Marsh & McLennan Companies, Inc. (NYSE:MMC) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Dean Klisura : Thanks, John. And Jimmy, maybe I’ll give you a little color between property cat and casualty as John mentioned. As John noted, we expect challenging market conditions to persist for property cat at the upcoming January 1 renewal, as John noted, driven by inflation. As you’re reading about, I mean, cat losses continue to be very elevated. Many attritional losses. Many billion dollar plus events this year. Political instability continues. We do expect pricing to remain firm in property cat. It will vary region by region. It won’t be what we saw last year, as an example, in the U.S. and Europe, but we do think that firmness will be there. We do expect additional capacity and an increased appetite from reinsurers to write more business, particularly at higher attaching property cat layers.

But I think the key is we expect reinsurers to continue to exhibit that discipline on attachment points, pricing and terms, and I don’t see anything going backwards. As John noted, we think property cat capacity in the market will remain adequate. And as John noted, we think it will be a more manageable renewal for our clients. without that significant supply, demand imbalance and dislocation that we saw last year. And we do expect increased demand for our clients to buy more reinsurance and particularly key regions like Europe. On the casualty side, for U.S. Casualty, as John noted, the market is trending very cautiously. And all of our meetings with reinsurers this fall, everybody expressed concern with prior year loss development in U.S. casualty and certain lines, again, driven by economic and social inflation.

And we do expect some downward pressure from reinsurers on seating commissions for our clients with quota share contracts and certain casualty lines. But in casualty, we do expect capacity to remain adequate.

John Doyle: The cost of risk, Jimmy is rising, and it’s up to us to find the best solutions in the market for both our insurance and reinsurance clients. And so, I think we’re well positioned to do that. Do you have a follow-up?

Jimmy Bhullar: Just on Oliver Wyman. I think typically, you think of Oliver Wyman as being sensitive to economic uncertainty. And this year, the business has shown a lot of momentum. So maybe — I know you won the UBS, I don’t know UBS Credit Suisse integration contract, but I’m not sure how material that is. But what’s really driving Oliver Wyman? And what’s your sort of pipeline look like? And how do you think about it performing if the economy does, in fact, slow down?

John Doyle: Yes, thanks, Jimmy. Oliver Wyman has been more sensitive to GDP over time, but it’s also been a faster growing part of our business over time as well. And after a relatively slow start to the year, Oliver Wyman had a terrific run, is now having strong growth year-to-date and a very, very strong quarter. So, Nick, maybe you can share with Jimmy some color on how things look at Oliver Wyman.

Nick Studer : Thank you, John, and thank you, Jimmy. Yes, let me enlarge on that a little bit. It’s definitely not an easy environment for discretionary spending in our clients. I still see a fairly wide range of possible economic paths. But John called out our wider resilience of Marsh McLennan, and I’m proud that Oliver Wyman has demonstrated that resilience and chlorine our way back from a flat to Q1. And as Martin said as well, we do try to look at the business on a year-over-year basis more than a quarter-over-quarter basis, but it does matter. We’re quite a diverse business now, and we’ve been becoming more diverse. So, if you think about the sectors that are driving our growth in the regions, our India, Middle East and Africa region has been the biggest contributor to our regional growth with Europe also contributing strongly.