Aon plc (AON) September 2026 Conference Transcript

We are going to move ahead so that we stay on schedule, and 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'll just say USI. But obviously, this is big news, and I was hoping you could talk through the thinking and the expectations of the deal.

I'm happy to do it, Meyer. First, I want to say to you, the KBW, thank you very much for hosting Aon. We are very much appreciated 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 three by three plan, which were some massive big bets on structural change in our firm, risk capital and human capital. If you don't understand what that means and Aon matters to you, dig in and understand 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 sort of integrated risk, you may 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 can deliver one of the other pillars of the three-by-three, three initiatives over three years, and that's data analytics and what we do on AI Business Services. And the engine around the analytics, our analyzers, our capabilities, all around AI 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. And that's enabled us to win and be very, very fortunate across a number of different fronts. Data centers as being one and they're 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. And 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, US commercial risk, two of the last four quarters, U.S. commercial risk of down was greater than 10% organic, greater than 10% organic in a market that was challenged, supposedly. So from our standpoint, we're making massive progress. That's the strength of our firm. That's 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 one was the E&S marketplace. And so 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 sort of accumulated EBITDA. They had EBITDA, multiple arbitrage, a zero cost debt. That's a good gig if you can get it. And 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. And better came along with Aon Business Services. And Aon Business Services, again, 16,000 to the 60,000 Aon colleagues, we can now invest into the middle market and create better, not just bigger. NFP. So NFP was the first major step to do that. With our current Aon middle market assets, we made great progress. That's been two years, Meyer, and four months, give or take. It's been phenomenal. What does that mean? Well, top 200, Top 400 producers are up 22% new business. So literally, top 400 producers are up 22% new business. Client retention. We think there's a 500 basis point opportunity. We've captured 200 basis points in the first two years. Producer retention. Producer retention is higher now than it was pre-deal. Not because we're a bunch of nice guys, but necessarily they're getting more content and capability to do with clients more than they ever have before. And that was the thesis. If we can bring the enterprise insight, large commercial insight into the middle market, that's better. then we could be bigger. And so 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's fantastic, but it is not really relevant for us in the US middle market. And so that's why we took this step with USI. And USI gets us to a place where we have a platform. Do not think about this as USI. That's not the bet we're making. The bet is USI plus NFP plus the AI on assets. So it's a six and a half billion dollar platform. Revenue, that's relevant. That's relevant, relevant and also better because we're gonna 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's what I described at the beginning, but it's a pillar that we think has real vibrancy. And USI was picked for a very specific reason because USI spent the last 15 years like we did trying to connect their firm. They're gonna run to that mission, not run away from it. They believe in content following relationship. Relationship first with content. That's exactly where we are. Complimentary to what we've done with NFP. And Mike Sicard is going to run the integrated program, the platform. And Mike Sicard, if you know him, has done a phenomenal job at USI. He's 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's why we loved USI and the opportunity with USI and Mike Sicard. We could stop there and we'd be good, Meyer. Everybody? Good. But they also invested in the other area, as it turns out. And they have 300 appointments into the E&S world. And so, you know, for us, that was a real unique benefit. And if you think about it, pick an example. When we complete a major data center and the opportunity, it's often, you know, the top 10, 15% of that gets done into the, into the wholesale market, into the ENS market, because the admitted market just can't, not enough capacity will come to that at some point. And, you know, if we actually had access, direct access to the ENS market, we would finish the placement. That opportunity is very real. And there are many, many other opportunities we can get into on the ENS 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. And oh yeah, one other thing, that machine we described, AI on business services, 16,000 colleagues, the content behind that is literally our secret sauce. Our AI understanding and drive, which we've been doing for 10 years, is really around first starts with content. And the content we now have in the US 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, ENS, check, data, content, check. Mike's the card can run and he's excited to do it. We felt really good about sort of USI overall. And then finally, you get the price. And you need to understand, price for us is very different than what we typically have done with the US middle market. That's 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 then from that point. It's a tried and true opportunity. You decide you're going to sell a year from now. You work your EBITDA for a year and you massage it however you're going to massage it in beautiful ways. And then you suggest to the seller that they have, you know, 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's good. We didn't do that. Sorry. Didn't do that. USI really wasn't looking to sell. They're 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 wasn't 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. You know, the number, 990 and change, therefore, or thereabouts. And we basically accepted nothing on the ad backs. Basically 10%, maybe. And then we built up a set of synergies. And if you get in the side meetings, our interim CFO, Liden Varane, who's here, has done a brilliant job. He's run this for months and months and months, ran the entire architecture on that synergy piece. And for us, the $395 million, by the way, it's EBITDA synergy. We're not talking about revenue and cost here. It's straight EBITDA we're tracking. We'll talk about the split. We feel very, very good about it. This was a set of operators around the table with the DIN in the budget, locking down the synergies. So for us, this is a 14.5 times 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 Mount Chief. We wanted our current shareholders to benefit from what we're up to. So that's 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've 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've seen maybe in my tenure. So that's the background.

