Aon plc (NYSE:AON) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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And we’re seeing that. We’re really excited to see that strong growth in our core health and benefit business globally. Winning new clients, expanding the relationship with them across all aspects of that employee life cycle is gratifying and exciting. So we see a lot of opportunity with both risk capital and human capital, both in our strong core but also as we develop sort of new capabilities. But Christa, anything you could add to that?

Christa Davies: Well, I mean, Mike, you also did just ask about second half outlook. And we would say year-to-date growth was 7%. We do think about our results over the course of the full year. And we are on track for our full year guidance, mid-single-digit or greater organic revenue growth, margin expansion and double-digit free cash flow growth. And so we’re really excited about the momentum in the first half and that continuing into the second half. And I think just each quarter, we have different seasonality of revenue, but we really do think about it over the course of a full year. And so mid-single-digit or greater organic revenue growth for the full year.

Mike Zaremski: And my quick follow-up is curious on the expense efficiency side, a number of competitors have kind of talked about leaning in to be able to kind of find more ways to be efficient over the last, I guess, in this post-pandemic world and there’s different nuances to each company’s strategy, but it feels like some of them are taking off of the and United Playbook, which you guys were a first mover on. Just curious, is there anything you want to call out in terms of — do you see incrementally more opportunities today for expense efficiencies or nothing really to call out that’s getting you guys even more excited about kind of some margin levers in the coming year.

Christa Davies: Look, we do actually, Mike. So thank you for the question. Look, we are on the next evolution of Aon Business Services. And as I mentioned in my opening remarks, expanding from just driving efficiency to really improve customer service delivery, and innovation at scale, helping us accelerate growth. And so as we think about margins, we think about margins again over the course of the full year, sustainably and over the long term. And year-to-date, we saw 90 basis points of margin expansion, and offset by investments in the business including people and in our technology. In particular, you saw an increased investment in IT, 13% year-to-date. And the majority of this is around our core business platforms to help clients and support revenue growth.

And you saw CapEx up as well, again, driving long-term margin expansion through the continued investments around standardized operations, standardized platforms, and innovation at scale, which we are really excited about in Aon Business services.

Eric Andersen: Yes, one comment on it because we — I know the question was on efficiency, but the ability to leverage the analytics that we have inside of ABS helped us develop the human Sustainability Index, helped us create the insight that we’re able to bring to corporate clients. As they think about managing their climate exposure from a property standpoint, how all of that comes together is part of the ABS strategy and how we execute it. So while there is efficiency, there is great opportunity, I think, to drive new products, new solutions and better solutions that our larger clients are looking for us to help them.

Greg Case: And just to remind you, Mike, we brought in — we’ve been working on this since 2017, actually prior to that by 2017. We have literally with the leadership under Christa, our new COO and others brought an India tremendous amount of capability to bear. And now we’re on kind of the next wave, building on a very, very strong platform that we pulled together. So it’s — for us, we’re very excited about this. for both the efficiency reasons that Christa described very well and the effectiveness outcomes that Eric described. And that really is the muscle and the foundation of Aon Business Services. Very excited about it.

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