Aon plc. - Class A (AON) — Q2 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to our second 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 begin by expressing our deepest appreciation for our colleagues. Their extraordinary dedication to delivering results for clients, bringing the best of Aon across geographies and solution lines, is inspiring. And their passion and commitment are reflected in the highest-ever colleague engagement recorded in our latest full survey. In the second quarter, our colleagues delivered excellent results, demonstrating continued momentum and progress against our key financial metrics. Organic revenue growth was 8% in Q2 and year-to-date, on top of 11% in the prior year quarter, consistent with our ongoing financial guidance of mid-single-digit or greater organic revenue growth. This top line strength translated into an adjusted operating margin of 26.2% in the quarter, up 40 basis points from last year, and adjusted EPS growth of 15%, demonstrating the strength of our Aon United strategy and Aon Business Services platform. Turning to revenue. Commercial Risk delivered 7% organic revenue growth, driven by ongoing strong retention and renewals, highlighting the strength of our core business and strength from areas of investment like CoverWallet within digital client solutions. In addition, external trends, and select inflation continue to be an opportunity for us to help ensure clients are covered for increased exposure. Reinsurance delivered 9% organic revenue growth in a dynamic renewal market. Our team brought the full capability of our firm's data, analytics, and expertise, resulting in strong retention and net new business generation. Health Solutions delivered 11% organic revenue growth, with strong growth in core health and benefits driven by client demand, increasing healthcare costs, and continued growth in advisory work related to regulatory changes, well-being, and resilience. Within Human Capital Solutions, demand remains very high to support clients with advice and solutions, especially as they manage ongoing return-to-work plans, a highly competitive talent market, wage inflation, and employee well-being. Finally, Wealth Solutions delivered 3% organic growth as our teams continued to deliver results in core retirement and investment solutions, with ongoing additional work to help clients address regulatory changes and impacts from recent market conditions, like the opportunity for pension risk transfer. Across Wealth and Health, external factors are increasing client costs, making it more important than ever for them to efficiently provide optimal benefits for their employees. Overall, our strong performance in Q2 and year-to-date reflects the strength of our core business across regions and solution lines. While there is uncertainty around external economic factors, some of the trends that challenge the broader economy are positive for our business and create opportunities for health plans. For the full year, we remain confident in our ability to deliver results in each of our 3 financial commitments; Mid-single-digit or greater organic revenue growth, margin improvement, and double-digit free cash flow growth. On the topic of innovation, among many categories of investment, we'd like to highlight 2 areas where clients are demanding new or better solutions, and we are making meaningful progress in serving them. Intellectual property and climate. On IP, our Intellectual Property Solutions team is delivering a first-of-its-kind solution that enables entrepreneurs to fund IP-rich startup growth businesses without giving up ownership using debt backed by insured IP assets. Q2 marked an exciting milestone as the team crossed the $1 billion threshold in IP-backed insurance and Aon's debt financing. Let me highlight one recent opportunity where our team supported a high-growth technology hardware company. Given the company's business model and growth stage, we've had multiple funding avenues available. The company chose this solution to meet its growth capital needs, minimizing equity dilution. The $100 million transaction allowed the company to secure its financing for growth while insurance markets were able to derisk high-risk schools with an innovative application to an intangible asset class. Going forward, we're making progress to increase the number of lenders and insurance carriers participating in that solution as we build client awareness, accelerate distribution, and continue to scale this business. One additional note, as current and evolving economic conditions make impressive equity-driven valuations, IP-backed debt provides a potential new option for startup growth clients to protect equity ownership and forgo potential down-round funding. On climate, our team is working on many initiatives. Today, we will highlight 2. Aon's work on Aon and our work supporting renewable energy investment. We'll start with our progress on Aon's journey to Zero Carbon. In March of 2021, we made an industry-leading commitment to be net zero by 2030, in alignment with science-based targets for Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions. We're pleased to report that we've made great progress so far and reduced our 2021 carbon emissions by 12% from our 2019 baseline, as we decarbonized our supply chain, reduced our real estate footprint with smaller greener space, and reduced travel, in part due to the impact of COVID-19. Our recent ESG impact report details our commitment and actions on climate as well as our ESG topics, which are embedded in our overall strategy. For our clients, this comes down to helping them understand and quantify their climate risk. We prepare to communicate and report on this risk and do something about it by building resiliency, positioning lower carbon, and investing in transition. Given our track record of underwriting new risks and developing proprietary valuation models, paired with our climate analytics, data, and partnerships, we're very well positioned to our clients to quantify current and potential future risks, which we can then help them mitigate and transfer. For example, in renewable energy alone, onshore and offshore wind investment exceeds $70 billion today and could grow to nearly $400 billion by 2030, another rapidly growing addressable market that we serve with meaningful solutions today to ensure the construction and ongoing operation of these facilities. Similarly, in solar, there is $45 billion of investment today in construction, manufacturing, and technology development. And we expect this investment to grow to over $100 billion by 2025. Recently, our team facilitated a placement for one of the world's largest solar farms, requiring Aon United Equity across Commercial Risk and Reinsurance to obtain coverage despite challenging market conditions. As these renewable energy projects continue to grow in size, scale, and complexity, the need for expertise and innovation in existing technologies will only increase. Further innovation in areas like carbon capture and storage, hydrogen, and other new technologies will require even more innovation to enable the risk financing necessary to make these projects more economically attractive. Our ability to reduce risks of new solutions helps bring in new investment and ultimately helps enable continued moves toward decarbonization. In summary, we delivered a strong quarter, demonstrating continued operating momentum and progress in our key financial metrics. Our Aon United strategy and operating model, supported by Aon Business Services, places us in a very strong position to support our clients as they face changing economic conditions. In addition, our colleague engagement is very high as our team delivers on a strategy that enables us to achieve results today, both in the core and in priority growth areas while also investing in innovative new client solutions like intellectual property and climate. Finally, our strong performance in Q2 and year-to-date reinforces our commitment to achieving our financial objectives for the year. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Christa for her thoughts on our performance and long-term outlook for continued shareholder value creation.

