Company name

Standard Life

PR team Twitter handle

@standardlifeUK

Team members & job titles

Jonathan Henderson, Head of PR

Jennifer Smallwood, Senior PR Manager

Darragh Leeson, Senior PR Manager

James Merrick, PR Consultant

Samantha Griffith, PR Consultant

What’s the best way to get in contact with your team?

Email or mobile works well. Standard Life is part of Phoenix Group and all the team’s contact details can be found on the press section of the website - https://www.thephoenixgroup.com/news/media-team

What are your specialist areas of comment?

Pensions are our core area of expertise but we can comment from a wide variety of angles.

Standard Life is one of the biggest workplace pensions providers so issues like participation, auto-enrolment, workplace investment design are regular themes for us.

We’re also one of the main players in the pension de-risking market so can comment on how defined benefit schemes are looking to secure their liabilities through bulk purchase annuities and the issues trustees are grappling with when doing so.

Standard Life offers retail pension products and have lots of people who can talk about the UK pension system from a regulatory or government perspective. We’re happy to talk about issues like the pensions lifetime allowance for example.

The company is also a funder of equity release products so is able to talk about the important role housing can play in combination with other savings for those considering their retirement plans.

How long does it take you to turn around requests?

We’ll aim to work to whatever the journalist’s deadline is and can normally respond quickly.

What kind of resources do you have at your disposal – e.g. spokespeople, case studies etc

One specialism is numbers. We’re happy to work with journalists looking to model different savings outcomes. For example, we can turn figures about how long it would take a person to hit a savings milestone through their pension around quickly.

We have a broad range of spokespeople. Some of the key individuals include:

Andy Curran, Standard Life CEO – strategy, financial results, major industry issues

Jenny Holt, MD Customer Savings and Investment – Standard Life’s personal finance expert, able to talk to a broad range of customer issues and more technical aspects of pensions.

Colin Williams, MD Pensions & Savings – responsible for the Pensions and Savings area which includes the workplace, financial adviser and individual customer markets.

Tom Ground, MD Retirement Solutions – responsible for the Retirement Solutions area which includes BPA and lifetime mortgages.

Sangita Chawla, CMO – responsible for marketing and brand. Passionate about customer engagement and bringing an international perspective to the UK pensions market.

Gail Izat, MD Workplace - responsible for the Workplace business and can cover related issues including regulation, Master Trust, participation, auto-enrolment, employer needs.

Kunal Sood, Managing Director BPA and Reinsurance – responsible for the BPA offer and covers issues including the market outlook, funding trends, pricing, risk and ESG.

Claire Altman, MD Individual Retirement Solutions – looking at how Standard Life can help provide customers with greater income certainty in retirement.

Chris Hudson, MD Retail Advised – responsible for re-establishing Standard Life’s financial adviser offering. Can talk to advice market trends and related regulation.

Tell us about your latest press campaign (include links, etc)

We recently launched our Retirement Voice report. It’s a comprehensive look at the challenges savers are encountering in trying to prepare for retirement. There’s more to come from the report over the next couple of months.

https://www.standardlife.co.uk/about/retirement-voice

What was your latest survey / research on?

There’s one going out this week on the impact inflation, higher interest rates and market volatility have had one people’s confidence in their financial decisions. This triple shock has meant many people are less confident and women were worst affected.

Any upcoming events for the financial press in the next few months?

One date for the diary is 7^th June. Standard Life has become the headline partner for Cancer Research’s Race for Life. We’ll be hosting media at a Race for Life event in Battersea Park after work that evening and are happy to sponsor journalists who sign up. It should be a good opportunity to say hello and raise some money for charity. Do get in touch if it’s of interest.

We’re a relatively new team and are keen to get out and about and meet up with journalists who may not know much about Standard Life since Phoenix Group acquired the brand in 2021 and the role it will play in driving the organic growth of the Group in the coming years.

And finally, anything else you would like to bring to the attention of financial journalists?

Another USP is our Thinking Forward programme. Each quarter we host events with international experts who can offer a broader perspective on the pensions issues the UK is facing. We recently had the CEO of the Swedish pension dashboard for example explain the implementation issues they faced when launching nearly 20 years ago.

We also have a Joint Research Initiative with the OECD and are looking at issues around diversity and inclusion and guaranteed retirement income. We’re happy to put journalists in touch with them if they ever need an international perspective.