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TWST: Can we start off with a quick historical sketch and overview of Marlborough Stirling (London: MAS.L)?

Mr. Coxell: Marlborough Stirling was established in 1987. We focus solely on the financial services marketplace. Our solutions, in simple terms, are aimed at the large financial service product providers and distributors of products and we focus on providing solutions based on software sales, business process outsourcing and application service provision where we host the IT infrastructure and the customer gains access to our solutions from their own customer services area. We exist with the sole purpose of enabling and empowering our customers to operate more effectively through helping them reduce their back office costs or helping them distribute their products more effectively to market. That, in essence, is what we’re about.

TWST: What’s the geographic focus today?

Mr. Coxell: Principally UK. We generate 85 to 90 percent of revenues in the UK with the remainder being spread across Canada, South Africa and Europe.

TWST: Has that percentage changed in any major way over the last 12 months since we last spoke?

Mr. Coxell: I think if anything the UK has got larger as a percentage because we’ve closed some very large contracts in the UK since we last spoke.

TWST: Can we stay with that? Perhaps you can run us through the key milestones accomplished during the year?

Mr. Coxell: Certainly. I think the principal one was the Sun Life Financial of Canada deal, which is a major outsourcing contract worth over £100 million over seven years. That contract positions us as one of the top three providers of outsource services in the Life & Pensions industry in the UK. So, straight away we’re a top player there. In addition to that, we won further outsourcing contracts with people like GE Life who have outsourced a number of product lines to us. In fact, part of the GE Life contract is now run out of the same operation where we run the Sun Life contract, so we’re starting to get economies there. I think the big focus of the business over the last 12 months has been on business process outsourcing where there is clearly increased demand in the UK market for manufacturers to reduce their costs, and the other area has been around distribution. On the distribution side, we’ve really focused on leveraging value out of The Exchange acquisition and have made some major wins in the distribution arena. First of all, we now have the UK’s largest privately-owned independent financial advisor group, The Tenet Group, using The Exchange and Officeweb and we’ve delivered a straight through processing capability to them where the members of their group can transact online. In addition to that, in the UK there were three portals, The Exchange being the biggest, followed by Misys, and then Bankhall. Now Bankhall’s model was based on the provision of services to IFA’s using their IFAengine portal and at the end of last year it was announced that we, i.e. The Exchange, are going to be powering product quotation and new business services for Bankhall going forward. So from a distribution perspective we’ve made some significant penetration into a position now where a significant majority of advisors in the UK marketplace use our infrastructure. What’s powerful is we’ve now effectively completed what we call the straight through processing capability, so with the Exchange you can get product quotations online and we have the capability now where you can transact business straight through to the back office for things like protection-based products. And that takes significant cost out of the industry as well as improving distribution.