Aon plc. - Class A (AON) — Q1 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Thank you and good morning, everyone. Welcome to our first quarter conference call. I'm joined by Christa Davies, our CFO; and Eric Andersen, our President. As in previous quarters, we posted a detailed financial presentation on our website. We'd like to start by acknowledging the tremendous work of our colleagues across the firm. They continue to exhibit remarkable leadership, supporting clients in a challenging environment. We also want to thank our colleagues for their inspiring support of our team, their families, and others who have been impacted by the Russian war in Ukraine. This is a tragic example of increasing global volatility adding to the challenges facing organizations daily, including continued effects of COVID-19, especially in Asia; inflation; climate change; capital availability; and related impacts on supply chains, intellectual property, workforce resilience, and retirement readiness. In this environment, helping our clients protect and grow their businesses, support their employees, communities, and stakeholders has never been more important. Turning to financial performance, our team delivered an excellent first quarter and start to the year with 8% organic revenue growth, an increase from a strong prior year performance of 6% in Q1 2021. This top-line strength translated to a 38% adjusted operating margin, an increase of 60 basis points, and 13% adjusted EPS growth, demonstrating the power of our Aon Business Services platform to drive sustainable margin expansion and support growth. Within our solution lines, we highlight that in Commercial Risk, we delivered 9% organic revenue growth with growth in every major geography and particular strength in renewals and retention. Our teams are working incredibly hard to ensure our clients have the right coverage that fully considers the impact of inflation and other economic factors. Reinsurance Solutions organic revenue grew 7%, driven by continued strength in retention and new business generation worldwide as we help clients navigate a complicated and challenging risk environment. In Health Solutions, organic revenue grew 8%, reflecting global strength in core health and benefits and advisory work, especially around well-being and resilience. We also saw double-digit growth in consumer benefit solutions and human capital, with particular strength in our rewards and corporate governance and ESG practices as we see our clients increasingly focus on talent, compensation, and risks and opportunities related to ESG. Finally, Wealth Solutions organic revenue growth was flat in the quarter. Our retirement investments team continues to do excellent work, helping our clients address ongoing opportunities as well as regulatory changes and challenges. Priority development areas like delegated investment management and growth in the pool of employer plans were a highlight in the quarter. Looking ahead and fully recognizing increasing uncertainty in global complexity, for the full year 2022 and over the long term, we continue to expect mid-single-digit or greater organic revenue growth. We also expect margin improvement and double-digit free cash flow growth for the full year 2022 and over the long term. As we reflect on the strong combination of organic revenue growth and margin expansion in the quarter and our expectations for the year, we want to highlight that our Aon Business Services platform is becoming an increasingly powerful tool for client service and growth in addition to driving ongoing efficiency gains. For example, in recent discussions with a multinational chemical company, our Aon Business Services client dashboard changed the game in how we interact with them on their M&A growth strategy. Comprehensive data sets easily accessible to our team enable them to bring insights around the value of the client's intellectual property as a driver of their priority M&A activity. This created great value for them and opened up substantial opportunities for us in many areas, including transactional liability and intellectual property solutions. More simply, these analytics help us identify innovative opportunities and areas where we might be underpenetrated today by geography or by solution line. In another example, Aon Business Services is equally powerful in supporting our work with clients and ESG, an increasingly wide-ranging topic for our clients. Our ESG practice within human capital solutions specializes in assessing and prioritizing risks and opportunities for our clients across their stakeholder base and their business. Our ESG risk assessment tool allows clients to monitor key risks in real-time and is focused on specific client priorities given their business, geography, industry, and competitive landscape. The tool links those risks to Aon insights, experts, and solutions to drive sustainability, model their climate risk, navigate the D&O or cyber landscape better, and reinforce their culture to strengthen their people strategy. Specifically, on environmental risk, we're utilizing our proprietary climate analytics to quantify the impacts of climate change on our clients' physical assets, informing risk mitigation and improving resilience. The power of this capability is not just in developing innovative solutions but also in how it helps colleagues better inform and advise our clients. It's also about our ability to connect and scale the distribution of these solutions across the firm, including in our acquisitions where we bring expertise with the express intent to scale new capabilities. Recently, we announced the acquisition of a UK-based technology company, Tyche, and we're delighted to welcome our new colleagues to Aon. The actuarial software platform they’ve built enhances our balance sheet modeling capability, especially in reserving and pricing, and allows us to enhance our analytics offering to a broad base of reinsurance clients and commercial risk clients with complex balance sheets. Tyche's differentiator is strengthening the speed of simulations, enabling our teams to model complex risk transparently to help our clients better understand both risk and meet evolving regulatory requirements. Scaling the formidable capability that Tyche brings reinforces our broader strategy by enhancing our analytical tools and actuarial modeling capabilities. This will enable us to advise and execute across the insurance industry with clients and assist them in meeting their goals of ongoing growth, capital management, and ultimately, economic returns. In summary, our strong first quarter results reinforce continued momentum and position us well to deliver on our key metrics over the full year. While we continue to anticipate the volatility of all kinds and its impact on our relationships, we believe our Aon United strategy and Business Services platform both become more relevant in this environment. The capability and track record we've built gives us confidence in our ability to drive further value for our clients, colleagues, society, and shareholders. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Christa for her thoughts on our performance and long-term outlook.