Thanks so much, Greg, and good morning, everyone. As Greg highlighted, we delivered continued progress in both the quarter and year-to-date. Through the first half of the year, we translated 8% organic revenue growth into 50 basis points of adjusted margin expansion and double-digit adjusted earnings per share growth. We look forward to building on this momentum through the rest of 2022, as I reflect on our performance through the first half of the year. As Greg noted, organic revenue growth was 8% in both Q2 and year-to-date. We continue to expect mid-single-digit or greater organic revenue growth for the full year 2022 and over the long term. I would also note that reported revenue growth of 3% in Q2 and 4% year-to-date includes an unfavorable impact from changes in FX, primarily driven by a stronger U.S. dollar versus most currencies, and fiduciary investment income of $7 million in Q2 and $9 million year-to-date. Further, I note we are uniquely well positioned with respect to current economic conditions. Inflation increases insured values, which has a positive impact on our business, and we've continued to see modest tailwinds from insurance pricing, which remains strong. Interest rate increases benefit costs through fiduciary investment income and reduced pension liabilities. Broadly, as Greg mentioned, volatility makes the solutions and advice we offer around risk and people even more valuable to our clients, for instance, in areas like workforce resilience and pension derisking. Moving to operating performance. We delivered strong operational improvement through the first half of the year, with adjusted operating margins of 32.7%, an increase of 50 basis points, driven by organic revenue growth and efficiencies from our Aon Business Services platform; overcoming expense growth, which includes investment in colleagues, technology to drive long-term growth, and some ongoing resumption of T&E. Looking forward, we expect to deliver margin expansion in 2022 and over the long term as we continue our track record of cost discipline and managing investments in long-term growth on an ROIC basis. As we've previously communicated, we think about margins over the course of the full year. And we expect continued investment in colleagues and ongoing reduction of T&E throughout the year. Our Aon Business Services platform continues to be a key contributor to margin expansion and represents a competitive advantage, especially in high inflationary markets. While our Aon Business Services platform continues to enhance our ability to scale innovation and unlock growth opportunities, it also supports continuous improvement as we automate day-to-day processes around the firm. For instance, our Aon Business Services and commercial risk teams saw automation opportunities specific to insurance. We're now using automation to locate, extract, and validate the data, rather than manually pulling it from emails and attachments. Over the years, this will save our North American team 83,000 work hours, representing a 30% reduction in total time spent processing service requests with certificates of insurance before further enhancements. We're delivering high-quality client service and enabling our colleagues to spend more time on higher value-added activities and improving colleague engagement. Our Aon Business Services platform enables us to find and capture efficiency opportunities like this around the firm and remains a key driver of ongoing efficiency improvements and margin expansion. We translated strong adjusted operating income growth into double-digit adjusted EPS growth of 15% in Q2 and 14% year-to-date. As noted in our earnings materials, FX translation was an unfavorable impact of approximately $0.10 per share in Q2 and $0.29 per share year-to-date. If conditions remain stable at today's rates, we'd expect an unfavorable impact of approximately $0.11 per share in the second half or approximately $0.04 in Q3 and $0.07 in Q4 of 2022. Turning to free cash flow and capital allocation. Free cash flow decreased 17% year-to-date to $1,063 million, primarily driven by higher receivables as well as higher incentive compensation payments given our strong 2021 financial results, as we described in Q1, offset by strong operating income growth. As we've communicated before, free cash flow can be lumpy quarter-to-quarter, and free cash flow generation in the second half of the year is seasonally stronger than the first half. We continue to expect to deliver double-digit free cash flow growth for the full year 2022. Looking forward, we continue to expect to drive free cash flow growth over the long term, driven by operating income growth and working capital improvement. 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 are significantly undervalued in the market today, highlighted by approximately $500 million of share repurchase in the quarter and $1.3 billion year-to-date. We can also expect to continue to invest organically and inorganically in content and capabilities to address unmet client needs. Our M&A pipeline continues to be focused on our priority areas that will bring scalable solutions to our clients' growing and evolving challenges. We will continue to actively manage the portfolio and assess all capital allocation decisions on an ROIC 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. As we've said before, we'll continue to add debt as EBITDA grows, while maintaining our current investment-grade credit ratings. Thinking about interest rates, I'd note that our term debt is all fixed rate with an average interest rate of approximately 3.8% and a weighted average maturity of approximately 12 years. I'd also note that our pension liability improves as interest rates increase. And historically, we've taken steps to derisk this liability and reduce volatility. In summary, our strong financial results in the quarter and year-to-date demonstrate continued momentum and progress against our key financial metrics. While we're seeing signs of economic uncertainty, we remain confident in the strength of our firm and our financial guidance for 2022. Overall, our business is resilient, and our Aon United strategy gives us confidence in our ability to deliver results in any economic scenario. With that, I'll turn the call back over to the operator, and we'd be delighted to take your questions.