And in no way do I want to minimize that.

Oh, hit it.

We have another 30 minutes if you want to.

I heard every question. Go for it. Anything you want to go.

So let's talk about integration. Integration was highlighted as one of the focal points, obviously. What does it actually mean? What are the challenges and opportunities? I want to jump off maybe a point you made about juicing up new business production at NFP by 22%. Can you talk about how the integration plan will replicate that?

So integration for us is paramount. You will eventually see an already integration plan fully developed, ready to go. Again, the synergies were done in a very unique way. We've never seen them done the way we did them, very operationally. We probably have, of the $395 million we've described, 23 specific revenue initiatives, 10 specific cost initiatives, all of which are in terms of track. The revenue initiatives are on traditional, but we also have those associated with the, with, with the NS and all the opportunities around wholesale. So for us, it is very much around that integrated view. Again, with, with our overall team kind of at the helm, there's a steering committee, SACAR day to day, all the content going up through the DIN to our board. So we actually are all tracking exactly what we're doing, and mostly understand this is an integrated team. This is an Aon United team. It's a card. But also, you know, you watch. You know, the CEO, Doug Hammond, I think talks about this very positively. This is something Doug and I have had a great deal of conversation around, around how do you complete the platform? Oh, one other thing I should probably say. When we brought NFP into Aon, we were asked a couple of times, maybe a couple of times a day, are you buying another platform? Now, we never answered that. We just said we want to have relevance and we want to have meaning for our clients. And make no mistake about it. If you miss everything else, don't miss that admission. We are flat out going to have better content for our clients. And the analyzers, better content. Cyber analyzer, better content. Service, better content. We've proven we can do it with NFP. Now we're going to scale it with this platform. It's a platform. I just want to be clear. Platform's done. So I want to say now, no new platform acquisitions in the middle market in the U.S. We're done. So $6.5 billion, good platform. We don't need to be the biggest. We need to be the best. And we have a good platform. We're relevant. And we are going to run that play. So I just want to be clear from that standpoint. But the integration is going to be USI, NFP, colleagues from NFP, Mike Schneider, Ethan Foxman. These guys have really been part of NFP and now been elevated. They'll be part of Mike's team. Doug Hammond's still playing a role as executive chairman. All this is good. Very, very focused. And if you know one thing about Cigard, this is as an operator. So we've got the best operator in the world on a mission that he's incredibly excited about with an integrated team with a set of synergies we know, and we're gonna actually begin enacting the day after we close.

Fantastic, I'm gonna jump on the point you made in terms of synergies. A couple points, you had a lot of precision in terms of the revenue, expense, and EBITDA synergies that you're expecting. What are the key challenges? Where do you see the opportunity for upside?

