or persons nominated to act as the Legal Personal Representative of a member in accordance with the specific rule of the deed.

A comprehensive and cascading binding death benefit nomination (BDBN) form is included which gives advisers flexibility and certainty.

Some of the many other features of the deed include wide latitude in membership classification, with the ability to limit membership to criteria identified by founding members. “For example, membership can be limited for a specific period of time, happening of an event, or even belonging to a family bloodline pool,” Ms Abbott says.

“The NowInfinity portal provides an easy and efficient way to help SMSF clients stay compliant and be ready to embrace the new world of superannuation with nothing more than just a couple mouse clicks.”

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In true NowInfinity style, The Trust Register allows all trust-related documents, including documents for the appointment and removal of trustees, subscription and transfer of units and other trust administration processes to be easily created and managed at the click of a button, decimating the amount of time required for these activities and streamlining the entire process.

“The real magic behind The Trust Register is that it allows you to view all trust history, while also serving as a repository for all necessary trust documents,” says NowInfinity CEO Amreeta Abbott.

The Trust Register is an integral part of the NowInfinity eco-system and takes full advantage of the platform’s automation, customistation and communication key attributes.

Ms Abbott says NowInfinity is on a mission to profoundly and fundamentally change the way businesses are functioning, workflows are implemented and documents are created, stored, updated and managed across the entire financial services and related industries and the launch of The Trust Register is just the first of a series of initiatives planned for the year ahead.

“We are living in a world where it is not only possible to radically transform complex administrative processes and make them faster and more efficient, but also absolutely necessary,” Ms Abbott says. “At NowInfinity we are constantly exploring, researching and collaborating to bring solutions to the industry which harness the power of cloud-based technology so that our clients can in turn deliver fast, superior solutions to today’s increasingly demanding consumers. We plan to bring a number of transformative solutions to market this year – so watch this space.”

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John Orrock

Leading cloud-based documentation platform NowInfinity has completed a proactive restructure, in a move which will expand both its executive management and business operations and ready the company for FinTech growth.

CEO Amreeta Abbott says the restructure includes a partnership with Future Now Ventures headed up by John Orrock, co-founder of Cloud Sherpas which recently sold to Accenture, and is an important growth play for NowInfinity.

“We recognised that the business had many broader opportunities and knew that we would need to restructure in order to seize those opportunities,” Ms Abbott says. “The partnership with Future Now Ventures, combined with our current client base, industry partners, leading product suite and balance sheet, enables us to scale and seize the substantial opportunities before us.”

NowInfinity is a cloud based documentation platform solution with features enabling rapid company formation with ASIC, corporate compliance tools and legal document templates. The solution is used by accounting, financial advice and super administration firms to help users with corporate compliance, document management and data integrity.

“I am pleased to have John and his team onboard as we move forward with our growth plans,” Ms Abbott says. “His global experience with enterprise cloud business applications and overall technology expertise is unrivalled.”

Mr Orrock said he is excited to be working with NowInfinity to help the business realise its full growth potential. “We have been on the sidelines with NowInfinity for two years through our technology outsourcing firm. It is a scalable cloud documentation platform business that is ripe for expansion and I’m delighted to be involved in that process.”

The restructure will also see the formal exit of co-founder and director Grant Abbott, who will continue to work via a partnership arrangement with NowInfinity on Self-Managed Super Fund (SMSF) platform activities.

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