Good morning and welcome to Arthur J. Gallagher and Company's quarterly investor meeting with management. Participants have been placed on a listen-only mode. Your lines will be open for questions following the presentation. Today's call is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. Some of the comments made during this investor meeting, including answers given in response to questions, may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the securities laws. The company undertakes no obligation to update these statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Please refer to the information concerning forward-looking statements and risk factors sections contained in the company's most recent earnings release and Form 10-K and 10-Q filings for more details on such risks and uncertainties. In addition, for reconciliations of the non-GAAP measures discussed during this meeting, please refer to our most recent earnings press release and other materials in the investor relations section of the company's website. It is now my pleasure to introduce J. Patrick Gallagher Jr., Chairman and CEO of Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. Mr. Gallagher, you may begin. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining the call today. We've been hosting these regular investor meetings now for over a decade. Our objective is to provide the investment community an opportunity to learn more about Gallagher, hear from our various leaders, and digest some more recent data points on our performance outside of the often hectic earnings season. Let me walk you through the format of today's meeting. I'll start by covering Gallagher's competitive position, the insurance market backdrop, and our organic expectations for full year 2024. Then I'll pass it over to our business leaders. Each will speak for 5-7 minutes, providing background information on our operations, insights into various markets, and cover relevant growth and operating initiatives. Our leaders will also give you some indications on our Q2 organic growth expectations. Doug Howell, our CFO, will pull all the business leaders' comments together to provide you with a more detailed Q2 outlook and also provide comments on the full year. Our prepared remarks should last a little over an hour. After that, we will open up the line to the group dialed in for Q&A. Let me start by outlining our consistent value creation strategy. It's based on four objectives. Number one, grow organically. Number two, grow through mergers and acquisitions. Number three, increase our productivity, raise our quality, and number four, promote our culture. This recipe has produced total shareholder returns as of June 1st of 79%, 222%, and 583% over the preceding 3, 5, and 10-year periods. All these returns have outpaced the S&P 500, the XLF, and the S&P Insurance Index. There are no plans to alter this strategy. In fact, our near and long-term growth opportunities are immense. We see opportunities to raise our quality and become more productive, all while remaining focused on our secret sauce, our bedrock Gallagher culture. Let me begin with organic. As I look across geographies, industry verticals, and product offerings, we're in a very enviable position. We have leading talent, unmatched expertise, and a wide global reach and a consistent, proven approach to sales and client service. Today, Gallagher has client capabilities in approximately 130 countries and more than 53,000 employees, providing professional advice, tailored solutions, and exceptional service within the insurance, reinsurance, human capital, and claims management space. As I look ahead, the growth opportunity for Gallagher remains enormous. Take a step back and think about it. Insurance touches about everything. I've described insurance as the oxygen of commerce, and that's what it is. Whether it's operating a restaurant, shipping goods via railroad or cargo ship, sending satellites to space, or even driving a car, you can't do any of these activities without insurance. According to the Swiss Re Institute, there is around $7 trillion of annual insurance premiums globally, including life, health, and P&C. That's $4 trillion in non-life premium, which are growing annually through a combination of factors, including economic expansion, rising insurance penetration, price increases, emerging risks, and new products. So insurance is a large, growing market. With our competitive position, I believe Gallagher will take market share and grow quicker than the industry. The team will walk you through various growth initiatives today, and we hope you walk away understanding that Gallagher can grow organically in just about any environment. We are also capitalizing on the tremendous opportunity to grow through mergers and acquisitions. The global insurance distribution space remains very, very fragmented, and it's estimated there are tens of thousands of agencies and brokerage firms across our major geographies: the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and even more across the globe. Most of these firms are embedded in their communities and have less than $25 million of annual revenues and lack specialization in multiple industries. Combining with Gallagher can create value for their clients and offer enhanced career opportunities for their employees. Merger partners also get to leverage our niche experts, extensive data and analytics, and centers of excellence, all while joining an incredible culture. All this creates long-term value for our shareholders. We are also improving our competitiveness by increasing productivity and raising quality. We've developed a cohesive sales and service process and operate on common systems, which allow us to better harness the incredible amount of data we have. The team will describe how we're utilizing this data, building analytical tools, and leveraging technology, allowing us to deliver more insights and value to clients and prospects. And don't forget, we continue to benefit from our Gallagher Centers of Excellence. While we are nearly two decades into our journey, there's more benefit to come in the future. Based on the hard work we've already done, we can more quickly embrace digitalization and look for ways to automate various aspects of our business. We are already operating at attractive margins, and we believe we can get better, faster, and smarter. We see the potential for further margin expansion in both our brokerage and our risk management segments during 2024 and beyond. All that said, our biggest competitive advantage is our bedrock culture. It's an aggressive, creative, and customer service-focused culture underpinned by doing what's best for clients day in and day out. Importantly, we have a lot of fun doing it, making us a great place to spend your career. The formula of organic, mergers and acquisitions, productivity and quality, and culture is a winning one. Okay, moving to an overview of the market. A few observations worth highlighting. First, we continue to see broad-based renewal premium increases across all of our major geographies and nearly every product line. These are sensible increases in our view, and carriers continue to behave rationally. They know where they need rate by line and geography, and we are seeing premiums increasing the most where it's needed to generate an acceptable underwriting profit. Take primary casualty, where we are seeing renewal premiums moving higher. Global umbrella, general liability, and commercial auto renewal premium increases are 8.5%, with 9% increases in U.S. retail. A recent study from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform noted a significant increase in nuclear verdicts over the past decade and the highest number of 100 million-plus cases ever in 2023. We've been highlighting worsening social inflation, medical expenses, and litigation financing for a number of quarters. And