All the challenges are real. We accept them. We know what they are. We've been through the movie multiple times before. Watch the history. Every time we bring someone in, there's always a concern and a reaction, and then there's our reaction. And our view is, Meyer, we've got to work the expense opportunities, and we are doing that. Ten initiatives laid out very specifically. This is Mindy Simon, our COO, and our teams, and then soon to be our efforts across USI, NFP, and Aon assets as well. The ones we're most excited about are the revenue opportunities, and they're meaningful. Again, I would just tell you we are committed to the 395. You know, those who know Aon know, you know, what that means in our world. That also means the opportunity is great. It is great. I mean just a few examples. So, USI, you know, essentially $11 billion, it's sort of a premium into the market. You know, like many, many middle market companies, they utilize wholesalers on 30%, 35%, you know, to sort of do those placements. By the way, just for reference, we put $26 billion in, and we maybe do a billion, a little over a billion. And ours are maybe some of the most complex placements. So the capability we have now, even before the wholesale comes on board, might be able to address the $3 billion that go to wholesale. And if you one could think about that, that's a real opportunity to serve clients better. That's the mission, but also that comes with a lot of other pieces too. So there are multiple, you know, angles here that are, from our view, are very clear and very apparent when you get a bunch of operators around the table, risk capital, human capital, and you talk about what they are. There's a tremendous amount that goes into London. Our capability in London is second to none. Aon Client Treaty, very unique, non-duplicated. in most fronts. So for us, those are very specific synergies that aren't two years away or one year away. They're one week away after close. So for us, a whole series of synergies from that standpoint. The other place you're going to see us spending a huge amount of time is with our producers. And no doubt, as you've all heard, everyone will hear, oh my God, everybody's going to do this and that and the other. Look, all I can tell you is this. We'll do our level best on retention, just like we did with NFP. Again, remind you, higher retention now than pre-deal. That's unheard of. And it isn't because we're a bunch of nice guys. It's because they get more stuff. Sorry. And we're not changing CompGrid. Therefore, they might accidentally, you know, more stuff, same CompGrid, they might get paid more. They get to wow their clients. So for us, we're going to do our level best to sort of make sure that's right. And that's also a big part of the synergies too. And our view is the new business impact we had at NFP, why can't we have that at a minimum at USI? And by the way, even with Aon, because remember at Aon, the assets inside of Aon were kind of embedded inside of Aon. They weren't called out as a platform and they were phenomenal, but they can be better and better as part of an integrated platform in terms of what we're trying to accomplish. So for us, this, you know, the idea the retention, synergies, all that go with it, revenue, cost side, we think there's lots of upside. But what we are clear is the absolute primacy of delivering $3.95.

Okay, fantastic. I will be surveying the room to see if there are questions there. I want to make sure that everyone is getting their questions answered. One important topic that I want to focus on, though, is in the E&S marketplace, or re-entering E&S, re-entering wholesale. For those of us that were around in 2004 and 2005. This is not a small issue. Clearly not a legal problem, but it was a big deal once upon a time. I was hoping you could talk through how you're viewing that marketplace and maybe a little bit more color on the opportunities.

Well, listen, we've been so fortunate at Aon. Our team has been really wonderful in all the effort I described at the beginning. We have the platform and that platform has been curated and worked damn hard. Risk capital, human capital, Aon Business Services, this is a fundamental machine, and it actually should get better and better and better on behalf of clients. Huge. It's served us reasonably well. And by the way, we see massive opportunity ahead. And the AI piece, I know you had the session on yesterday, we've been doing machine learning and AI for a number of years. I have said on a few calls, we put an early generation NVIDIA chip into an Aon solution called Pathwise in 2009. That was before it was cool to be doing this stuff, okay? And so for us, we love it. AI is not a strategy, but it is an accelerant to a strategy. And it's helped us accelerate massively sort of around that. And you watch the middle market and now what we're doing in the middle market. You watch ENS. ENS is now 26% of the flow in the US. And by the way, we have great access, but it's indirect access. And it's through a great group of wholesalers. And this is not about going after our wholesale partners at all. I've had conversations with CEOs of all of them. I mean, this is a massive area. And now we have direct access to it. We also have direct access through our MGUs and MGAs. You saw us also announce the Tuesday before USI, Totalus Specialty. That is not Aon brand, but Totalus. This is where all this is going to come from and drive. A guy named Kip Kelly, who ran our affinity business, and Tom Gillingham, who ran the business at NFP, have come together to sort of form Totalus Specialty. So ES, ENS for us is a real opportunity to access market. Again, think about it. You finish a, you know, what is a $5, $10, $15 billion opportunity in data centers. And again, I hope we get a chance to talk a little bit about those. And in doing so, you have to top it off because the admitted market is tapped out. And you hand it to the ENS market. You hand it to a wholesaler. There's no more content than Aon has. You don't have that right now. but we need the capacity and we need to sort of get it filled. That's all gonna go away, Myra, at the high end. And then think about the opportunities. Totalus Specialty, by the way, now serves, and this is an eight or $900 million revenue business. Just for reference, this is not a startup. We have 21,000 independent agents that access through Totalus Specialty our programs in MGUs and MGAs, 21,000. We probably have 40% of their submissions each year, 40% that don't apply to those programs directly. We dump them. How do you guys feel about that? Feeling good about the fact that, you know, literally we got 40%, you know, this is circa called 16,000 applications in which we say, nah, I don't want you today. That's what we do. That's stopped. That's now going to be addressed. So for us, this isn't a one-off thing. It's a very, very specific. And by the way, we have it all laid out in the first year and the first 24 months and what we're doing but our view is there are very specific things we can do right now and then there are a whole series of things over time again benefit to client to get a better solution better coverage better analytics and we're going to be able to do it and we couldn't have done it before and so we literally took the 16 000 and gave them back to the market we gave to wholesalers we're not going to do that so these are again very explicit pieces and places that we know we can apply, and then we'll see what happens. But again, it's a massive market, so please don't walk out the room and think this is not about Amwins or Ryan or CRC. It's not at all. These are great partners, and they'll be great partners for a long time, hopefully, even better. But we are going to access the E&S market. It's 26% of the flow. Our clients need it. We're doing it. So the fact that we had 300 appointments as part of USI was a big wow. And Mike's worked that for three years, and they were just beginning to think about how they were going to apply them. By the way, the revenue is de minimis. So don't go look for the revenue of ENS at USI because it's just starting. The 300 appointments is what we heard. That's what got us excited, and that gave us the access. Because if you think about it, for us to get that kind of access and buying somebody, the breakage is high because we have a whole series of competitors who are placing into those groups too. You really can't buy one. So you have to do it organically. This was the most elegant opportunity around organic we've ever seen. Okay.

