Phoenix Group | helping people secure a life of possibilities

With market leading brands such as Standard Life and SunLife, Phoenix Group ranks as the largest long-term savings retirement company in the UK and one of the largest in Europe.

We spoke to Catherine Foot, director at longevity think tank Phoenix Insights, part of the Phoenix Group, about the group's long-term growth plans and how being based in Europe's largest insurance market is pivotal to that growth.

What does your company do? 

Phoenix Group is a long term savings and retirement company. We can trace our history back to 1782 and are the largest long-term savings and retirement company in the UK with about 13m customers and £0.3tn of assets under administration. We have a clear social purpose, which is to help people secure a life of possibilities, and this drives everything we do, including setting up our own longevity think tank Phoenix Insights to transform the way society responds to the fact that people are living longer these days.

Tell us about your UK and global operations. 

The head office for Phoenix Group is in the City of London and we have big operational centres across the UK. Overall we have about 8,000 colleagues with around 3,000 of those in Edinburgh. We have sizeable presences in Telford [Shropshire], Hitchin [Hertfordshire] and in Wythall near Birmingham. We also have international offices in Dublin, Frankfurt and Graz.

The UK insurance industry is the largest in Europe and the fourth largest in the world. So being based here gives us lots of opportunities for future growth. We benefit from a very skilled and experienced workforce in the UK and a very developed and sophisticated regulatory environment to support our work

What are the main benefits to being based in the UK? 

We are mainly a UK focused business. It is important to us to be a FTSE 100 company listed on the London Stock Exchange as that gives us access to lots of investors globally. 

The UK insurance industry is the largest in Europe and the fourth largest in the world. So being based here gives us lots of opportunities for future growth. We benefit from a very skilled and experienced workforce in the UK and a very developed and sophisticated regulatory environment to support our work.

It is important to us to be a FTSE 100 company listed on the London Stock Exchange as that gives us access to lots of investors globally

Tell us about your company's growth ambitions. 

Many UK insurers are disposing of their legacy life and pensions back books through M&A. That therefore remains an important element of our growth strategy. We want to continue to be a market leader in heritage M&A, consolidating life and pensions business. 

Employers are also wanting to continue to de-risk their defined benefit pension scheme liabilities.  By transacting bulk purchase annuities with us, they can focus on their core business yet still deliver on the promise to their former employees. 

Further, UK workplace pension schemes continue to grow rapidly thanks to auto-enrolment and a move from defined benefit to defined contribution pensions and we are continuing to invest in our Standard Life workplace pensions business. 

As a company we feel it is important that we grasp the opportunities and challenges of longer life expectancy. So we have established our own longevity think tank Phoenix Insights to bring some fresh thinking to business practice and public policy to make sure that the products and services that our industry provides reflect the lives that we live now in the 21^st Century.