Willis Towers Watson Public Limited Company Ordinary Shares 2026 Q3 Earnings Call

Please go ahead. Thanks, Claudia, and good morning, everyone.

Thank you for joining us for WTW's third quarter 2026 earnings call. Joining me today is Andrew Krasner, our Chief Financial Officer. Julie Gebauer, our President of Health, Wealth & Career, and Lucy Clarke, our President of Risk & Broking, are also joining us for our Q&A session. In the third quarter, we delivered 4% organic growth, 150 basis points of adjusted operating margin expansion, and 18% adjusted EPS growth. This quarter's results demonstrate the strength and resilience of our model, the continued benefits of our technology investments, and our team's commitment to our clients and to cost discipline. Across both segments, we grew the top line and expanded margins, allowing us to deliver double-digit earnings growth. R&B grew 5% organically, led by our North American international regions as our strategy continues to drive growth, especially in our global specialty lines.

Health, Wealth & Career grew 4%, with the health and career businesses leading the way. We see solid momentum in our pipeline and feel confident in our position as we head into the fourth quarter. We continue to execute consistently on our strategy and accelerate the pace of technology and AI use. I'd like to start today's commentary with an update on our strategic progress and the rollout of Propel, our AI acceleration plan we introduced last quarter. I'll then share some observations on market conditions, and Andrew will take you through our results and outlook in more detail. Our strategy to accelerate performance, enhance efficiency, and optimize our portfolio continues to create value in the face of a volatile economic environment.

The best evidence is the business we're winning, with both new and longstanding relationships converting into large mandates, thanks to our expertise, innovation, and increasingly efficient client delivery model. Let me share a few success stories from the quarter that highlight how our strategy is resonating. In Health, Wealth & Career, we're seeing strong demand for our AI-enabled offerings, including our AI Workforce Transformation solution. This quarter, we were selected by a Fortune 500 energy company to lead a large-scale AI workforce transformation, where we're designing the skills framework, operating model, and enterprise-wide adoption approach. The engagement grew from our strong relationship with the client's leadership team, enabling us to identify the need early and position WTW as a strategic advisor. Making smart connections continues to be an effective growth driver for HWC.

One of the largest utilities companies in the U.S., a longtime retirement and health and benefits client, expanded its relationship with us to add full Benefits Delivery & Outsourcing for roughly 50,000 employees and retirees, an expanded Embark deployment, and benefit account administration. We also recorded another prominent smart connections win with a fast-growing global AI infrastructure company whose U.S. workforce has grown more than tenfold since January. The company awarded us a seven-figure engagement spanning health and benefits plan management, global benefits governance, our LifeSight Pooled Employer Plan, and employee communications. The relationship's already expanded beyond HWC and is creating opportunities for our Corporate Risk and Broking business. In Risk & Broking, our specialization strategy continues to drive wins.

In Latin America, our construction team secured a construction all risks and excess liability program for a global medical technology company's new manufacturing facility, while our risk and analytics and catastrophe modeling capabilities helped us win the property program for a leading energy group. Both wins demonstrate the strength of combining local relationships with global specialty expertise. As innovation accelerates across the defense and security sector, we're seeing growing demand for specialized risk solutions that can keep pace with rapid technological development and complex government procurement requirements. This quarter, one of our global specialty teams brought that expertise to a fast-growing defense technology company, helping it address complex liability, operational, and personnel risks ahead of a critical testing milestone, and to advance its commercial and funding objectives. We also continue to see strong new business momentum across other specialty lines.

A global sports and apparel company that appointed us across all lines earlier this year has already expanded the scope of our engagement, a direct result of our quick execution and our ability to bring unique specialty expertise to the relationship. Finally, in Insurance Consulting and Technology, a leading global insurer expanded its longstanding relationship with us by extending our Radar pricing and underwriting platform across its international retail lines. Radar will enhance pricing and risk selection across its global footprint, demonstrating how deeper AI integration continues to increase the value of the platform. Across both segments, these wins demonstrate that our strategy of building deep, trusted relationships and adding value with specialty expertise, proprietary data, and differentiated technology is resonating with clients. Let me take a few minutes to expand on that last point regarding technology. Last quarter, we shared Propel, WTW's AI acceleration plan.

Among the many benefits of Propel and our broader technology investments are the opportunities they create to differentiate our businesses, strengthen our client value proposition, and drive growth. We are focused on applying these capabilities to build new solutions, elevate existing ones, and serve clients more effectively. One example of innovation is our recently launched Via Retirement solution, which we believe is a game changer for individuals who are transitioning from employment to retirement. Via Retirement is built on our deep expertise and experience in retirement and investments. It combines sophisticated AI-enabled financial planning support with an intuitive digital experience and a marketplace of institutional-grade investment vehicles and annuities at lower fees than the retail market. The Via Retirement end-to-end experience is designed to help people move into retirement with greater confidence that the money they have saved throughout their career will meet their financial needs.

For our corporate clients, this means a trusted path for their employees as they become retirees. For WTW shareholders, this is an exciting expansion into a large and underserved market. In another example of AI development, we collaborated with Microsoft to build an agentic administration process within Violet, our outsourcing AI suite. It is now deployed and managing end-to-end workflows for 160 vendors across more than 20 clients. This means agents complete vendor exports, HRIS data imports, and case management with human oversight. The model directs colleague attention to where it matters most, decisions that require contextual expertise. While saving tens of thousands of human hours so far, it also sets the operational foundation to extend the capability to additional workflows and client programs. In other words, this is the start of a new operating model for our BD&O businesses.

As I shared earlier, our AI Workforce Transformation solution, launched in June, is winning engagements with some of the largest employers in the U.S. In September, we also announced a partnership with Lyzr, an enterprise agentic AI platform company, to help clients move from workforce transformation planning to execution by embedding AI agents directly into HR workflows. In Insurance Consulting and Technology, we are leveraging our expertise and technological capabilities to help insurers embed AI into pricing, underwriting, portfolio management, and risk modeling, including the Radar AI Assistant we released in September, which enables underwriters and portfolio managers to uncover emerging risk signals in their data using natural language. We are also using AI to make it easier for clients to work with us and with their own data.

In September, CRB launched RiskIQ Nexus, a risk intelligence platform that brings a client's policy, premium, loss, and exposure information from multiple sources into a single connected view. Its AI capabilities ingest documents in multiple languages and lets risk managers ask and answer questions about their own program, such as: What coverage do we have? What is our total cost of risk? Which renewals are coming up? Nexus can hold a client's full program, and our specialists are looped in and on call to help clients interpret and act on the information that Nexus surfaces. We are rolling out Nexus to clients globally. Of course, AI is also helping us enhance efficiency, allowing our colleagues more time for what matters, like innovation, client-facing activities, and strategic priorities that support growth. Since we announced Propel, we have mobilized work streams across the company.

As I explained last quarter, many of these initiatives build on work already in progress. Propel gives us a structured and governed way to accelerate proven ideas and scale them across WTW. In addition to the initiatives I've already mentioned, we're currently deploying technology to help our retirement actuarial teams complete valuations faster. In health, we're scaling automation across claims, servicing, and benefits administration. In CRB, we continue to roll out our AI-enabled operating model across our broking operations globally, adapted to each region's regulatory and data requirements. That includes an AI assistant now in the hands of our client service and placement colleagues in North America, helping service teams produce client-ready documents faster and letting brokers hand off routine analysis and submission work. As part of this, we already have several AI agents that are live today handling high-volume, rule-based tasks such as issuing certificates.