Andy Briggs: ‘Only one in seven people are saving enough for a decent retirement’

Andy Briggs is a hard man to miss. At six feet five inches tall, the chief executive of Phoenix Group, the FTSE 100-listed savings business, is immediately recognisable when he enters Leydi, a new Turkish restaurant that has opened just around the corner from his company’s offices in London’s Square Mile.
Yet being blessed with such a towering stature, which helped him into the England under-20s volleyball squad in his youth, has its drawbacks. Briggs has developed a bad back over the years and now does personal training first thing in the morning twice a week to tackle the problem.
“I’m 58 now, so I decided I need to get my act together,” he says.
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The sessions are working — “my back’s much better as a result” — but they mean an early breakfast. So by the time we sit down for lunch Briggs is hungry and we quickly order our food: baked claypot hummus and a lamb shish for him; hummus, with some bread to mop it up, and a chicken shish for me. Even on a Monday, the restaurant is busy and it is a welcome haven from the rain outside.
Sitting down for lunch makes a change for Briggs: “I tend to go to the Pret and grab a sandwich on the run.” He is, after all, a busy man. While Phoenix may not be a household name, its Standard Life brand is, and with operations that manage £289 billion of assets for about 12 million customers, the group is Britain’s biggest long-term savings and retirement company. It provides everything from life insurance for the over-50s through its SunLife unit and workplace pensions, to buyouts of defined benefit retirement schemes from companies that want to offload pension liabilities.
Its focus was originally on closed “zombie” life insurance funds and Phoenix has become the biggest consolidator in the industry by buying up unwanted books of businesses that are shut to new customers. More recently it has built out a division that is open to new business, mainly through the £2.9 billion acquisition six years ago of Standard Life that was spearheaded by Briggs’s predecessor, Clive Bannister.
An industry veteran who has spent his entire career in insurance, Briggs took charge of Phoenix in 2020 and has focused on further growing the company’s open business. He has also become a leading voice calling for pension industry reform to avoid what some fear is a looming retirement time bomb.
“Only one in seven people in the UK are saving enough for a decent retirement,” Briggs warns as we wait for our food to arrive. A further problem is the way that pension money in the UK is invested, with returns here lagging behind those enjoyed by schemes in countries such as Canada and Australia.
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Tackling this latter issue was a focus for the previous Conservative government and is now for the new Labour administration. Last year Phoenix became one of nine founding signatories of the Mansion House compact, which was overseen by Jeremy Hunt, the previous chancellor, and involved a pledge by UK pension providers to invest at least 5 per cent of the assets in their default retirement funds in unlisted assets.
The aim is to boost domestic funding for young, privately owned British start-up companies which too often secure backing from overseas investors, as well as improve returns for pension schemes’ members. To support the compact, Phoenix announced in July that it had teamed up with Schroders, the investment manager, to start a venture called Future Growth Capital that will invest in private markets. Phoenix will also be represented by Sir Nicholas Lyons, its chairman, at the investment summit that the government is hosting on October 14 to drum up investment in Britain.
Meanwhile, pension reform is also being pursued by Hunt’s successor, Rachel Reeves, who has started a wide-ranging review of the industry, the first phase of which will focus on ways of lifting the investments made by schemes in UK assets. Examining whether auto-enrollment — in which workers and their employers automatically pay into pensions — should be overhauled to lift minimum contributions from their current level of 8 per cent of qualifying earnings will be left to the second phase of the review.
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Yet Briggs, who sticks to sparkling water with his meal, believes that increasing contributions to at least 12 per cent is vital.
“What worries me more than anything is that lots of ordinary consumers will be labouring under the misapprehension that 8 per cent’s the normal, standard rate and therefore it’s enough, and it’s not,” he says. “It will not give them a decent retirement income.”
Phoenix, of course, has a vested interest in lobbying for higher contributions.
“Clearly there is a conflict there because we’ve got one of the strongest workplace pensions businesses in the UK,” concedes Briggs, who took home £2.9 million for running Phoenix last year. “I’m very fortunate, I get well remunerated for what I do, but it’s not why I do it. I do it because I actually care about making a difference.”
He credits his parents, who both left school at 14, for instilling in him a “sense of fairness and opportunity” from a young age. Raised in Essex with his three sisters, his father was a painter before retraining to become a lecturer in a technical college, while his mother worked in administration. He had a “very ordinary upbringing”, attending a state grammar school and holidaying in the UK in the family’s caravan.
An aptitude for numbers led Briggs to study maths at the University of Southampton, after which he trained as an actuary at Prudential, where he spent 19 years. He then moved to Scottish Widows, which he ran for Lloyds Banking Group, before taking charge of Friends Life, which was later bought by Aviva, where he became a senior executive. He left Aviva in 2019 after missing out on the top job there and joined Phoenix the following year.
In March, he set out a three-year strategy for Phoenix, which involves generating £4.4 billion of cash by 2026, and half-year results last month showed the business was on course to achieve the top end of this year’s target range of £1.4 billion to £1.5 billion.
Even so, Phoenix’s share price has drifted sideways since Briggs took charge, something he blames on a broader aversion to British equities from overseas investors and outflows suffered by UK income funds, which largely own its stock.
A plan to sell SunLife was also abandoned after the Financial Conduct Authority, the City regulator, in August started a review into the market for pure protection products over concerns that customers are being ripped off. Briggs says he is not worried about the review, because SunLife’s products “are very good value for money”, but it meant fetching a good price for the business would have been difficult.
A bigger regulatory challenge for the financial services sector has been the recent introduction by the FCA of its consumer duty rules, which are designed to ensure firms put the interests of their customers first. This prompted Phoenix in March to book a £70 million provision to cover the capping of charges for some customers, although Briggs insists that Phoenix’s business as a whole meets best practice under the duty.
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He is unfazed by the looming budget, where there has been talk that the government could cut pension tax relief for higher earners, although the latest reports suggest that the Treasury is scrapping the idea. Briggs says that while the current tax relief system is “imbalanced”, because “the wealthiest few get most of the benefit”, changing it is complicated and risks deterring people from saving.
With an afternoon of meetings ahead of him, he declines dessert and a coffee. The restaurant is quieter now the lunchtime rush has faded away and the conversation turns to his other interests.
He spent six years as a trustee of the NSPCC and was awarded an MBE in 2021 for his fundraising efforts for the charity. A colleague first got him involved and once his eyes were opened to the neglect some children suffer “I just got quite passionate about it all”. If he ever moves out of pensions and insurance, he’d like to do “something radically different, a not-for-profit charitable thing”.
Still, given that six out of seven people aren’t putting enough into their pension, he believes his job at Phoenix is not done.
“Our goal is to help everyone get that better, longer life and we’re a long way off that.”
Age: 58
Education: King Edward VI Grammar School in Chelmsford, then the University of Southampton, where he studied maths and operational research, which involves applying maths to management problems
Family: Married with four children, two of whom are from his previous marriage
Career: 1987 Prudential, where he rose to run its retirement income business; 2006 Scottish Widows, which he ran for Lloyds Banking Group, then he later led Lloyds’ general insurance business; 2011 Friends Life, as its chief executive until its sale to Aviva; 2015 Aviva, where he ran its UK business; 2020 Phoenix, as chief executive
Bottle of sparkling water £5Baked claypot hummus £9Hummus £6Lamb shish £24Chicken shish £20Bread £6Service £9.10Total £79.10