when combined with additions to historical reserves by many carriers, it leads us to believe further rate increases are to come in casualty. Shifting to property lines, we see renewal premium increases moderating as insurance and reinsurance carriers believe they are approaching price and exposure adequacy. We are not seeing a change in underwriting standards from our carrier partners. However, we are seeing some carriers willing to offer additional limits for certain insureds deemed to be more favorable risks. At the same time, it's been an active Q2 for U.S. tornado and severe convective storms, and many weather predictions are for an above-average U.S. hurricane season. If there are significant losses over the next two quarters, the property market could move in 2024. So in total, primary insurance renewal premium increases so far in the Q2 are up about 5% and up between 6%-7%, excluding property. Interestingly, year-to-date renewal premium increases, excluding property, are about a point higher relative to full year 2023, and that could tick up later in the year if renewal premiums and casualty lines move higher. The reinsurance market is also behaving rationally. We are seeing less increases in property classes and more focus and perhaps caution on many casualty treaties. In terms of our clients' businesses, we are not seeing any indications of meaningful broad economic slowdown within our data. Our daily brokerage revenue indications from audits, endorsements, and cancellations remain positive. Additionally, Gallagher Bassett's core workers' compensation and general liability claim counts, which are typically tied to business activity, are growing nicely year-over-year. Finally, the U.S. labor market remains tight and balances are easing a bit while wages continue to rise and medical cost trends shift higher. With this backdrop, employers are focused on a total reward strategy to help them achieve their human capital goals. So I see demand for our benefits products and services remaining strong. So we're seeing continued increases in global renewal premiums, a persistent tight labor market, growing claim counts, and a steady economy. Combined with clients expecting meaningful data-driven insights, deep industry expertise, and increasing levels of digital interactions creates an environment supportive of organic revenue growth. As we sit here today, there is no change to our full year 2024 organic outlook. It's still looking like brokerage segment organic growth will be between 7%-9%, and risk management segment organic growth between 9%-11%. That level of organic growth in both of our core businesses would be fantastic. Our dependable growth and strong profitability drives substantial cash flow, allowing us to reinvest in our business to drive future organic, fund our long-term standing merger and acquisition strategy, promote our culture, and position our brand, all while paying a growing dividend. To close, let me give some quick soundbites of what you'll hear from the team today. Mike Pesch will tell you our U.S. and Canadian retail PC businesses are performing very well. Renewal premium increases moderated a bit from Q1. However, net new business spread is wider than last year. Patrick Gallagher will tell you our international retail and London specialty operations are performing great. Retail renewal premium increases are up in the high single digits on average, and our London specialty business has a strong pipeline of opportunities. So outside the U.S., we are expecting another year of strong growth. Then Joel Cavaness will tell you our U.S. wholesale operations are expecting strong growth as well. Renewal premium increases continue, submissions are up again, and our overall net new business is better than last year. Tom Gallagher will tell you that our reinsurance unit performed great during April and June renewals. Tom will also highlight why we continue to be so excited about our global M&A strategy. Then William Ziebell will describe our employee benefits and HR consulting business. He will tell you new business and retention trends within our core health and benefits business are solid and that we continue to see nice demand for our consulting services. Scott Hudson will tell you our third-party claims administration business is seeing continued claim count increases and is very well positioned for continued growth over the long term. Then our CFO, Doug Howell, will bring it all together and tell you what we think this means financially for Q2 and the full year. I'll stop now and turn it over to Mike Pesch, who's going to discuss our U.S. and Canadian retail and PC operations. Mike. Thanks, Pat, and good morning, everyone. I'm Mike Pesch, the leader of our property casualty business in the Americas. And today, my comments will be focusing on our U.S. and Canadian retail business. My prepared remarks this morning will touch on three topics. First, I'll provide an overview of our North America retail PC brokerage business. Second, I'll discuss current insurance market conditions. Third, I'll give you some early indications of how the Q2 of 2024 is shaping up so far. Starting with an overview of our U.S. retail operations, we generated $2.5 billion of revenue during 2023, making us the third largest PC retail broker in the country according to Business Insurance. Today, we place more than $18 billion of premium annually, aided by nearly 10,000 employees. We are a top five commercial broker in Canada, operating in all but two of the 10 provinces, have around 1,200 employees, and generate around $300 million of annual revenue. Our U.S. and Canadian retail businesses have many common attributes. In both markets, we serve clients of all sizes, from large risk management clients to small commercial lines, and also high-net-worth personal lines customers. With that said, the vast majority of our clients are in the middle to upper-middle market, which we think is representative of the U.S. and Canadian economies. Our middle-market clients' insurance programs are typically between $100,000-$2.5 million of premium, which translates into roughly $10,000-$250,000 of annual revenue to Gallagher. We find the middle to upper-middle market very attractive. It's a segment of the market where our professionals can add tremendous value. That's because these size businesses typically have complex insurance needs, yet they don't have a dedicated risk management professional on their staff. They rely on our experts to identify and evaluate risk on their behalf and, of course, find the right markets to place their insurance coverage. This is the foundation of our global client value proposition called Core 360. Core 360 focuses on the six key drivers of the total cost of risk. This approach resonates with companies looking for risk management and insurance solutions and embeds Gallagher inside our clients' business. Our ability to analyze the key cost drivers of risk is bolstered by our various niche practice groups. These are subject matter experts with specialized knowledge and deep insight into 30 different product and industry verticals. Leveraging these experts and our proprietary data and analytics allows us to better identify and understand unique risk characteristics of our customers and products. These niche leaders work side by side with our producers in the field, making sure we are addressing the distinct risks that those industries are facing through focused offerings, coverages, and products. We believe this holistic approach to risk management and insurance procurement is a competitive advantage. I'd also like to highlight our national risk control group. We have around 300 professionals working with clients to develop safety protocols and risk management programs while also assisting in claims resolution and advocating on behalf of our clients. So we have a fantastic offering to our clients. Our