Thanks so much, Greg, and good morning, everyone. As Greg highlighted, we delivered a strong operational and financial performance in the first quarter to start the year, highlighted by 8% organic revenue growth that translated into 60 basis points of margin expansion and double-digit growth in earnings per share. We look forward to building on this momentum through the rest of 2022. As I reflect on the quarter, first, organic revenue growth was 8% driven by strong ongoing retention and net new business generation. I would note that total revenue growth of 4% includes an unfavorable impact from changes in foreign exchange driven primarily by a weaker euro versus the dollar, as Q1 is just our seasonally largest quarter for euro-denominated revenues. As we look to the rest of 2022, we're continuing to monitor various macroeconomic factors, including the underlying drivers of GDP, inflation, and interest rates, which all impact our clients and our business. In particular, I would note a few interrelated impacts. On GDP, we've noted there's a correlation between our revenue and GDP growth, particularly the underlying drivers of GDP, such as asset values, corporate revenues, and employment levels. We've recently seen decreases in global GDP growth forecast for the year driven by factors such as ongoing impacts of COVID-related restrictions, the war in Ukraine, rising inflation, and expected increases in interest rates. As we've communicated previously, our revenue base is very resilient. An impact from GDP tends to affect the more discretionary portions of our business, such as project-related work across the portfolio. These portions of our business were strong in Q1. Though, as Greg mentioned, we're seeing increased uncertainty in overall trends. I would also note there are many ways in which we can help clients in terms of challenging economic circumstances or increased volatility. On inflation, we see impacts to our revenue and expense base. On revenue, inflation increases underlying exposures across our business, for instance, in property values and healthcare costs. As Greg mentioned, we're working with our clients to ensure they're appropriately protected against these increasing values and optimizing their total cost of risk. On expenses, we're continuing to invest in our colleagues, hiring to support growth, especially in priority areas. This does increase overall compensation costs, although Aon Business Services strategy continues to drive efficiency in operations to support our goal of ongoing margin expansion. Regarding interest rates, there are both positives and negatives at play, but generally, we are very well-positioned for higher interest rates. While revenue in some areas of our business, like construction and transaction liability, is often dependent on client investment behavior, which may be impacted by rising interest rates, I would highlight three main points on how we benefit from higher interest rates. First, we see investment income increases as short-term interest rates rise. Over the course of the year, a 100 basis point increase in short-term interest rates, such as the U.S. federal funds rate and ECB deposit facility rate, translates to an impact of about $60 million in total revenue and operating income. Second, our pension liability improves as increases in interest rates result in higher discount rates used to value our pension obligations. Third, our term debt is all fixed-rate with an average rate of 3.8%. So the interest expense associated with our existing term debt does not increase. Overall, our business is resilient, and our Aon United strategy gives us confidence in our ability to deliver results in any economic scenario. As Greg said, we do see increased external volatility; however, we continue to expect mid-single-digit or greater organic revenue growth for 2022 and over the long term. Moving to operating performance. We delivered strong operational improvement with adjusted operating margins of 38%, an increase of 60 basis points, driven by organic revenue growth and efficiencies from our Aon Business Services platform, overcoming a negative impact of FX and expense growth, which includes investment in colleagues and technology to drive long-term growth and some resumption of travel and entertainment expenses. As we've previously communicated, we think about margins over the course of the full year. We expect continued investment in colleagues and the ongoing resumption of travel and entertainment throughout the year. We expect to deliver margin expansion in 2022 as we continue our track record of cost discipline and managing investments in long-term growth on a return-on-investment basis. We translated strong adjusted operating income growth into double-digit adjusted EPS growth of 13% for the quarter. As noted in our earnings material, FX translation was an unfavorable impact of approximately $0.19 per share on the quarter. If currency remains stable at today's rates, we expect an unfavorable impact of approximately $0.08 per share or approximately $24 million decrease in operating income in the second quarter of 2022. Turning to free cash flow and capital allocation. Free cash flow decreased 17% to $440 million, primarily driven by higher incentive compensation payouts given our strong 2021 financial results. I would note that we had strong growth in the prior year period, and Q1 has historically been our seasonally smallest quarter from a cash flow standpoint due primarily to incentive compensation payments. As we've communicated before, free cash flow can be lumpy from quarter to quarter. We continue to expect to deliver double-digit free cash flow growth for the full year 2022. Looking forward, we expect to drive free cash flow growth over the long term driven by operating income growth, working capital improvements, and reduced structural uses of cash enabled by Aon Business Services. Given our strong outlook for free cash flow growth in 2022 and beyond, we expect share repurchase to continue to remain our highest return on capital opportunity for capital allocation. We believe we're significantly undervalued in the market today even at all-time highs, highlighted by approximately $800 million of share repurchases in the first quarter. We also expect to continue to invest organically and inorganically in content and capabilities to address unmet client needs, as we've done with Tyche. Our M&A pipeline is focused on our high-priority areas that will bring scalable solutions to our clients' growing and evolving challenges. As we've said in the past, we continue to assess all capital allocation decisions and manage our portfolio on a return-on-capital basis. Now turning to our balance sheet and debt capacity. We remain confident in the strength of our balance sheet and manage liquidity risk through a well-laddered debt maturity profile. In Q1, we issued $1.5 billion of senior notes. We estimate our leverage ratios to be within the range expected for our current investment-grade credit ratings. As we've said before, we'll continue to evaluate the opportunity to add debt as EBITDA grows while maintaining our current investment-grade credit ratings. In summary, our first quarter results reflect strong top and bottom line performance driven by our Aon United strategy. We start the year in a position of strength and expect to continue to make progress on our key financial metrics and drive shareholder value creation. With that, I'll turn the call back over to the operator, and we'd be delighted to take your questions.