I'm going to follow up on the organic side because I think this is a question I've gotten a lot, and that is with all of the tools you've provided Aon producers, you've had really, really strong organic growth. That's outpaced what USI has been doing. What's the pathway in timeline not for generating organic growth through the wholesale side that benefits Aon, but for individual producers at USI to match Aon?

So one excellent question. You should do all the analysis you need to do in any way you want to do it. The analysis focused on USI and USI growth, I would say, is an interesting one that has modest relevance. Why? It is at USI. It's USI and NFP and Aon together as that platform. By the way, if Nadine were up here, he would commit to mid-single-digit or greater organic growth over time, just as we have been forever. By the way, we believe this platform is going to reinforce the time for, or greater. Mid-single-digit's nice, or greater's better. So we're going to, we're really, our view is we know the, listen, we know the formula now. So the CEO is really slow. It's taken a long time. We did unit productivity forever. And by the way, we got pretty good at it. We didn't actually hire that many people over a long period of time. Better than unit productivity is unit productivity and more units. Someone told us that, and now we're right. And so if we do all those things, that's part of what we have in the context of it. By the way, USI, like NFP, is going to benefit hugely. That's going to be good. Also, Mike Sicard has done fewer and fewer acquisitions over the last three years. He has instead diverted to a fewer hiring engine. And by the way, you know, he We probably have, you know, one of our ad backs could have been, let's take the X percent, high percent of producers who you brought in over the last year, produce nothing, have zero revenue. And we have that in the till. We'd say we won't accept that. But by the way, does that have opportunity? In fact, the hiring engine that USI has, we love. I can see us putting that across the platform in terms of where we are. Point being, literally in the end, you should expect from us, mid-seql, digit or greater, soft market whatever that means hard market whatever that means weird I don't really doesn't really matter and and we're going to literally have to deliver that that's going to be you know that we that is our that is our focal point our view is over time this helps us do that more effectively so be clear we're not going backward in mid single digit or greater period under any and by the way did we with nfp and nfp was you know supposedly lower too we got the exact same questions. We just went to work. And in the end, during the time we owned NFP, the last 24 months, 10%, greater than 10% organic in two of the four quarters in U.S. commercial risk. Like, I'm not saying, I know you guys are thinking about it going, you're probably asking what I ask, which is why not four quarters out of the four quarters? But two out of the four quarters is unique. And that's part of why this formula, in our view, is a good would add to what that chassis was that I started with.

I was going to ask why not 15%, but different questions.

I might have asked that too, but anyway. But greater than 10, greater than 10.

This will be my last question on USI, but again, I welcome questions to the audience. Talk a little bit about the funding. You mentioned a little bit about how you wanted your current investor base to reap the benefits of this. But it's a large dollar amount. So how did you, what was the decision-making process to do it on the basis of all cash, no equity?