professionals are leveraging our thought leadership, online tools, and web-based industry discussions to continue to generate new business and incremental revenue opportunities. Our expert-hosted webinars and our Core 360 Insight Series explore a wide range of topics. These are in addition to our Core 360 Flashcasts, shorter online content such as the use of group captives, loss portfolio transfers, DE&I, our cyber risk predictions, and navigating the property insurance market. Importantly, all of our content can be accessed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, allowing our clients and prospects to tap into our network of experts anytime they would like. And when a client or prospect engages with any of the online content, our producers are notified. Moving to some of our recent technology initiatives, we launched Gallagher Submit, our online client renewal platform in both the U.S. and Canada. The Gallagher Submit platform uses a digital interface to reduce the friction in the renewal process for clients. And with many of our carrier partners embracing digitalization, it's making the quote process easier and more efficient. We are seeing positive impacts on both client retention and new business activity as the number of digital interactions with clients and prospects increases, whether through Gallagher Submit, Gallagher Drive, or Smart Market, which Patrick will discuss later. Sticking on the technology front, our efforts over the last two decades to standardize our processes and unify our technologies have equipped us to harness the power of AI. We are in the early stages of our journey to further streamline work within our Gallagher Centers of Excellence. The first group of tasks include policy checking and the issuance of certificates of insurance. With these efficiency gains, we are able to redeploy resources within our Centers of Excellence to help on the sales side. Today, our service teams can help gather and check client and prospect data and provide proposal support for renewals and new business activity. So I believe we are in a great spot competitively. And at the very forefront, when considered we are competing with someone smaller than us 90% of the time, these local brokers just can't match the insights, service, and tools that we provide. Moving on to my second topic, the U.S. and Canadian insurance market. We are experiencing many of the same trends we talked about 8 weeks ago, and our overall customers continue to experience renewal premium increases in both the U.S. and Canada. Beginning with the U.S., so far in the Q2, renewal premium changes, that's both rate and exposure combined, are up about 5%. That is not as high as Q1 and mostly reflects the moderation in property, offset somewhat by increases in casualty lines. Let me give you some flavor by line of business. Property is up low single digits. Casualty lines, including general liability, umbrella, and commercial auto, are up about 9%. Workers' compensation is up 1%. Cyber and D&O are seeing low single-digit decreases. Interestingly, our larger U.S. clients are seeing more moderation in property increases than our smaller and middle-market clients. This more favorable property trading environment is leading some of our clients to consider moving retained risk to the insurance carriers. Moving to Canada, renewal premium changes are up about 4%. We are seeing casualty line increases in the mid-single-digit range, while property is also up low single digits. So across America, we continue to see rational carrier behavior. Pricing does vary by client loss experience. Good accounts get some premium relief in certain lines. However, accounts with poor experience are seeing greater increase. That is a terrific market for us to show our expertise, product knowledge, and data-driven capabilities. Every client is different, and we can help each one of our clients get the right coverage at the most optimal pricing by line of business for their risk profile. That's our job as a broker, and I believe we have the best team in the industry. Finally, I'll conclude with some thoughts on what we are seeing so far in the Q2. Through the first two months of the Q2, we are seeing renewal premium increases in total a bit lower than Q1 and last year's Q2. Net new business spread better than 2023 levels and a small headwind from lower late April midterm policy adjustments. Encouragingly, May and early June audit premiums, policy endorsements, and cancellations are more in line with prior year. So based on what we are seeing thus far, we think Q2 organic in North America will be somewhere between 6%-7%. Looking ahead, I remain excited and bullish about our near and longer-term prospects. The investments we have made in the best talent combined with our client-first, sales-driven culture, and data-driven insights puts us in a position to consistently win. Okay, I'll stop now and turn it over to Patrick Gallagher, who is going to discuss the remainder of our property casualty retail operations in addition to London specialty. Patrick. Thanks, Mike. And good morning, everyone. This is Patrick Gallagher, and my comments today will focus on our retail P&C units in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, in addition to our London specialty business. Similar to Mike, I plan to touch on three topics. First, I'll dimension each of these businesses. Second, I'll discuss the P&C pricing environment, and then I'll finish up with some comments on what we are seeing thus far in the Q2. Starting with international retail, we operate in about 60 countries globally and have client capabilities in an additional 70 countries. Mike just covered Canada, so let me focus on our other large retail operations concentrated in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Combined, these three geographies finished 2023 with more than $1.3 billion in revenue, placing around $8 billion of premium on behalf of clients. Breaking these operations down further, we are a top five U.K. retail broker and generate more than $700 million of annual revenue across approximately 80 offices. In New Zealand, we are one of the largest commercial retail brokers and a top five broker in Australia. Taken together, Australia and New Zealand generate around $600 million of revenue annually through 70 different locations. Importantly, each of these international retail platforms are leveraging the same sales tools and techniques we use in the U.S. and Canada and also use the Gallagher Center of Excellence for large portions of their client servicing efforts. Our retail sweet spot internationally is the middle to upper-middle market, and our customers here are similar in complexity as most of our North American clients. Outside of the middle market, we serve a wide range of large account risk management businesses, smaller commercial enterprises, and high-net-worth personal lines clients. As I mentioned before, our sales approach and tools mirror that of the U.S. by design. What is equally as exciting through our learnings and ideas that flow to the U.S. from around the world that help us get better in the U.S. too. As an example, our U.S. small business strategy follows the approach taken from Australia and New Zealand. Let me give you some further examples of our unified global retail strategy. First, Core 360, which Mike just covered. While we introduced Core 360 eight years ago as our U.S. retail value proposition, it is now our global go-to-market strategy. It's the foundation of our risk management discussions with clients and prospects of any size, anywhere around the world. Second, our niche practice groups. Many of them have been organized at the global level, allowing clients across geographies to benefit from our deep industry knowledge and expertise. Examples of our global niches include real estate, energy, marine, and hospitality. Third is our data and analytics