Last quarter on your conference call, you guys had alluded to, if you go into a recession, there could be an impact on the discretionary pieces of your business, which I believe is around 20% of your revenue. I was just hoping for you guys to expand just upon, if we do go into recession later this year or '23, how that could impact revenue in Aon. And I'm assuming like right now, given the growth you saw in the quarter, you're not seeing any signs of a slowdown just yet.

Elyse, maybe I'll start with that and go to Eric and Christa as well. We tried to convey last quarter, we'll just reinforce this quarter. As we look at the world, as it stands and is evolving, we're in a very unique place, incredibly well positioned. And it really shows through in the first quarter, shown during the second quarter, and we expect through the year and into 2023. If you look at growing risks across the board that clients are looking at, their current businesses, of course, the going risk around supply chain and climate cyber resilience, people aspects, all these things are areas where we have a great opportunity to support clients, and that's coming through. It really comes through across the board on our core book of business and also our investment part of our business. And then the underlying pieces that are talked about, inflation and interest rates, as Christa described, have a positive impact on our business. And finally, Aon Business Services enables us to react and implement solutions globally while continuing to operate and invest efficiently. So you're seeing us do what we do. We improve and drive mid-single-digit or greater organic growth, margin improvement, and free cash flow growth at a double-digit level. So that's what we want to convey and make sure you understand sort of where we look as we think about the global economy. But Eric, anything else you would add from a client standpoint?

