Aon plc Class A KBW Insurance Conference 2026

Are going to move ahead so that we stay on schedule. Also, I imagine that this session is going to be incredibly informative. I want to welcome Greg Case, CEO at Aon. To kick off, I guess, the most obvious and immediate question, I just say USI. Obviously, this was big news, and I was hoping you could talk through the thinking and the expectations of the deal.

Terrific. Happy to do it, Meyer. First, I want to say to you and to KBW, thank you very much for hosting Aon. We very much appreciate it and very much look forward to the discussion today. USI. When you think about USI, you have to start first and foremost with Aon and the foundation of Aon over the last number of years, in particular, what we've done over the last three years. So you start with a foundational approach and understand this thing we call the 3x3 Plan, which were some massive big bets on structural change at our firm, Risk Capital and Human Capital. If you don't understand what that means and Aon matters to you, dig in and understand it. That is a structural change, the organizational change, which means commercial risk and reinsurance are in the same conversation, not combined, but in the same conversation.

Talent, health, and wealth are also part of the same conversation. This sounds trivial. It's not trivial. When you show up with a client and you understand integrated risk, you have different solutions and you get different outcomes, and clients know it. So it's something we looked at in 2002 and 2003 and felt like we had to do to structurally strengthen and align our firm so we could deliver one of the other pillars of the 3x3, three initiatives over three years, and that's data analytics and what we do on Aon Business Services. The engine around the analytics, our analyzers, our capabilities, all around Aon Business Services, connected data in ways no one in our industry has ever connected it before through our team, Risk Capital and Human Capital to our clients.

That's enabled us to win and be very fortunate across a number of different fronts. Data centers as being one of the great examples and what we've been able to do there. When you show up with a client and you actually have that integrated view, they get different answers. Trillion-dollar market cap companies get different answers on how they build them, how they manage risk, and the stakes are massive. We'll come back and hopefully talk about that a little bit. That's the strength of Aon. That's the foundation. In our view, if you think about the last four quarters, two of the last four quarters, we've applied this mostly in commercial risk, U.S. commercial risk. Two of the last four quarters, U.S. commercial risk at Aon was greater than 10% organic. Greater than 10% organic in a market that was challenged, supposedly.

So from our standpoint, we are making massive progress. That is the strength of our firm. That is a number that we believe is multiples of our current share price, in terms of what the possibilities might be. There were two opportunities for us that mattered, two big opportunities that mattered, and one is U.S. middle market, and the second was the E&S marketplace. Our view was, if we can continue to make progress on the platform and address those two areas of potential opportunity, this is even a stronger platform. So this is about strength on strength, and that was the goal. U.S. middle market. We spent 20 years watching U.S. middle market, Meyer, as you know, and others accumulated EBITDA. They had EBITDA multiple arbitrage at zero cost debt. That is a good gig if you can get it. In the end, that persisted for a while.

We did not enter this space with a vengeance because our view was we couldn't create better. All we could do is get bigger. Better came along with Aon Business Services. Aon Business Services, again, 16,000 of the 16,000 Aon colleagues, we can now invest into the middle market and create better, not just bigger. NFP. NFP was the first major step to do that. With our current Aon middle market assets, we made great progress. That has been two years, Meyer, and four months, give or take. It has been phenomenal. What does that mean? Top 400 producers are up 22% new business. So literally, top 400 producers up 22% new business. Client retention, we think there is a 500 basis point opportunity. We have captured 200 basis points in the first two years. Producer retention. Producer retention is higher now than it was pre-deal. Why? Not because we are a bunch of nice guys, but necessarily they are getting more content and capability to do with clients more than they ever have before.

That was the thesis. If we can bring the enterprise insight, large commercial insight into the middle market, that is better. Then we could be bigger. That platform with NFP has worked exceptionally well, but we still weren't as relevant as we needed to be. My counterparts would tell me time and time again, "Great work, Greg. That is fantastic, but it is not really relevant for us in the U.S. middle market." That is why we took the step with USI. USI gets us to a place where we have a platform. Do not think about this as USI. That is not the bet we are making. The bet is USI plus NFP plus the Aon assets.