platform, Gallagher Drive. Here, we are able to provide clients and prospects trends of Gallagher clients around the globe from what lines of coverage are being purchased, limits ultimately bound, as well as potential catastrophe exposure and claims forecasts. The platform further differentiates us versus the competition, and producer utilization of Drive continues to increase. And finally, SmartMarket. It too was originally developed in the U.S., but has grown into a global tool. Across our various international retail platforms, SmartMarket is being utilized by more than 20 markets. Our cohesive retail strategy allows us to develop a product, a process, or a new sales tool and deliver it uniformly across our global footprint. With us competing against a small, local, or regional broker about 90% of the time, these firms just can't match the offerings, the insights, expertise, or service anywhere around the globe. Now shifting to London specialty. Our leading franchise has roots dating back to the mid-1970s. Here we focus on larger commercial clients and also support retail agents and brokers around the world, place specialty insurance solutions across six main trading divisions: aerospace, marine, financial lines, construction, energy, and property. Our 1,100 colleagues generate more than $600 million of annual revenue and place around $6 billion of premium annually. UK specialty organic growth has been fantastic in recent periods, and we still have many exciting growth initiatives. Let me provide you with a few examples. First, we continue to invest in and expand our niches and specialisms. We are constantly looking to deepen our capabilities, market relationships, and products. Second, we are looking to onboard and develop new talent, seasoned producers that will add to our expertise across our 6 specialty trading units, in addition to leveraging our graduate program, Gallagher Futures, and our summer internship program. Third is the utilization of our SmartMarket platform. We have already signed up a number of specialty markets and believe our success on the retail side will drive additional carrier appetite through 2024 and beyond. It's a great tool to allow us to trade with participants more efficiently. Now moving to my comments on the insurance pricing environment. Let me discuss what we are seeing so far in the first 2 months of the Q2, starting with retail. In the UK, renewal premium changes, both rate and exposure combined, are increasing around 9%. Commercial auto and property both are up 10% or more. Package is up 8%. General liability is up 5%. Professional indemnity is off 2%. Renewal premiums in Australia are up 5%. Most lines are seeing mid to high single-digit increases. However, D&O is negative. New Zealand's renewal premiums are up 14%. Most lines are seeing low double-digit increases, while professional lines, including D&O, are up mid-single digits. Going back to the UK, our London specialty operations continues to see underwriting discipline from carriers, and there is increasing appetite by risk bearers to write business at what is deemed to be attractive prices. Accordingly, we are seeing clients leverage this to reduce their deductibles, push for improved terms and conditions, or even buy more limit. Price increases on property classes, particularly North American cat-exposed property, have moderated, but that could be short-lived if there is an active U.S. wind season as predicted. Carriers remain cautious on U.S. casualty classes. However, there has yet to be a meaningful shift to higher pricing for this business. Overall pricing is stabilizing. Nevertheless, renewal premiums are moving modestly higher. Finally, new business production is ahead of last year, and at the same time, revenue retention remains strong across London specialty and our major international retail geographies. Pulling it all together, I see Q2 organic for our UK, Australia, and New Zealand retail and our London specialty units combined in the 6%-8% range. So these businesses continue to perform very well, and we remain excited about the remainder of 2024 and beyond. Okay, I'll stop now and turn it over to Joel Cavaness, who is going to discuss our domestic wholesale brokerage operations known as Risk Placement Services. Joel? Thanks, Patrick. Good day to everyone. I'm Joel Cavaness. My comments today will focus on our U.S. property casualty wholesale intermediary Risk Placement Services, or RPS for short. Similar to Mike and Patrick's comments, my prepared remarks will focus on three topics. First, I'll begin by providing an overview of RPS. Second, I'll give you some comments on the market and pricing environment in the wholesale space. And third, I'll wrap up with some observations related to the first two months of the Q2. Risk Placement Services was founded in 1997 and has grown organically and through M&A to about $700 million of annual revenue today. We are the fourth largest wholesale broker in the U.S., and we place around $6 billion of premium on behalf of our clients. As a wholesaler, our customers are independent agents and retail brokers that need unique or differentiated products, specialized solutions or capabilities, and access to our carrier relationships. We were established to solve the insurance needs of all retail agents and brokers, and even today, around 75% of our business comes from agents and brokers unrelated to Gallagher. RPS offers solutions to our clients through two main businesses: open brokerage and MGA programs and bindings. So let me walk you through each one. First, our open brokerage business supports retail agents and brokers with access to specialty products. We find coverage options and negotiate with insurance carriers on behalf of the retailer and their client. The types of insurance products we deal with tend to be very specialized and can range from hard-to-place property coverage to complex casualty lines. Many times, placements involve multiple carriers in order to fill out a particular program. Next is our MGA programs and binding business. Here, we can underwrite, price, bind, select premium, and issue policies on behalf of insurance carriers. We do just about everything, but we do not take any underwriting risk. We have around 40 programs spanning across both commercial and personal lines coverages. This includes programs ranging from non-standard personal auto to amateur sports to coverage for country clubs. We compete against a wide range of insurance intermediaries. Clients tend to choose RPS because we have strong carrier relationships. We're easy to do business with. We are responsive and have a wide breadth of products. We engage with our retail clients regularly and solicit feedback so that we can further grow our product suite and expand our offerings. We also have a national client relations team that provides concierge-level service to our larger retail partners. Ultimately, our goal is to be the recognized leader in the insurance intermediary market by providing a wide range of products and services across a broad distribution platform. Retailers need our help, our expertise to place coverage in many cases, and this need has been a nice growth tailwind for RPS. RPS has thrived on helping customers quickly and efficiently find products, capacity, and coverage. We are leveraging the data associated with more than $6 billion of premium that RPS places in the market. It allows us to better manage our own business through more timely insights, but more importantly, it's allowing us to expand our client-facing data and analytics platform so that we can provide better advice. We are also utilizing the information to develop innovative products and new programs, including property and construction-focused underwriting program groups. As I mentioned in March, we launched two new cross-divisional programs, one within commercial trucking and the other for excess casualty. It's