Simple. First of all, we can, and we want to make sure you're comfortable we can. Heard a lot of different stir around, you know, why and how and what do you think? And in the end, we feel highly confident in our 395. Start there. Second, watch what we did with NFP. We went up and then we came down faster than everybody thought, started buying back stock faster than everybody thought. But remember, we did something unheard of in NFP. we sold a piece of the business in the 24 months we were integrating them. Who does that? Did you guys hear about that? Not really, because you never heard about it. We just did it. And it was, you know, it was multiple billions. We sold the wealth business. I know you knew about it, but it missed me in. It wasn't a big deal from the standpoint of, like, there was no some consternation. Who does that? You're sitting in an office of 10 people and two of them are leaving. And everybody's good with it. So, seriously, we sold a business. That's not CEO 101 stuff. We're not supposed to do that. We've done 150, give or take, sales in the last decade, circa $8 billion in cash. So if one wants to understand how important re-underterm invested capital to us is, understand the pain of selling business, $150, $8 billion, including one we did within the construct of the two-year period we were integrating them on the wealth side to both, by the way, drive return on invested capital, protect the balance sheet, do what we're doing. So from our standpoint, straight up cash and all we have is the $17 billion. We pay it down. We're committed to an investment grade rating. By the way, you've seen it. We did the res-ras. There was no change in rating. So Moody's, S&P, good. Understand what we're trying to do. And then on top of it, understand we also have other means. we've got everything stacked and racked and we understand where our businesses are and what they look like. So our view is we have a commitment to pay down and we will do that. And we will very quickly get to our undervalued stock as well as we think about that as a priority. In the meantime, if something doesn't quite work, our ability to actually be quite nimble is high. And even if it does work really well, we still may be nimble in terms of sort of what we're doing. But our view is we can pay down the $17 billion very, very quickly, certainly in the time frame we've laid out. And we want the benefit to accrue to our current shareholders. Frankly, given our current valuation, it kills us to think about spreading that out. So we can and we did.

Moving along to other news, I guess. So Greg and I, I don't think we ran into each other. We were both in Monte Carlo this week. And one of the first pieces of news was Aeon Blackstone. I was hoping you could touch on that a little bit.

Did anybody notice that in New York? Probably not, right? Okay, all right.

It was a big deal in Monte Carlo.