Sure, Greg. I would say, look, Elyse, it's a great question. And areas of growing risks, like climate change, geopolitical uncertainty, all have a major impact, changing regulation on areas like wealth, the focus on workforce resilience, well-being, challenging talent market, you go on and on, health care costs, all issues that our clients are facing irrespective of broader economic conditions. I would also say, the Aon United model that we've built is actually built for moments like this, where our teams are integrating together, trying to come up with innovative solutions for clients in a way that pulls all the different capabilities of the firm and can deliver it in one unified fashion. So we think the world isn't getting any less risky. And so the opportunity is there for us to continue to grow our business.

And Elyse, I'd just add that many of the underlying drivers of GDP, as Greg highlighted, positively impact our business. We've talked about market impact, which has really made up of two components; insurance pricing, which provides modest tailwinds to growth and remains strong; and inflation, which increases insured values, exposures, wages, medical costs, and some asset value, all things that positively correlate with our revenue and offset potential pressures while on GDP. We've also mentioned that interest rates have a positive impact on our business through fiduciary investment income. Each 100 basis point increase in interest rates is $60 million top line and bottom line for us. It also decreases our pension unfunded liability, which decreases cash contributions to pensions. And finally, our investment in Aon Business Services continues to drive efficiency and support growth while helping mitigate inflationary impacts on our own cost base. So we're very confident of these trends, and the fact that volatility actually creates challenges for other industries that really creates opportunity for us with clients, as Greg and Eric have highlighted.

That's helpful. And then my second question, Christa, in your prepared remarks, you talked about the slowdown in free cash flow to start the year and mentioned like receivables as part of the reason. So as you think about the back half of the year, do you think cash flow is going to be strong enough that you'll hit the double-digit target this year? I think right decided it's still double-digit growth for 2022.

We are very confident about achieving double-digit growth for 2022. Cash flow in the second half is usually stronger than in the first half, and the first half was affected by two factors: higher receivables due to robust organic revenue growth, though DSO remained flat, indicating we are managing it without speeding it up. We have a strategy to accelerate the collection of receivables. Additionally, the first half was impacted by incentive compensation payments reflecting our strong performance in 2021, which aligns with our commitment to rewarding our colleagues. Therefore, we are optimistic about double-digit free cash flow growth for the entire year of 2022 and into 2023. We have a strong outlook for free cash flow and are excited about using it for organic growth, mergers and acquisitions, and share repurchases, which offer the highest return on capital.

Great. And one last quick following thing. The other income line, you did see gains a couple of quarters in a row in some business sales. Should we model that going forward? I know in the past, you told us just to assume kind of 0 for that line on an ongoing basis.

We would assume 0 to that line ongoing basically. What you saw in this quarter was us continuing to manage the portfolio as we do. We continue to invest in higher revenue growth, higher margin, higher return on capital opportunities. And we continue to divest, and this is a small divestment in lower revenue growth, lower margin, lower return on capital opportunities. And so I would continue to model it at 0 going forward.

I had a couple of questions. First, on margins. You mentioned you expect to improve margins in 2022 and thereafter. I think seasonally, the second half should be weaker than the first half, but do you expect to improve margins in the second half as well with a potential increase in T&E versus last year and maybe some inflationary pressures, if you're seeing them.

Thank you so much for the question. We absolutely agree that we are focused and committed to expanding margins for the full year 2022. We don't give margin guidance right here. We've certainly seen very strong 50 basis points of margin expansion in the first half of the year, and we expect to see full year margin expansion, driven by organic revenue growth; our portfolio mix shift to higher revenue growth, higher-margin areas; and our continued productivity benefits through Aon Business Services, which I mentioned specifically in our prepared remarks. So again, completely committed to full year 2022 margin expansion.

Okay. And on fiduciary investment income, I think theoretically, obviously, it's understandable how it should pick up, but rates have been high for a while now, and we haven't seen too much of a pickup. So I'm just wondering if you could comment on the expected lag and what the outlook is for fiduciary investment income, if interest rates stay around current levels maybe a year or two years from now.

Yes. So as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, every 100 basis point increase in interest rates, and this is the short end of the curve, is $60 million top line and bottom line for us. I note that our assets in terms of investments on behalf of plans are about 55% in the U.S. and 45% outside the U.S. Our fiducial investment income for Q2 was $9 million. And so it is increasing as interest rates rise.