really exciting that both of these programs are utilizing Gallagher Re reinsurance while Gallagher Bassett will be handling the claims. It really highlights the power of Gallagher. Additionally, our e-commerce platform allows retailers to more efficiently interact with RPS. Our retail clients can access more than 30 distinct specialty products through an online interface, including recent additions such as standalone EPL coverage and an insurance agents and brokers product. One of our major retail insurance customers, they are very excited about making this the go-to product for their 5,000 agencies. You also heard Patrick talk about our SmartMarket platform, which allows a more efficient matching of carrier supply and customer demand. We have quite a few E&S markets using this platform, and we think that that will grow over the course of 2024. So our investments in technology and digital interactions with clients and carriers is positioning us as an even more attractive trading partner. So moving to the US wholesale market environment, the E&S market continues to show very strong growth. In fact, a recent S&P market report noted that 2023 marked the fifth consecutive year of double-digit growth. A lot of this growth has been driven by risks, both personal and commercial lines, migrating away from the admitted market, and we don't believe the flow into the E&S market will significantly change anytime soon. For the first two months of the Q2, our data is showing renewal premium increases overall of about 5%. Property renewal premiums are up low single digits. Umbrella is up about 12%. Commercial auto up 20%, while most other lines outside of D&O are up mid-single digits. Echoing what Mike's earlier comments, we too are seeing renewal premium differences between large risk and small to medium-sized accounts. With that said, complex insurance towers are still difficult to place, especially when multiple carriers are needed to complete a program. Across our personal lines programs, homeowners and auto businesses continue to see double-digit renewal premium increases. Carriers are managing their cat exposures, including wind, wildfire, flood, and convective storms, so finding homeowners' capacity for cat-exposed risks continues to be very challenging. Despite property renewal premium increases moderating, we continue to characterize the wholesale market as difficult. Let me finish with a few more data points from April and May. First, new business production is up nicely over the prior year, with client retention similar to last year. Midterm policy adjustments, including policy endorsements and audits, are trending similar to last year's levels. So bringing it all together, it feels like the Q2 organic for RPS will be between 7%-9%. In summary, the E&S market is poised for continued growth, which we should capture through our expertise, deep and growing portfolio of products, outstanding service, carrier relationships, and data-driven insights. I believe that we have built the best U.S. wholesaler intermediary. We continue to win market share, and we are in a fantastic position to deliver another excellent year of financial performance. Okay, I'll stop now. I'm going to turn it over to Tom Gallagher, who's going to discuss our reinsurance operations and our global M&A strategy in greater detail. Tom? Thanks, Joel, and good morning to everyone joining us on the call. Since Mike, Patrick, and Joel have already touched on our various PC units around the globe, my comments today will focus on our global reinsurance brokerage operation, Gallagher Re, and then switch gears to discuss our global M&A strategy in more detail. Starting with an overview of reinsurance, Gallagher Re was formed through the combination of our 2013 startup Capstone Re and the purchase of WTW's Treaty Reinsurance business in late 2021. Today, Gallagher Re is the third largest reinsurance broker in the world, has over 3,000 colleagues, and operates in more than 30 countries. Our reinsurance professionals provide advice, strategy, and placement expertise on a wide range of offerings, including Treaty Reinsurance, Facultative Reinsurance, and other risk transfer products to around 1,000 underwriting enterprises around the globe. We finished 2023 with more than $1 billion of revenue and had a fantastic start to this year with 13% organic growth during the Q1. Building on our success over the past two years, we see a lot of exciting growth opportunities in the reinsurance space. Let me provide you a few examples. First, we are expanding our global direct and facultative reinsurance offerings. We recently hired a group of professionals focused on the Fac market, bringing the team to approximately 40 professionals. I think they are well positioned to expand our facultative offerings and drive the business forward. Second, we continue to execute on new cross-divisional opportunities, whether through Gallagher Bassett, our retail business, or our MGA and programs operations. Frankly, because working together across divisions is ingrained in our culture, I believe we have a leg up when leveraging existing Gallagher relationships. For example, Joel mentioned a couple of new programs developed within the trucking and excess casualty space. And third, we're investing in talent, targeting emerging risk areas and geographies. We've identified areas that we believe are ripe with opportunity, including cyber and life insurance, in addition to further expanding our reach into Continental Europe. Next, let me provide some comments on the reinsurance market environment. As we noted on our Q1 earnings call, we saw more coverage being purchased at the April 1 reinsurance renewals. Overall, reinsurance carriers maintained their pricing discipline and were able to support increased demand from reinsurance buyers. More property capacity was available at the top end of reinsurance towers, and in many cases, risk-adjusted pricing was down a bit. Lower reinsurance layers, with the largest premium dollars of transacted, saw stable capacity and pricing. Overall, the quoting and renewal process was disciplined and predictable. The casualty treaty market saw stable pricing and buyers able to differentiate themselves through good management of prior year reserves and were able to secure more favorable reinsurance terms. Specialty class renewals varied by coverage, product line, and industry. Many clients were able to secure modestly lower pricing. Those interested in more detailed commentary on April renewals can find our 1st V iew market report on our website. Moving to mid-year renewals. June 1, Florida property renewals saw modest risk-adjusted price decreases, again concentrated at the top layer of programs due to more available capacity from both traditional reinsurers and the ILS market. Overall, aggregate demand for cover was up, headed into a potentially active hurricane season. U.S. casualty renewals were more challenging. Reinsurers were heavily scrutinizing pricing on many accounts, given the industry's unfavorable prior year reserve developments and reinsurance view of current loss trends. Outside the U.S., risk-adjusted pricing for international property treaties was mixed with Latin American flat to up modestly. The Middle East was up double digits, and the U.K. treaties were flat overall. So demand for reinsurance coverage remains strong, and given the limited amount of new capital entering the market other than ILS, we're not expecting much change in reinsurance conditions in 2024. What could impact this? A number of factors ranging from large loss activity, investment portfolio marks, changes in reinsurance demand, new capital entering the market, to changes in interest rates. Regardless, we believe our reinsurance team will continue to perform extremely well, and for the Q2, I see our reinsurance organic somewhere in the low teens. That would position us for