It was a big deal in Monte Carlo, that's true. It was leaked in Monte Carlo. So I guess, just seriously, does anybody know what we're talking about here or not at this point? Probably not. Okay, a couple people do. If you're in Monte Carlo, if you know what Monte Carlo is, that's kind of the good and the great, and unfortunately, that's all. They were talking about the first question and the second question. Those were the two questions that were being addressed. So what came across was a leak story that said Aon and Blackstone are doing something and Blackstone's going to take a piece of the Aon flow, some version of that, okay? All right, so let's start, let's step back. Remember that platform I described at the beginning, risk capital, human capital, the machine around analytics? It's real. And if you want proof points of real, you don't listen to somebody like me. Who cares what I say? What you watch is the feed of the capital. And if you can draw capital in, you're having an impact. You draw capital into a Jamaica cap on, you know, and, you know, cover for a category five hurricane, that's called content. Because capital doesn't pay attention to people like me. They pay attention to content. If they think you get a return, they'll come. So just start with that premise. Understand that. Our analytics are unique. Here's a proof point. If you believe we need to do more and get more capital in our industry so we can actually address the risks of our clients, if you believe risks are going up, severity going up, All these things are happening. Complexity is going up, and you need to bring more capital in. We've got a $5 trillion industry, guys. All the balance sheets in our industry, $5 trillion, give or take. And there's more we can do. And if you think about even the data centers, greatest example. If the data centers happen in the way we think they're going to happen, and they are, we're way outstripping the industry. So how do you do this? And in the end, our view is our ability to be relevant from a content standpoint in a data center, for example, is huge. I mean, we just finished a piece with a client in which we did a $20 billion placement. Now, that would have been impossible had they not listened to us and they did what they were going to do, which is build their $20 billion facility in one spot, get to all the lights, camera, greatest thing ever, you're amazing. The problem is our industry has a massive allergic reaction to concentration risk. So we convinced them to build it in modules. They did. And we did a series of $5 billion placements that got their full coverage. That's real relevance. And then, by the way, if they get coverage, they change their financing structure and they change their operating volatility. So forget insurance. We are changing the financing structure of this company for their data centers. If you say what's short of this over time, it's the capital in our industry. $5 trillion is not big enough. By the way, the access points are all over the place. Pension, sovereign, PE. That adds up to $250 trillion. So we don't need all that, right? It's not coming anyway. But a tiny fraction of that increases to $5 trillion, could even double it. That means if we can actually help clients understand the value and they pay for it, we're not talking about unit price reduction. We're talking about they pay for it. How cool would that be? Our industry has a lot more relevance and it's a massive, massive boost for our clients. And by the way, everybody gets paid a lot more. Everybody does great. Our clients do great. So we've done a number of things. You know, one thing you might have heard about these things, reshare opportunities. Reshare opportunities are when you work with an insurer and you take all their treaties and you amalgamate them together. You create a bit of a mini index, if you will. And we worked with, you know, some of the PE firms to do a sliver of that. Well, that's beneficial for the insurance company. That's beneficial for clients. It brings more capacity. it's called Reshare. And we were the pioneers of that. We did the first of those. And we did one with the counterparty named Blackstone. This is different. Imagine if you wanted to actually participate in our industry. You can buy a company, hire a team, hope they're good, have them develop over the next five years and create a diversified portfolio. Hopefully that all works well for you. Or Aon might have the analytic horsepower to take our entire flow on the reinsured side, the whole thing, this is tens and tens and tens and tens of billions of dollars. It is the most diversified portfolio in the world in reinsurance, period. And if we could actually create the means for you to understand it as capital, and we gave you the opportunity to take a piece of that, what would that be worth to you? And how would you think about it? I can tell you what it'd be worth for our clients. It'd be very, very powerful, especially if that counterparty was someone of the yoke of Blackstone. and especially if they also created preferred outcomes for clients as they came in. Think about duration. Think about dividend. Think about a whole series of other things. Imagine they did that and imagine what that would mean for clients. So the reason this was a big deal at Monte Carlo is every reinsurer in the world is there wondering what that means. And the answer doesn't mean anything for you. You're one of the best in the world. Your underwriting muscle is what produced that massive, massive portfolio we have. That's going to be relied on. you're golden. And we, in essence, have Blackstone coming in to actually take a piece of that overall portfolio. Conceptually, it all comes together in a way in which our clients benefit. The market's bigger. We're going to do it through Lloyd's. So it's on a syndicate. We have someone doing it, not us. We're not going to on a syndicate. Andros want to do that. We want to have others get that benefit. All this is clean, tight, new capital. By the way, not just new capital, some of the most substantial capital in the world and permanent and you can say well that's the other thing no no let's have the conversation if you want to permanent so literally what we're talking about is us with our analytic capability creating that transparency such that Blackstone would come in and say we'll take that piece we'll give preferred outcomes for clients for a multi-year period and it's a great great thing all through Lloyd's so yes that was it wasn't announced that way, you just got more content than anybody got probably in it. What you heard was a something going on with Aon and Blackstone. That's what was leaked. And this is what we're talking about. And, you know, could not happen. It's possible. But we're this close to being able to pull that off. And that's net new, raw, permanent capital that is going to be, we think, innovative and meaningful against an index we've created because of the content we've got. So in any event, it's kind of a thing. It's kind of a big deal, frankly. It might be bigger than the first topic, to be blunt.

Okay. The first topic was a big deal, too. I want to talk about AI. There was one day in February, we wake up, and apparently insurance brokers are no longer necessary because we have chat GPT. Personally, I never bought into that thesis. I thought very, very few small entities are going to go without insurance and rely on their own skill set. What worried me is if you get to the larger end of things where you've got very sophisticated insurance buyers that are large corporate risk managers, they might be less dependent on some of the ancillary services, consulting that goes along with their brokerage. Is that a realistic concern, why we're not?

