Pippa Andrews who this week revealed she is stepping down as director of corporate business at Vitality, speaks to Health & Protection about why championing menopause in the workplace, winning industry awards and achieving sustainable growth rank among her standout achievements over three-and-a-half decades in the sector.
Andrews also touches on discovering that she loves a good spreadsheet, why it is the people she has met over her career that she will miss most as well as her plans for retirement as she heads out in a camper-van to travel around the country and beyond.
Spending time with family
“I’m retiring because fundamentally, I just think it’s right now to enter a different phase of my life,” Andrews tells Health & Protection.
“It feels like I’ve been in the corporate world for a long, long time now, about 34-plus years.”
With her daughter finishing university imminently and having saved carefully through pensions and investments, Andrews reveals travel is high on the agenda in retirement.
“My daughter’s finishing uni,” Andrews says. “I’m conscious I’ve been a working mum. So I haven’t always had a huge amount of time with her.
“She’s got a job. At some point, she’s going to fly the nest. It’s nice to spend some time with her and be young enough to go exploring in our camper-van, hiking up the dolomites and all of that type of stuff before our bodies start to give out on us.
“We bought a camper-van last year,” Andrews continues. “We’ve been enjoying travelling around in that and I just want to do more of that stuff.”
“We spend our lives travelling up and down motorways to get everywhere as quickly as possible.
“We’d already realised from the weekend that there is so much of the countryside that we haven’t seen that is absolutely beautiful.”
Seeing the countryside
But the plan is also to see the rest of the UK and even Europe.
“So we are going to start off seeing a lot more of the UK, so Wales, Scotland, the Lake District and the Yorkshire dales. We’ve got plans for all of that and then ultimately, off over to Europe, which again we haven’t seen much of. We fly in and out for the odd city break, but that’s about it.
“We’ll just get out and about and do a lot of walking and hiking.”
Andrews adds that while she lives on the south coast between Portsmouth and Southampton she has not seen a lot of the nearby countryside.
“Even near us, we recently went up near Petersfield and there were some lovely walks up and round there,” she continues. “It’s only 20 minutes from our house and we’d never done that.
“We’ve seen loads of Dorset, again another pretty area, but we’ve not travelled too far yet. We’ve done a little around Leeds where my daughter is for uni, but we’re always dashing about, so we don’t get time to stop and see it really.”
Menopause support
Reflecting on her achievements over her long career, Andrews points to a recent standout.
“There’s probably recency bias on this, but recently, I was able to champion menopause in the workplace and getting Peppy menopause support into all of our health plans, supporting many, many women and their families,” Andrews says.
“I was a beneficiary of that myself going through that phase of my life, so I know more than many how much that would have supported everybody.
“I was really happy to be able to champion that and get that into our offering.”
Sustainable growth
A further key focus for Andrews has been around creating sustainable growth.
“I was always involved in underwriting and pricing the corporate books of business, be that group risk and more latterly across to group PMI and being able to grow them for those organisations, Zurich, Aviva and now Vitality, in a really sustainable way focusing on profitability and volume.
“I think corporate portfolios in particular because big corporates are large, you can grow your book pretty quickly if you want to as an insurer, but the harder bit is growing it in a profitable and sustainable way and I feel that’s where I’ve added value. So I really feel happy about doing that.”
Team win
But an award win as recently as just two years ago, also ranks among Andrew’s standout achievements.
“My corporate team at the end of 2024 won team of the year at Vitality’s Awards,” Andrews says. “So we were all able to get up on stage and I was able to recognise all of them and their contributions.”
Loving a good spreadsheet
In terms of what she has learned about herself over the years, Andrews reveals she loves a good spreadsheet, a chart and a graph, more than she ever thought she did.
“I love making decisions,” Andrews says. “I love that tension between volume and profitability and I love making decisions on those big cases. So in many ways that’s made me into a perfect underwriter as I was until more recently.
“Moving from always having been in an underwriting specialist role into a much broader corporate role and managing profit and loss effectively required me to suddenly be on stage and front-of-house and often speak to hundreds of people.
“That pushed me significantly outside of my comfort zone in the early days.
“It’s something I’ve got used to and grown into, but I never would have thought prior to doing that I would have been able to do that. So that’s been a great learning.”
Important mentors
Looking back at mentors who have stood out, Andrews says while she tried to limit her choice to just one, in the end she could not.
But in particular she picks out Jacqui Humphries and Terry Coulthard from early on in her career, Nicola Graham and Myles Rix and more recently, Keith Klintworth and current boss, Greg Levine.
“So there are lots of people,” Andrews says. “I can’t give you one I’m afraid. They are the key names that pop out to me and what’s nice is it’s a mixture of women and men as well who have championed and supported me over my career and that’s really nice.”
Missing the people
And Andrews is clear that ultimately as she packs up and heads out on to that highway, it’s the people she will miss most.
“It’s the people and the community and the enjoyment that’s given me over the years,” Andrews continues.
“Group risk and group PMI, the health and protection market is quite a small arena. And I’ve got to know many people really, really well over the years and consider them as friends.”
Though Andrews adds she is also looking forward to seeing how the sector evolves without her.
“I’m really looking forward to seeing how the sector is going to change and progress with the advent of AI and how that’s going to personalise pathways and the health and protection market as a whole and help employers and insurers personalise care pathways for its members.
“So I will be keeping in touch with many, many people. But that’s the part that I’ll miss most. It is the people and it’s the friendships that I’ve built over the years.”