another fantastic year. Pivoting to our global M&A strategy, across our different businesses and geographies, the opportunity to grow through mergers is tremendous. While this growth shows up initially through a merger, it also helps fuel our future organic growth opportunities. According to one leading consulting firm, there are upwards of 30,000 agencies and brokerage firms in the U.S. alone, and perhaps another 30,000 or so across our major operating geographies. The vast majority of these firms are smaller, family-owned, and operated. We believe Gallagher is a natural home for entrepreneurial owners looking to further grow their business, add additional value to their current clients, and help further advance their employees' careers. M&A at Gallagher is about believing we can be better together, that 1 + 1 can equal 3, 4, or even 5. We have proven over and over again that a merger partner brings us relationships, expertise, market insights, and creative thinking. We get their people and their brains, and that makes us better. We have many exciting things to offer our merger partners, including industry expertise through our various niche practices, access to data and analytics from our Gallagher Drive platform, product breadth of retail, wholesale, benefits, alternative markets, and reinsurance. Not to mention our terrific relationship with our insurance carriers, plus an efficient back and middle office through our Gallagher Center of Excellence and a recognized brand name. When you are merging with Gallagher, you realize that we are your ultimate and final home. That means you won't ever have to change your name again. You won't be flipped. You won't have to stop investing in the business or make dramatic expense cuts to pay rising debt costs. Once in the door, merger partners get our knowledge and know-how, allowing them to bring more value to their clients. From renewing insurance each year through Gallagher Submit or the ability to compare insurance programs to other Gallagher clients through Gallagher Drive, clients like me. To the quick turnaround time of any certificate of insurance, we can do so many more things than a traditional broker can do. These tools and offerings are becoming more integral to the way that we take care of our clients around the world. Owners have to make a choice. Hope that their clients don't demand it. Spend many years and lots of money building it themselves or get it overnight by joining us. Many firms are realizing this, which is why our M&A deal sheet is showing more than $1 billion of revenue from mergers in various stages of the process. That represents around 100 tuck-in opportunities across retail, wholesale, benefits, and reinsurance, and in multiple geographies, including the U.S., Canada, Australia, the U.K., and Latin America. As of today, our current pipeline of opportunities with signed term sheets or term sheets being prepared is 60 mergers with around $550 million of annualized revenues. While we know not all of these will close, we believe we will get our fair share. We've proven we have a proven M&A machine that will continue to deliver excellent results and returns. Okay, I'll turn it over to Bill Ziebell now. He's going to discuss our benefits brokerage and HR consulting operations, known as Gallagher Benefit Services. Bill? Thanks, Tom. Good morning, everyone. I'm Bill Ziebell, and I lead our employee benefits and HR consulting business, Gallagher Benefit Services, or GBS for short. My comments today will cover three topics. First, I'll provide an overview of the business. Second, I'll give you some flavor on the market overall, our value proposition, and our execution strategies. I'll conclude with some observations from the first two months of the Q2. Okay, starting with an overview of the business. GBS was started in the mid-70s and has been predominantly a U.S.-focused operation through most of its history. About a decade ago, we began to expand internationally. That includes the United Kingdom in 2010, Canada in 2012, and Australia in 2017. This geographic expansion and our appetite for middle to upper-middle market clients laid the groundwork for our multinational consulting business. Here we can help employers with operations outside of our core geographies. Today, we have significant scale across HR and benefits services focused on emotional, career, and financial well-being that is provided and serviced by nearly 8,000 employees. During 2023, the business generated $1.9 billion of revenue, making GBS the fourth largest benefits broker and HR consultant in the world. The United States remains our largest geography and represents approximately 85% of our annual revenues generated from about 70 locations. The remaining 15% is predominantly from the U.K. and Canada, but also includes our operations in Australia. Our producers sell solutions and products, including traditional group insurance coverages such as medical, disability, life, dental, vision, and various voluntary products that employers offer to their employees. We advise on employer benefit plan design, model financial projections of the plans, and provide potential cost-saving strategies. Combined, these offerings represent nearly two-thirds of our annual revenue. The remainder of our annual revenue comes from retirement, compensation advice, executive life, HR consulting, and other similar services that help employers address their human capital strategies. Most of the time, we are competing against local or regional benefit firms for middle-market clients, which we define as businesses with somewhere between 100 and 5,000 employees. However, we also serve many larger clients, providing an alternative to some of our bigger competitors. We also have a leading small group benefit business. Before diving into some of our growth initiatives, let me talk about our client value proposition, Gallagher Better Works. It's the approach our professionals take to examine the most important strategies that employers can enact to attract, engage, and retain talent while simultaneously managing costs. There is a plethora of employee benefits and rewards outside of compensation and medical coverage. For example, employers could invest in physical and emotional health offerings or enhancing financial well-being through defined contribution plans or other retirement solutions. The approach we take to help a client move towards its human capital goals can be very bespoke and is tailored to its needs. On a macro level, the U.S. labor market remains rather resilient. May's non-farm payroll increase came in well above economists' expectations while the unemployment rate moved to 4%. Further, the latest data shows about 20% more open jobs than the number of people unemployed and looking for work. Strategies to retain and attract talent remain very important for businesses. Our latest U.S. organizational well-being report highlighted employee retention as a top priority for operations and HR leaders in 2024. That focus makes the employee experience and competitive compensation plans very important. Our professionals are well equipped to help employees put together solutions that align with client goals of employee retention. Shifting to medical costs, we are seeing increases of 7%-8% for fully insured plans and stop-loss trends into the low teens. As we have mentioned previously, medical cost trends are being driven by a number of factors, including increased costs of hospital and physician services, a greater incidence of high-dollar claims, and the impact of cell and gene therapies and specialty medications. 