I wanted to follow up on Elyse's question regarding economic sensitivity. Could you remind us how the current Aon compares to the end of previous recessions, particularly in terms of business mix? Why is it significantly different now? Also, how should we consider the relative sensitivity today compared to the past? Any insights on the magnitude would be greatly appreciated. Additionally, as we look ahead to M&A, does the strategy shift in any way due to the recession or your aim to adjust economic sensitivity?

Paul, let me take both of those 2 big categories, both important. On the first piece, when we talk about mix, Eric's point around how we approach our clients around Aon United is fundamentally different and evolving and getting stronger and stronger. We're bringing the core capability of our firm to clients every day and that really does enhance our ability to grow in the core but also bring new solutions and ideas to them and also solutions ideas which connect across areas, meaning we're connecting things in D&O with our people business in the ways we haven't done before. That fundamentally changes the risk costs for clients sort of in the D&O world with that piece. That's really cuts across the future. And what we're trying to convey and why we're confident in mid-single-digit or greater growth across all the environments Chris had described is this capability, fundamentally different than it's ever existed before. And we've been working on it for quite some time, and it's really reinforced in client and outlook variable to serve clients. So it's exceptionally positive, which is why, as I said before, we're confident, mid-single digit for the year and over time. But it really does show up at a client level. And there are aspects that are discretionary, but those change over time and evolve over time. Overall, the client service leadership capability just continues to strengthen. But additional thoughts and views?

Thank you, Greg. Paul, I would add that from 2008 to 2010, we faced an extremely challenging economic environment for a company like Aon, which was characterized by a global recession without inflation or interest rates, a rare situation. Despite this, Aon experienced organic growth during that period, with reported revenue increasing at a 6% CAGR over those two years. We also improved margins by 250 basis points and significantly increased free cash flow. In the current environment, we believe there are three factors that strengthen our position compared to that performance. First, inflation positively affects our revenue by raising asset values, employment levels, and overall revenue. Second, higher interest rates improve our fiduciary investment income, contributing an additional $60 million to both our top and bottom lines for each 100 basis point increase. Third, our commitment to Aon United, as highlighted by Greg and Eric, enables us to combine our capabilities to better serve clients who need our support, especially during volatile times, whether in areas like workforce resilience, pension derisking, or supply chain management. We are confident in our ability to navigate the current landscape, which is why we are maintaining our guidance for the full year of 2022 and beyond, aiming for single-digit organic revenue growth, margin expansion for the year, and double-digit growth in free cash flow.

And so maybe if we could take a minute and then Paul will come back to your other question, also equally important, around M&A, what we're up to and how we're thinking about it. We are seeing a revolving market. It's terrific. But maybe it's helpful to start just with you on just overall capital allocation, how we're thinking about it, because there's really opportunity on the M&A front. But elsewhere, and then Eric, some examples that we're seeing and some things we've done recently.

Christa, would you like to…

Absolutely. And look, I'll just say firstly, Greg, our M&A pipeline is really strong. And we are continuing to invest organically and inorganically in areas of great growth and great margin expansion, data analytics with Tyche, digital with CoverWallet, a number of other areas across our business, where we're seeing enormous client need, supply chain, workforce resilience, climate, et cetera. And then I would say we continue to operate in a very disciplined way on return on capital. So as we generate very strong free cash flow for the full year 2022, we expect our highest and best use of cash will remain share repurchase because we remain undervalued today. We remain undervalued at our peak pricing of 350. And so we continue to invest in share repurchase because it remains the highest return on capital opportunity across Aon. And for us to invest in M&A or organically in any of these very, very attractive opportunities, it has to be share repurchase because that's the bar. But Eric, you are in the middle of a lot of the great investments in our business and including in M&A, maybe you can talk a little bit more about this.