So I have a hard time with this one because every time you try to justify what you're doing, you sound so defensive, right? So it's like, and it's like, the only answer is you're just an idiot and don't understand AI, Greg, so what are you talking about? So anyway, I'll take that risk today, so forgive me. I'll take the risk. Look, I know, I'm sorry. I see more opportunity now than I've ever seen in my 20 years in my role. And I can be myopic, but more. Why? Not because anything's special, because demand's going up. We don't always recognize demand and we can't respond to demand, but it's going up. I mean, quite literally, the data center example, demand going up. Cyber, we have a $15 billion nothing. It's not big enough. It needs to be bigger. By the way, clients have to pay for it. So understand, clients have to recognize the value of buying down volatility in a way that drives their market to book up. If they get that right, they'll pay for it. We need to use our analytics to convince them of that. And that will bring more capital in. So we're not talking about capital just coming in to sort of do nice things and be good. So all these things to us are our opportunity. And if we can't respond to it, shame on us. But if we do, we're not worried about how we get compensated for it and recognized for it. But remember, this is what I think is completely missed. This is not a pure linear optimization game. I know all the markets. They're in my chat GPT. I know all the programs that have ever been written in the history of the world. And I know everybody I need to talk to. Bam, here's your story. Sorry. They don't understand what we do. This is a set of distributions talking to distributions, and they're all changing all the time. And then somebody's jobs depended on actually that answer. This is a mess. What is your exposure? No, no, I'm asking you. Tell me what your exposure is on this apparel. I want to know what is your exposure. That actually is a distribution. It depends on where the company is, what's going on in the world. That changes. Okay, I know my exposure all of a sudden. Great. Did all this analytics or I didn't. I got it. What are you going to do about it? How much are you going to keep? How much are you going to try to transact, put in the marketplace? Notice I haven't said insurance yet. That's a real decision. Again, it depends on what your businesses. If you're doing great or not doing great, I've decided I'm going to keep this much and eat it, and this much I'm going to transact. Who are you going to transact it with? Now we go to the insurers. Now we're into the optimization game, right? Okay. Really? All the insurers act exactly the same? No, no. We have their records. Good. Do they change their mind ever? Do they? I don't know. We have $1 billion of decline claims every year. $1 billion that we get paid. Hear the last part? That we get paid. I'm sure the algorithm would work too, but when you get the declination, it's like, nope, you're declined. We get them paid. So you basically have, what's my exposure? What do I keep? What do I transact? What's my service? Oh yeah, I just described the optimization program. Forget that. Blackstone, we just talked about, is not just market taking. Why am I putting the client in a position where all they do is take the market every day? Forget it. market making. We just changed the market structure. We just opened up an opportunity and an avenue for financial sponsors. That's 10 times the industry opportunity into what we can do. And it's not about lower costs. It's about more opportunity. So I look at it and go, hey, with that kind of mess out there in the world going on and all this stuff happening, if we can't find a way to help clients understand volatility and do something about it, shame on us. I think I like our chances. And by the way, it's not just with big companies. It's with the middle-sized companies and what we found with NFP. If you get it clean and right, you're talking to a CFO and a head of HR who are literally fighting for their company's life. You know, they blow a $50 million claim and they're done maybe. So for us, I look again, I come back and go, AI should help accelerate that. And by the way, it is. And last thing I'll say on this is the AI applications we have now aren't just cost. They're the analyzers. I mean, the reason we end up talking with, you know, Anthropic and Google and Microsoft and others, it's not because we're cool. I can promise you that. It's because we have AI use cases. I'm sorry, revenue use cases out of AI that are working. And that's cool. And so for us, we think it's both sides of the equation. We see the opportunity. We embrace it. We want to accelerate it. And look, it's definitely got its risks, I guess. but we see more opportunities than risk.

Okay. And we have time for one final question. And I apologize. It sounds almost petty to ask it, but I have to. How should we think about the next phase of the PNC cycle or the market impact in the context of Aon or Aon USI?

Got it. One last thing I have to add on the last question. And we bet a billion three on it. So we already took the wrath of God from our investors, all of you guys, when we said, hey, we're going to spend a billion dollars. And you're like, By the way, we spent a lot more than that, but a net billion three. So, you know, that was a big goal. The PNC cycle. So I won't have anything of nourishment for you, I'm sure. But at a macro level, you ask the question on demand supply, and you basically, if you believe the thesis I just described, over time, the unit prices, we're going to see movement up over time. Right now, we're in a moment, we're in a cycle. We haven't had any major events, et cetera. By the way, it's not one piece. The markets are very, very different. You know, I had the conversations with Monte Carlo. This happened a hundred times. So I listened to our experts. So Joe Pizer, Andy Marcel, and others, they would say it's going to be flat. It's going to flatten by June. Probably you're going to start to see it flatten a little bit. Their view, absent massive, anything massive, happened in terms of where we are. But over time, again, as it relates to Aon, you know we can't be about the cycle. So we're having conversations with our clients around literally how do you double down on specific areas, how do you buy more, what do you do, how do you protect from the future. So for us, our mid-simple-digit or greater holds no matter what the cycle is, but in our view it's more in pockets and it's it's more short-term and we'll see flattening by you know June mid-year this year, 27th. Okay.

I know people have stuff to do. I would go on for a couple of hours otherwise, but Greg thank you. This was tremendous.

We have a lot of ground. Thank you.