Aon plc (NYSE:AON) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Greg Case: Yes. From our standpoint, we see tremendous opportunity around the marketplace overall. And as there’s been some market strategy, it creates more opportunity. As Christa described, our decisions are made around literally with the cash pool. It’s a return on those capital, cash-on-cash return and we see lots of opportunity out there. We also see lots of opportunity to invest organically in our business and we’ve been doing that with great success. And the pipeline we see is as strong as ever before as Christa described, it’s got to really add value. For us, it’s about content, we can scale effectively. And that really drives sort of a set of outcomes that are very powerful. And we see a lot of opportunities there. Christa, anything else you’d add to that?

Christa Davies: Yes. And look, I would just add, we’ve found some terrific companies and invested in those this year. I mean, Tyche, fantastic capability in the capital modeling and analytics space and ERM in the modeling space in Mexico. And so we continue to invest in areas of high growth and client need which we’re really excited about.

Operator: Our final question this morning comes from the line of Mike Zaremski with BMO Capital Markets.

Mike Zaremski: Great. Just a follow-up on the M&A landscape. Can you remind us — we know that Aon has moved in some of M&A with cover wallet into the small commercial marketplace. Any ambitions to get into kind of the main street U.S. retail marketplace. I know you just mentioned there were some market stresses. I believe there’s some market stresses for some of the private equity roll-ups there. Just curious if that’s any ambitions to get into kind of Main Street retail, small mid-commercial?

Greg Case: Listen, as we step back, I want to make sure I understand the market segments that you’re thinking about them. We love the segments we operate in which is really the large market, the middle sized marketplace and the small commercial market. And you’re absolutely right. The bringing in cover wallet has been phenomenal. It is a capability, much like many that we can scale. Scale, not just in the small commercial market but if you think about B2B, 2C in large companies with bringing that capability in the context of that, if you think about kind of distributed businesses, franchises, things like that phenomenal kind of opportunities. So we love the space. We’ve got great capability in it. We were going to continue to grow it and we’ve seen great success with it. So that’s how we think about overall small commercial. But I want to make sure does that answer your question.

Mike Zaremski: Yes. I just wanted to confirm that you — there is no strategic initiative that kind of operates more kind of in the here I guess, for a marshaling agency or what were the sandbox that they’re competing in. The smaller size businesses versus the kind of Fortune 5000, little bigger cover wallet.

Greg Case: Yes, we’re absolutely active across the board. The question is how and how with content capability that lets us scale in those agreements. And we’ve been very successful across all of those segment pieces, not necessarily in Novo because of that size as opposed to more capability. But it really has been — we love the segments, I see great opportunity in the segments and cover while it was a great addition to the Aon world. Eric, anything else you’d add to that?

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