Today, 12th November 2019, Phoenix Group confirms an enlarged partnership with leading technology and service provider TCS, to drive Phoenix’s growth plans for its open book workplace business and meet the future needs of its workplace clients, customers and their advisers. The enlarged partnership will bring together the strengths of Standard Life Assurance Limited, Phoenix and TCS. It will build on the strong innovation and customer service excellence to which the partners are committed, and enable further digital and technology capabilities to be developed.
The partnership will create a single, open architecture workplace pensions and savings, digital operating platform for Standard Life Assurance, allowing the long term savings specialist to partner with a variety of innovators and experts as it continues to develop its wider workplace offering. It will be agile; accelerating speed to market to meet the evolving needs of workplace advisers, employers and their scheme members, and will provide much richer insight for workplace clients.
A key element of the partnership is TCS’s commitment to expand its already significant Scottish presence and establish a further TCS technology and operational service hub in Edinburgh, with a skilled team of experts from Standard Life Assurance and TCS to support the partnership and deliver excellence in customer service. A number of Standard Life Assurance employees will transfer to TCS* by the end of the transformation.
Commenting, Susan McInnes, CEO of Standard Life Assurance, said:
“We want to ensure we lead the way in meeting the needs and expectations of all our customers in the future, and become an even more innovative, progressive, well run business. We believe a partnership model is absolutely the right approach. It enables us to work with a leading global organisation with great expertise and to respond to the dynamic environment that we’re operating in.
“Working in partnership with TCS will support our growth strategy in the workplace market and bring benefits to workplace clients and scheme members. It will accelerate our ability to innovate and efficiently evolve our proposition in the future, whilst continuing to deliver excellent customer service.”
Commenting on the expanded partnership, Suresh Muthuswami, President, BFSI Platforms, TCS, said:
“We have cherished our partnership with Phoenix over the last 16 years and are truly delighted with the opportunity to serve Standard Life Assurance in a significant manner. Our focus will be to bring the power of digital technologies to further improve customer experience to Standard Life Assurance’s customers including employers, Employee Benefit Consultants and members. This exciting partnership builds on our existing substantial presence in Edinburgh to support Standard Life Assurance, and TCS’s growth plans. We will be leveraging our presence in Edinburgh to enable Standard Life Assurances’ workplace clients and their advisers to collaborate and envision the future digital transformations to help shape our future offering.”
*TCS is the parent company of Diligenta, a preferred strategic partner of Phoenix.
Media enquiries:
Shellie Wells
Head of Corporate Communications
Phoenix Group
020 3735 0922 / 07872 414 137
shellie.wells@thephoenixgroup.com
Nicki Lundy
Head of Media Relations
Standard Life Assurance, part of Phoenix Group
0131 245 2737 / 07515 298302
nicki_lundy@standardlife.com
Rimmi Shah
Associate Director
Lansons
0207 294 3670 / 07963 014027
rimmis@lansons.com
Peter Devery
Director of Communications UK & Ireland
TCS
07714 915403
peter.devery@tcs.com
Notes to editors
About Phoenix Group and Standard Life Assurance Limited
Phoenix Group is the largest specialist consolidator of heritage life assurance funds in Europe. Its main focus has traditionally been on closed life fund consolidation, where it specialises in the acquisition and management of closed life insurance and pension funds (its heritage business).
Alongside this, it has an open business which manufactures and underwrites new products and policies to support people saving for their future and when they come to retire. This open business is underpinned by a strategic partnership with Standard Life Aberdeen following the Phoenix Group’s acquisition of Standard Life Assurance in 2018. Standard Life Assurance is a long-established expert in workplace pensions, personal pensions, long term savings and retirement solutions, and its customers and clients include individual savers and some of the largest employers in the UK, as well as professional advisers. Phoenix Group also has a market leading brand - SunLife - which sells a range of financial products specifically for the over 50s market.
Phoenix Group is a member of the FTSE 100 index, and has 10 million policyholders and £245 billion of assets under management. It has four operating life companies and operations in the United Kingdom, Ireland and Germany. In Ireland and Germany, customer and adviser services are unchanged.
About TCS
TCS is an IT services, consulting and business solutions organization that has been partnering with many of the world’s largest businesses in their transformation journeys for the last fifty years. TCS offers a consulting-led, cognitive powered, integrated portfolio of business, technology and engineering services and solutions. This is delivered through its unique Location Independent Agile delivery model, recognized as a benchmark of excellence in software development.
A part of the Tata Group, India's largest multinational business group, TCS has over 450,000 of the world’s besttrained consultants in 46 countries. The company generated consolidated revenues of US $20.9 billion in the fiscal year ended March 31, 2019, and is listed on the BSE (formerly Bombay Stock Exchange) and the NSE (National Stock Exchange) in India. TCS’s proactive stance on climate change and award winning work with communities across the world have earned it a place in leading sustainability indices such as the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI), MSCI Global Sustainability Index and the FTSE4Good Emerging Index. For more information, visit us at www.tcs.com.