My first question is on the reinsurance business. You guys saw 7% organic growth, which is a deceleration from where you have been over the past few quarters. I was hoping to get a little bit more color on whether the business was impacted during the January 1 renewals or if there's any timing issues. How should we think about growth within that business for the rest of the year?

Step back and think about what our colleagues have accomplished over the last number of years in reinsurance, and it's really been extraordinary. We see so much opportunity in this space. By the way, Tyche, that I described on the call, is a real direct investment in content capability that will enhance our position. So we're doubling down on the opportunities in this category. And honestly, the quarter doesn't reflect the continued momentum. Although 7% is a strong first quarter, we see tremendous momentum in this business and great opportunity. Eric, do you want to provide specifics around this?

Sure, Greg. It was a very strong quarter for the team. We had fantastic growth in the ILS business with strong cat bond issuance. In fact, the team did a lot of great work with clients as they look to reposition their portfolios going into the January 1 renewal cycle. So I would say it was a very strong start for the year, and I have high expectations as they continue to work through the existing insurance cycles.

On the margin side, last year, we started to see an uptick in the back half of the year. Given that the comparisons related to travel and entertainment expense get easier in the back half, do you think we are positioned to see stronger margin improvement in the second half than what we might see in the first half? Or is there anything else we need to think about with the cadence of expenses this year?

Thanks for the question, Elyse. We think about margins over the course of a full year and don't really give specific guidance by quarter, at least. But I would say we’ve delivered 1,100 basis points of margin expansion over the last ten years, so approximately 100 basis points a year. We'll continue to grow margins in 2022 driven by three key factors: strong revenue growth, a portfolio mix shift to higher revenue growth, higher-margin areas, and leverage from our own business services where we're getting productivity each year. Those drivers of margin expansion will be offset by our continued investment in colleagues, increased travel and entertainment costs, and investments to grow the business long-term. We delivered 160 basis points of margin expansion in 2021, so it's a very strong comparable. We do expect to deliver margin expansion for the full year 2022, and we're very excited about that.

Greg, I wanted to see if you could comment on how you think the operating environment for your business has changed in the past few months. Pricing is still a tailwind, but it seems like it's slowing. The economic outlook is less clear than it was a few months ago. How have your views on business trends changed?

There's no doubt there's a lot going on out there in terms of overall complexity and volatility, which is showing up in many ways, as you described. I want to start with this: we're very confident when you put all that into consideration. Both Christa and I have emphasized mid-single-digit growth or greater in 2022 and over the long-term. So we'll start with that. But we just have great momentum. The uncertainty, in many respects, means clients are asking us about how to manage the volatility in their businesses. But if you think about the momentum coming out of 2021, we had the highest annual growth in a couple of decades, and we delivered a Q1 2022 that was higher than the Q1 2021 in that comparable quarter and the highest year ever. So we feel very good about where we are in the context of a very uncertain world. Eric, you can provide a couple of examples to illustrate this.

