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

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Greg Case: Listen, I’m not sure how much we disclose on a specific people because it isn’t about the individuals for us from the standpoint, it’s how we help them become more effective, more capable — greater ability to deliver to the firm. And I would say, as we look at that, we’ve been incredibly pleased with the progress. When you think about overall Aon United and all the aspects around it. And great progress. But I would say we continue to invest tremendously in our colleagues and bringing colleagues on it and you saw that in ’22, you’ll see it again in ’23 and ’24.

David Motemaden: Got it. And I guess just a follow-up on that, Greg. You mentioned, I guess, it sounded like just productivity enhancement of your existing employee base. Is — are there any metrics that you guys track that you can help us think about that?

Greg Case: David, there are lots of metrics. We have them. We don’t disclose them. I do think it’s worth on this point, in particular, understanding and maybe taking a minute to step back and say, listen, when you think about our ability to drive organic growth, to drive margin improvement, to drive free cash flow improvement, fundamentally, Christa and I both highlighted the role the Aon United strategy plays in that. And it is fundamental and I think it’s worth a couple of minutes here, David, to your question. Look, if you think about it, we’ve been at this for 10 years plus. We saw back then client need was changing. We saw that we need to help them make better decisions to protect and grow their business. We saw, frankly, this accrued across all aspects of risk, not just commercial risk, all aspects of what we’re doing, workforce health, talent, etcetera.

We also saw we had great capability. But like everyone around the world, it wasn’t joined up and it wasn’t driving innovation at scale. And we saw that loud and clear, David, in terms of where we are. We also saw, however, there were pieces and pockets when our colleagues work together. We win more clients, we do more with them. We retain them longer and we also deliver better and faster innovation at scale across the firm. And this fundamental truth, 10 years ago for us, created a great deal of excitement but it also created a real challenge which was, okay, that sounds great. Everybody talks about this. How do you do it? How do you accomplish that? And that’s the Aon United strategy. And this is back to your critical question, how do we maintain performance and drive it over time.

It is in Aon United. The challenge has been as we’ve evolved it and the opportunity is this required a fundamental design of organization around serving clients, training, learning, how we think about leadership development. Aon Business Service is fundamental to that and some real, frankly, price of admission to really do this, single brand, single P&L, single leadership team, etcetera and we are really bringing that online. And what you heard from both Christa and I and Eric’s comments as well is what we’ve done with Aon United is fundamentally to put us in a position to not just serve clients by solution lines that really cutting across solution lines to bring better capability to them. And in the current environment, the more difficult it becomes for clients, the more opportunity we have to bring value.

And that’s frankly what you’re seeing which is why we are confident in our ability to, frankly, not just make progress over the last decade as Christa highlighted but why we are so excited about the go forward.

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