That is a $6.5 billion platform revenue. That is relevant. Relevant and also better, because we are going to bring the content in that we prove with NFP into USI. Our view is that is a great, strong platform. Again, not the integrated strategy of Aon. That is what I described at the beginning. But it is a pillar that we think has real vibrancy. USI was picked for a very specific reason. Because USI spent the last 15 years like we did, trying to connect their firm. They are going to run to that mission, not run away from it. They believe in content following relationship. Relationship first with content. That is exactly where we are. Complementary to what we have done with NFP. Mike Sicard is going to run the integrated program, the platform. Mike Sicard, if you know him, has done a phenomenal job at USI.

He is excited about taking that mission to now a bigger platform and bringing better to the middle market. Better to the middle market than what we have now. That is why we loved USI and the opportunity with USI and Mike Sicard. We could stop there and we would be good, Meyer. That would be good. They also invested in the other area, as it turns out, and they have 300 appointments into the E&S world. For us, that was a real unique benefit. If you think about it, pick an example. When we complete a major data center and the opportunity, it is often the top 10-15% of that gets done into the wholesale market and then the E&S market, because the admitted market just not enough capacity. We will come to that at some point.

If we actually had direct access to the E&S market, we would finish the placement. That opportunity is very real. There are many other opportunities we can get into on the E&S side. So USI brings an integrated view. They bring the platform to complete the platform. They bring the ability to actually access the E&S market directly. Oh yeah, one other thing. That machine we described, Aon Business Services, 16,000 colleagues, the content behind that is literally our secret sauce. Our AI understanding and drive, which we have been doing for 10 years, is really around first starts with content. The content we now have in the U.S. middle market is substantially greater with the $11 billion of premium flow that comes with USI on top of what we have. So the platform, check. E&S, check. Data content, check. Mike Sicard can run and is excited to do it.

We felt really good about USI overall. Then finally, you get the price. You need to understand, price for us is very different than what we typically have done with the U.S. middle market. That is a thesis we all know well and sorry for the long-winded answer, but just to get it on the table, then you can hit it from that point. It is a tried and true opportunity. You decide you are going to sell a year from now. You work your EBITDA for a year, and you massage it however you are going to massage it in beautiful ways. Then you suggest to the seller that they have 20% or 30% or 40% of add-ons they should make. Everybody agrees to that. They all think the price to that looks good, and everybody walks away and says it is good.

We did not do that. Sorry. Did not do that. USI really was not looking to sell. They are part of KKR. The balance sheet opportunity, fantastic. A lot of time with Scott Nuttall on this. Absolutely. By the way, in the end, there was not a data room. There was no pristine opportunity. We essentially stripped this back and said, "Tell us what you think." They did. You see it in the exhibits. The number, 990 and change therefore, or thereabouts, and we basically accepted nothing on the add backs. Basically 10% maybe, fraction. Then we built up a set of synergies. If you get in the side meetings, our interim CFO, Nadin Virani, who is here, has done a brilliant job.

He has run this for months and months and months, ran the entire architecture on that synergy piece. For us, the $395 million, by the way, it is EBITDA synergy. We are not talking about revenue and cost here. It is straight EBITDA we are tracking. We will talk about the split. We feel very good about. This was a set of operators around the table with Nadin in the budget locking down the synergies. For us, this is a 14.5x multiple gig, to get the benefits I just described. We love this platform as a value creation opportunity, which is also why we did this on the balance sheet. We wanted our current shareholders to benefit from what we are up to. That is a long-winded answer, Meyer, but it really was an attempt to say what were we thinking about, and we know everybody in this space. We know every opportunity. For us personally, I have been doing this for a little while.

I think this may be one of the highest value creation opportunities we have seen at Aon over the next few years than I have seen in maybe in my tenure. That is the background. Okay.