Sure, Christa. And maybe I'll just touch on the Tyche platform that we acquired just as a way to tie some of these pieces together. And for those that remember, Tyche was really about enhancing the capability around capital modeling that we do around reserving and pricing, predominantly for the life and non-life business on the reinsurance side. But ultimately, where we see it going over time is how we extend the platform beyond insurers to corporate clients as many of these large corporates with big balance sheets are looking to optimize their own risk strategies across insurance, captive, self-insurance, etcetera and need better information to be able to do it. So the ability to add that team and that talent to be able to provide that existing impact to our insurance clients from a reinsurance angle, but then use that capability across the broader firm is one of the areas of why we were so interested in Tyche. And it's also just worth saying that once you acquire an asset like that, getting them involved in the Aon United mindset, how we actually integrate them and leverage their capabilities across a broader firm has been what we've been working on over the last couple of months and I think just build confidence in our ability to use that kind of capability across the broader firm.

Christa, last quarter, you made some commentary around the discretionary parts of your business. I was just wondering if you can talk about what you're seeing in terms of leading indicators of demand on those discretionary businesses, specifically in the second quarter?

Sure. So look, what you're seeing, David, is very strong growth across our business, 8% growth in the quarter, 8% growth year-to-date. And we're reiterating guidance of mid-single-digit or greater organic revenue growth for the full year, exactly the outlook we started the year with. So we continue to see strong areas of demand from clients in the core and in the discretionary areas, really, David, because in times of volatility, a lot of the services we're offering clients are in greater demand. And so whether that's supply chain volatility; whether that's market volatility, which is creating opportunities for pension derisking, attention buyout by end; whether that's workforce resilience with that supply chain, there are so many areas of increased demand from clients in times of disruption.

David, thanks. We love the question around talent. It's the heart of our firm. Everything we do comes back to our colleagues as they support clients. And we continue to invest very substantially in attracting and retaining talent. And it's been the strategy for forever at Aon and continues to be. But as Christa described and I described, we are investing in capability to do that more effectively. So yes, last time, we talked about productivity. Productivity for us is helping our colleagues do more with clients. They love it. When they consider across the table and allow a client on new ideas, it's a tremendous outcome. And we are developing content capability that makes it easier and easier for them to do that. So yes, not just bringing talent in, but making talent better, not just bigger, but better. And it really is at an individual level working to do that. It's why, as I described in Q2, we recorded the highest-ever engagement we've ever had from our poll survey. So you see that from the standpoint of how colleagues are reacting to that. And our voluntary attrition, for example, is way back in line with where it was pre-pandemic. So all things are coming together very, very positively and continue to reinforce each other from an overall talent perspective. And we'll take energy and efforts to sort of make investments, wherever we need to, to support our business and to support our client leadership. Eric, you're leading us every day at a talent level, so fundamental. What do you see?

Thanks, Greg. It's a great question and one that's really important to us, and we spend a lot of time on. And we have been making investments, which are really exciting. I would say they come in like 3 buckets. The first is we're investing in client leadership, especially people who have industry focus and deep understanding of client-specific challenges. We're also investing organically in some of the areas we've been talking about, like climate, cyber, IP, analytics, all the areas where we think we can add real value to clients and need expertise to be able to provide that value. And then the third, and we talked a little bit about it with Tyche, but CoverWallet, the same through M&A, we're bringing in expertise not only from a people perspective but a technology perspective as well. And then critical to, I think, Greg, just picking up on your last point, making sure that we embed that talent in the firm, so that the broader firm can use it and leverage it with their clients, using that Aon United model to get that talent across all types of clients around the world is critical, but really focused on making sure we've got the best talent in the industry. And I think we're making great progress.

Eric, two great examples as you sort of go back in time, we're talking now CoverWallet and Tyche. But if you go back in time, the investments we made in cyber have been phenomenal, both on the acquisition front and M&A front. It's put us in an unbelievable position to serve clients today in a category. Also, go back to 601 left. We haven't talked about on these calls for quite some time a few years ago. Now we've evolved with what was a truly world-class capability and the 200 colleagues working on intellectual property. And we put the example out today on sort of after a number of years, what we're seeing, $1 billion now across the threshold on IP debt. So these are all the things that we think are fundamental, David, to come into this. And we track it carefully, as you might expect, and we're seeing results in progression. I do want to just touch on the Aon Business Services and did Christa highlight that again, too, because that also is an area that helps us scale capability that reinforces talent. So Christa, do you want to talk about ABS for a minute?