2024 medical plan increases reflect these rising costs. With some carriers suggesting profitability pressures this year, we believe elevated price increases are likely here to stay for the near to intermediate term. But remember, our job is to help mitigate these increases through program design and various point solutions and services. Outside of the typical producer-led meetings, our thematic webinars and thought leadership continue to drive engagement with our customers and prospects. Through May, we have hosted numerous webinars covering topics like compliance updates, pension plan derisking, compensation for executives, employee communication strategies, and financial market updates. These web-based events are in addition to the thought leadership that we are publishing on a regular basis. These include reports focused on physical and emotional well-being, workforce planning, and our Gallagher Better Works Insights magazine. On the technology front, we continue to develop and roll out Gallagher Drive, our data and analytics platform. Here, we are able to leverage both public data and our vast amounts of proprietary data, enabling us to provide clients and prospects plan and program design changes to boost their HR and benefits program performance. The data-driven insights are further separating ourselves from the competition on the benefit side, too. Shifting to some comments on April and May organic, starting with the US, which again represents 85% of our annual revenues. Recall, more than 75% of our annual US revenues relates to typical coverages you get via your paycheck from your employer: medical, dental, vision, and voluntary insurance products. During the first two months of the quarter, we saw favorable new business production and customer retention. As we look ahead, stable labor market, combined with our expertise, thought leadership, data-driven insights, and superior service, positions us well for growth. Moving to the remaining 25% of our U.S. revenues, this includes our fee-for-service, individual products, and retirement consulting businesses. Demand for our services and solutions remains very strong. Employers are engaging with our various consulting practices as they prioritize bespoke strategies that differentiate themselves versus their competitors. Most of our practice groups showed nice growth in April and May, and our life business is looking like it will have another good year. Don't forget, as we have frequently flagged over the last several years, this can be a lumpy business quarter to quarter. These large cases just don't close on a consistent pattern, nor do they have annual renewal dates. They can be a little interest rate sensitive. Prospects might decide to delay purchasing these products if they're trying to time the rate environment. Ultimately, the quarterly swings are really just timing. Looking ahead, we have a strong pipeline of future opportunities and remain bullish on full year 2024. Shifting gears to outside the US, which is about 15% of our total revenues, here, too, we are seeing good revenue growth. So when I combine what we're seeing across our global business, Q2 organic is running about 4%-6%. Looking ahead, I believe we are positioned for attractive growth. Our Gallagher Better Works value proposition, combined with leading experts, tools, insights, and products, will help clients navigate their most pressing organizational well-being needs. I am very excited about our future. All right, I'm going to stop now and turn it over to Scott Hudson, who's going to discuss our risk management segment, also known as Gallagher Bassett. Scott? Thanks, Bill. And good morning, everyone. I'm Scott Hudson, and I lead Gallagher Bassett, our third-party claims administration business. For those of you that are familiar with our financial reporting segments, it's our risk management segment. Today, I'll cover 3 topics. First, I'll provide an overview of Gallagher Bassett, or GB for short. Then I'll get some insight into what we're seeing thus far in the Q2. I'll finish with a few comments on how we are positioning the business for the long term. Gallagher Bassett was formed in 1962 by the Gallagher brothers and Sterling Bassett. The business has grown to $1.3 billion of revenue in 2023. Most of that growth was organic, but GB has also executed on some M&A. Today, Gallagher Bassett is one of the world's largest P&C third-party claims administrators, with about 85% of our revenue in the U.S. and the remaining 15% spread across Australia and, to a lesser extent, the U.K., Canada, and New Zealand. We have around 11,000 employees globally, and most of our claims resolution managers work from home. To be clear, we do not take underwriting risk, but rather adjust claims on behalf of our clients. In 2023, we closed 1.1 million claims and paid out around $15 billion on behalf of our clients. That level of annual claims paid would make us one of the 10 largest P&C insurance companies in the U.S. Most of the claims servicing revenue is from workers' compensation claims, while 30% comes from liability claims and less than 10% relates to property. Important to note that within the property space, we focus on specialty classes or complex claims and are not large storm or catastrophe loss adjusters. In addition to our broad comp and general liability services, we have many specialty product offerings for medical malpractice, professional liability, environmental, products liability, and cyber, to name a few. Our suite of products enables us to provide claims services for the majority of our clients' exposures. We have segmented our business into four different client types. First are large commercial clients. Think Fortune 500 businesses. These clients have balance sheets that allow them to have large deductible programs or self-insure. While they typically take on some portion of their own insurance risk, they outsource the claims resolution process to Gallagher Bassett. This is our largest and most mature client segment. Second are public sector customers. This includes school districts, municipalities, state entities, and federal governments. For example, we are a leading provider to the Australian state workers' compensation schemes. The third client segment are group captive or alternative market clients. These insurance entities utilize our services for their claims infrastructure. Finally, our fourth client segment is insurance carriers. These insurance organizations choose to outsource or white-label a portion of their claim-handling operations. With around $250 million of annual revenue across 150 different carriers, this is one of the fastest-growing portions of our business today. Customers choose GB because we can deliver superior outcomes by leveraging our deep expertise, stellar service, and consistent execution. In some cases, a superior outcome could mean avoiding a loss altogether or even mitigating a loss. It also may result from more efficient medical care delivery, quicker return to work, or greater employee satisfaction. Our services are specialized, and thus we organize our claim resolution managers around client and claim type. For example, we don't assign a resolution manager that handles slip-and-fall type claims to a large trucking loss. Rather, our offerings are tailored to align with client expectations of a best outcome. Whether it's brand protection, ensuring customer loyalty, or back to work sooner, we customize our offerings to provide value for our clients. I believe we have the best team in the industry with leading-edge technology to achieve the best outcomes. The technology we've developed focuses on what matters most to our clients and ultimately supports and complements our claims resolution professionals. This includes leveraging our data to guide decision-making throughout the life of a claim, easy access to claim status and financial information, performance benchmarking tools, analytical reports, and easy exchange of information. Our RMIS platform, Luminos, has consistently been recognized as the best in our industry and has won numerous awards. It's improving all the time as we continue to introduce more machine learning and AI to improve risk and claim