David Motemaden: Hi, thanks. Good morning. I had a question just on Oliver Wyman, and I know a few quarters ago, we spoke about the pipeline that had slowed a little bit, but growth has remained pretty resilient there. I’m wondering if you could just talk about some of the drivers there within Oliver Wyman for organic. And we’ve seen a few more – a little bit more activity on the life insurance transaction side, just M&A activity. Is that something that’s been an outside driver to results?
John Doyle: Yes, thanks, David. Oliver Wyman had a terrific year, and as we all recall, we had a flat start to 2023. So, demand continued to pick up and sales continued to pick up throughout the course of the year, and we had a real strong finish. But Nick, maybe you could share a bit more color on what drove the growth and your outlook a bit.
Nick Studer: Thank you, David, for the question. Yes, 12 months ago, we were coming off a pretty strong year, but we knew the first quarter was going to be tough. And looking back on the year, it was indeed a pretty tough marketplace for many of our competitors and for the industry, and we’re very proud of clawing back from that slow start to a strong year. It was pretty wide-based growth. As Mark mentioned in his prepared remarks, our Middle East business grew very strongly, had excellent growth in Europe. We had strong growth in our economic research capabilities, as well as in digital, in finance and risk. Some of our other capabilities grew, our people and organizational performance capability. And I’ve mentioned a few times that we’ve been building a restructuring practice.
It’s still not a big restructuring cycle, but that practice continues to grow very strongly. And across the industry is, again, broad-based growth in the public sector, which is a strong practice for us, particularly in the Middle East. Some good growth in banking. You mentioned life insurance and consolidation. We have a strong insurance practice. We’ve seen a lot more activity in post-merger integration and M&A across our sectors. And then our transportation and services and our communications media and technology practices also grew strongly. And I think it’s off the base of just good hiring, good organic growth, and also some good inorganic growth. We’ve made a number of acquisitions over the last few years. We announced one which we hope to complete in the next couple of months, and both great partner level hires and M&A are helping fuel that growth as well.
So, the business is now 50% bigger than it was three years ago. That scale, that breadth, allows us to play in more places, allows us to help our clients with their big transformative moments.
John Doyle: Thank you, Nick. And David, I would add, Oliver Wyman is just one of the ways in which we can show up in a very, very different way in front of clients and prospects. And so, we have a unique collection of capabilities, certainly with them and the family. Do you have a follow-up, David?
David Motemaden: I do, yes. Thanks for that. Just a bigger picture question. I just sort of look over the last decade or the decade pre-pandemic, Marsh as an enterprise has grown organically in the 3% to 5% range, and we’ve obviously been well above that over the last three years, including 9% here in 2023. There’ve been a number of tailwinds, but you guys have also been investing in the business. So, I’m wondering if you think we can sustainably grow above that 3% to 5% organic growth we saw in the decade pre-pandemic as we think about the next several years.
John Doyle: Yes, thanks, David. As I said just a couple of minutes ago, I think we’re a better business entering 2024 than we were in 2023. I thought we were an outstanding business leading into 2023, but we’ve been working hard at being a better growth business for many years now. Part of that’s reshaping the mix of business. As we’ve talked about, investing organically and inorganically. We’ve spent a lot of time refining our client engagement models and investing in sales operations and technology to support sales. And of course, in 2019, we made the biggest acquisition in our history with JLT. So, we were building up these capabilities going into 2020 when, of course, the pandemic hit. So, I knew we were ready to run coming out of the pandemic.
The macro environment, of course, has been supportive since the pandemic. And as I mentioned earlier, we expect the macros to continue to be supportive in in 2024. So, we think we’re well positioned. As I mentioned earlier, we expect mid single-digit revenue growth or better. So, we’re excited and quite optimistic heading into the year. Operator, next question, please.
Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Robert Cox with Goldman Sachs.
Robert Cox: Hey, thanks for taking my question. So, just curious if you could give us some more color on any changes in the middle market operating environment in particular, and anything you guys are thinking about in terms of competitive dynamics as some large peers enter this space in a bigger way.
John Doyle: I think you could ask Aon about NFP. I’m happy to talk about our middle market offering. I believe we have the best-in-class middle market US platform in MMA. It has been 12 years that we’ve been building our business here in the United States. And we’ve been building it out methodically and I’m very, very proud of it. We love competition. And so, I’ll take our team in the market, but we’re excited about our prospects at MMA. And candidly, I think we’re just getting started. And when we began this effort 12 years ago, there were 30,000 independent agents in the United States, and today there are 30,000 independent agents in the United States. So, there’s much more in front of us. Do you have a follow-up?