Yes, Greg. I would say the results of our core business have been very strong in all of our solution lines. That said, there are a couple of key risks that the teams are engaged in that are very much top of mind for clients today, including supply chain issues, colleague resilience, climate risks, cyber threats, and pandemic impacts. These topics were not a major concern three or four years ago but are now a focus for our clients. We feel good about the growth prospects and our ability to help clients manage these emerging challenges as we move forward. Additionally, issues such as inflation and GDP are being closely monitored as clients think about their strategic planning, investments, and overall risk management.

There were concerns about disruptions in your business given the merger and the subsequent fallout last year. It seems like you're not seeing that reflected in your results. Can you discuss employee retention and how it has trended over the past several months? Do you expect any slowdown due to personnel losses?

Really quite the opposite. We have exceptionally high retention this quarter. Our voluntary attrition is at levels better than they were pre-COVID, and our engagement levels are at 80% or higher. We are in a very strong position regarding talent. Additionally, we are investing in new types of talent and in developing our colleagues, ensuring they have the support, content, capability, and enabling technology they need. This support includes advanced analytics to accelerate innovation for our clients. The Aon Business Services platform is becoming essential, and this initiative has been driving margin improvement. We've grown our team, particularly in intellectual property, and we’re working continuously to support our colleagues positively.

I'd like to add that our investments in talent align with where we see the business growing over the next few years. Areas such as climate, ESG, colleague resilience, and cyber risk require deep expertise. As we make investments in capability or talent, it's essential to deliver Aon United, ensuring our teams know client needs and can collaborate with other experts to deliver effective solutions. We remain optimistic about our talent strategy and the future.

I have a technical question. As I understand it, the language regarding operations in Russia is to suspend rather than to terminate them. Does that mean if there is office to organic growth from discontinued Russian services right now?

As you mentioned, there is very minimal impact overall on our core business. While we are busy supporting clients and suspending operations, the overall effect is minimal.

Okay. My second question is related to the current competitive landscape for reinsurance brokerage. There seems to be a large number of newly formed or newly strengthened reinsurance brokers trying to rapidly gain market position. Is this affecting the competitive environment?

We see significant opportunity on the reinsurance side, as stated before. We are particularly excited about this opportunity, which extends beyond our insurance clients. The work we are doing with Tyche and our team allows us to address our clients' needs directly. We anticipate substantial opportunities here, along with leveraging analytics that are becoming increasingly relevant in commercial markets. This means we are not just competing within the current market but also creating new opportunities entirely. Our capacity to innovate in response to client needs, particularly in areas like climate risk and intellectual property, is critical to increasing the market size.

If I may add, Greg, having global capability and deep analytical insight is crucial for us in dealing with client needs in the reinsurance space. The issues our insurance clients face today revolve around emerging risks, including cyber threats and climate change. We see strong opportunities in these areas, and while competition is increasing, we believe our team remains closely aligned and committed to providing cutting-edge solutions.

Greg, you mentioned that voluntary attrition continues to be at favorable levels compared to pre-COVID levels. However, could you discuss how new headcount trends have been over the last year or two compared to pre-2019 levels?

I'll offer an observation, but we don't talk specifically about head count. We focus on investing in content capability to improve our colleagues' skills and enhance their opportunities. Adding new hires is different from developing organic capabilities. We've been adding new capabilities, especially in terms of forward analytics, to help our teams leverage trends effectively. This approach has led to top-line growth and improved operating performance, along with record trends in free cash flow. The Aon Business Services platform is unique because it goes beyond efficiency and enhances how we work with our clients through our colleagues.

In Commercial Risk Solutions, I noticed double-digit growth in the U.S., Canada, and Asia-Pacific in the press release, but I didn't see a comment on EMEA and the U.K. Could you elaborate on how growth trended there during the quarter and what expectations are, particularly in light of a potential severe economic slowdown in that region?

Certainly, Greg. Our U.K. and EMEA business had a solid quarter regarding client retention, new business development, and related areas. The war in Ukraine is a significant point of discussion for our clients. Topics such as supply chain issues and political risk are top of mind for many of those clients. This situation offers us the opportunity to provide real value to our clients as we navigate these issues together. Overall, our EMEA and U.K. business had a very strong first quarter and is expected to have a solid year as we progress through 2022.

And could you clarify the other income line item, which has varied significantly? It was $25 million this quarter. How should I think about that going forward in terms of Aon's earnings power?

What occurred this quarter is a continuation of our portfolio management approach. We manage our business based on a return-on-investment basis. We divested some lower-growth, lower-return businesses. We regard the other income line as near zero moving forward. However, as you think about Aon, we will focus on improving performance by driving higher revenue growth through more significant, higher-margin investments and continuing to divest lower-revenue growth, lower-margin parts of our portfolio. That summarizes what you saw this quarter.

I want to thank everyone for joining the call. We appreciate your participation and look forward to speaking with you next quarter.