Yes. Look, a really important part of our talent strategy is Aon Business Services. As you've heard us say before, it's not just driving efficiency but enabling us to increase growth and scale innovation much faster. And for the power of Aon Business Services will enable us to drive efficiency in our core operations, which helps offset the trends we see around wage inflation, enabling us to continue to invest in talent and people, which drive long-term margin expansion. So we're really excited about Aon Business Services, helps us accelerate Aon United.

Study aside, I guess, the Symantec game right now. I don't mean you, I mean, politically. We've gone through 2 quarters of contracting real GDP growth. Can you talk about how that impacted your first half results relative to expectations?

Mark? Go ahead, Christa.

Yes. So look, I would start with, we've seen really strong revenue growth, 8% in Q1, 8% in Q2, and 8% year-to-date. And we continue to reiterate guidance for the full year exactly as we did at the beginning of the year, mid-single digit, greater organic revenue growth, margin expansion for the full year, and double-digit free cash flow growth. So we're seeing opportunities, Meyer, whether it's installation, which positively impacts our revenue in driving up asset values, driving up employment levels, driving up corporate revenues; whether it's interest rates, which obviously positively impact both on the revenue side in terms of fiduciary investment income; or whether it's volatility and clients needing us more on the supply chain, workforce resilience, pension derisking in times of increased volatility. But Greg, what would you say?

I think you captured it well. Meyer, just trying to reinforce in every way we can, mid-single digit or greater in terms of some of the performance for the year and ongoing for lots of different ways and perspectives that we've been able to accomplish that. And you've just seen it. You've seen the performance. You've seen by the way, when we think about growth, it's not just top line growth, it's also operating income growth and free cash flow growth, as Christa described as well.

I was hoping to get a little more color on what's driving the strong growth in Health Solutions broadly, and if you could quantify how meaningful the benefit from the timing of revenues was in the core health and benefits brokerage business in the quarter?

Excellent. I love this question, Rob. And we love this category, as we talked about before, so much going on around the global world with Health. And it really does cut across regions beyond just a specific area. But Eric, thoughts on the progression in health.

Sure. I think when you look at the long-term outlook, certainly helping the clients mitigate healthcare costs and improving employee health and well-being is a great business at the moment, and I think we're really confident in it. The growth has come from all geographies. And it's driven by retention, renewals, project work across the broad segment of that area, but also great growth related to the well-being and employee resilience part of health; the human capital piece with the Data Solutions growth, the advisory work, really broad-based in terms of its impact we're having with clients across all of our geographies.

Got it. And then on the timing benefit on revenues in the quarter, is there any way to quantify that?

Yes. So what I would say is, we haven't disclosed it, but what we have said is, it's come from Q3 into Q2. So it's not material world, but you should see some small amount in Q3 than you would otherwise expect.

Okay. Got it. And then just lastly, I was just hoping to ask a question on Aon's ability to negotiate fee pricing and some of the fee-based businesses in light of inflation. And if you've seen any greater success in doing so in certain fee-based businesses versus others.

Well, the conversation we have with our clients always is about value, the value we provide for them, how we build teams that support them and create. And then having to establish that, they have to understand the value, I appreciate the value. And then we talk about what's fair in the context of sort of how we are compensated for that. So that's been something we always do. Ours is about higher value. We want to bring more incremental value to clients than anyone else in more over time. And in doing so, we have been rewarded for that as it relates to value for clients. And so we continue to do that. And we're having the progression this year just like we had last year and the years before.

One follow-up question on organic growth within reinsurance. You highlighted strong growth in both treaty and facultative in the quarter. Swift, the facultative piece, understanding it's more transactional in nature and second half weight. Just curious on your outlook for facultative placements in the second half of the year. Any tailwinds worth pointing out? Or is facultative growing faster or slower than treaty currently?

Facultative has been a great business for us over many years. And if you put it in the context of the overall market, where many of the insurers continue to remediate their portfolios, and they often do that through the use of facultative placements in order to maintain their direct client relationship. So facultative for us around the world continues to be a great business, and we had created value with it and expect that that would continue as we go forward.

Thanks very much and just wanted to say to everybody, I appreciate you being part of the call and look forward to our discussion next quarter.