management program performance. About 90% of U.S. claims are still handled by insurance carriers today. So there is a large potential for our carrier services. Many underwriting enterprises are faced with aging claim systems and recruitment challenges, and outsourcing a portion of the claims handling can help them address these challenges. In addition to managing claims for ongoing businesses, we have runoff claim capabilities that can help carriers eliminate claims infrastructure that is no longer needed. Our runoff services allow carriers to move a large group of legacy claims to our platform, which can result in better outcomes and reduced loss adjustment expenses. Moving to mergers and acquisitions, we see M&A as a tool to expand our offerings and expertise. With that said, the opportunity set of potential merger opportunities is narrower than on the brokerage side as the TPA industry is more consolidated. A great illustration of our strategy in action was our December merger with My Plan Manager in Australia, or MPMG for short. MPMG is the leading provider of claim and administration support services to participants in Australia's national disability insurance scheme. It enhances our capabilities, provides opportunities for growth, and adds to our relationships throughout Australia. Moving to some comments on the Q2 of 2024, let me provide you some data points on what we're seeing through May. First, client retention remains fantastic. We believe this is a direct reflection of the value we provide customers through our customized services and industry-leading tools. Second, our new business pipeline remains excellent across all geographies and client segments. Our prospects are responding to numerous cost pressures across their businesses, and today's superior claim outcomes are even more important. Third, new claims arising continue to grow during the Q2. Claims are increasing across workers' compensation, liability, and property. That's a nice indicator of continued economic strength and potential future growth for GB. Pulling it all together, we're expecting an excellent Q2, organic of around 8% and adjusted EBITDA margin of about 20.5%. And just a reminder, the big tailwind from last year's large new business wins is behind us since the organic roll-in from these new clients was completed in the Q1. As we think about the full year, we still believe organic will fall in the 9%-11% range, and margins will be around 20.5%. That would be another fantastic year. As I look ahead, the business is in great shape and should continue to benefit from our investment in new claims resolution managers, the addition of new tools and technology that enhance and further improve the claims experience, the development of new services, including integrated industry solutions, the expansion of our products and offerings, further broadening our specialty insurance capabilities to align our services with potential new customers, our efficient client-centric platform, making us the provider of choice, and finally, our compassionate and client-service focused culture, which keeps client satisfaction at very high levels. As you can tell, I am very bullish about our future prospects. Okay, I'll stop now and turn it over to our CFO, Doug Howell. Doug? Thanks, Scott. Hello, everyone. Today, I'll cover four topics. First, I'll do a recap of the organic revenue comments made by each of our business leaders and roll it up for the brokerage segment. Next, I'll provide our current view on 2024 margins. Third, I'll give you some sound bites from the CFO commentary document. And then I'll wrap up with my typical comments on cash, M&A, and capital management. Okay, to the business unit organic revenue recap. Mike, Patrick, Joel, and Tom all had positive commentary on our global P&C and reinsurance brokerage operations. We continue to see excellent new business production and strong retention across all of our business units. Notably, our reinsurance team had a strong performance during April and June renewals. Reinsurance premiums are moving higher overall due to increased demand in both property and casualty-related coverages. As for rates, we are seeing in our data that primary P&C renewal premium increases are similar to what you are hearing from carriers and other brokers. In a nutshell, that means most property is increasing, but at a lower rate of increase than what we saw over the last couple of years. And most casualty rates are also increasing, but at a higher rate of increase than we saw over the last couple of years. So again, we're seeing what others are saying. Underneath that macro environment, we are seeing rates for small and middle market accounts increasing more than larger accounts. By larger, I mean those paying over $1 million a year in premiums. The reason for this seems to be twofold. Carriers are being a little more competitive on the larger accounts, yet being less competitive on the smaller and mid-market accounts. Seems that perhaps there's a little movement on both ends of the spectrum to the middle. One other interesting observation, U.S. general liability and commercial auto renewal premium increases are moving higher across all client sides. So that's what we're seeing in our data. As we look forward, we are also hearing from our carrier markets that there is concern everywhere that casualty rates might need more meaningful increases over the coming few years. As we digest all this information, right now, it feels like our global P&C units combined might post Q2 organic growth somewhere between 8%-9%. Next, Bill walked you through our employee benefits and HR consulting business. He has seen favorable new business production and stable customer retention and continued strong demand from our individual products, life, and retirement practice units. Accordingly, we see solid organic growth in Q2, called around 4%-6%. One asterisk on that. You heard us say the large life case sales can be lumpy. So that range includes about 0.5 point of sensitivity within those percentages. So pulling it all together, as Pat said, we are still comfortable that full year brokerage segment organic growth will land in that 7%-9% range. So no new news here. We are not ready to narrow that to 7.5%-8.5%, but might have a better feel by the time we speak again at the end of July. As for Q2, we see brokerage segment organic growth somewhere in the 7.5%-8% range. Two items influencing that range by about 0.5%. Those lumpy life cases Bill and I just discussed, and we're also seeing $ a few million of adverse development on our prior year contingent commission accruals. As carriers come to realize prior year casualty reserves might need strengthening, that does have an impact on our contingent commissions. In the grand scheme of things, not a big issue, but $ a few million here or there can cause a little year-over-year quarterly noise on our contingent line. Either way, we expect strong Q2 organic in that 7.5%-8% range. And again, like I said earlier, full year in that 7%-9% range. And just to be clear, all of these organic growth percentages exclude interest income. Moving now to our risk management segment. You just heard Scott say Q2 organic is looking about 8% due to excellent client retention and higher claim volumes. That's in line with what we have been forecasting because we are now lapping last year's larger account wins. And interestingly, Scott explained they're just not seeing a slowdown in their customers' business activities. That's a comforting indicator of the strength of the U.S. economy. So for full year, we still expect the risk management segment to post organic in the 9%-11% range. Let me shift to our brokerage segment adjusted EBITDA margins. First, as we have been saying, and as we sit here today, we continue to believe that in an 8% full year organic growth environment, we could expand full year margins by about 60 basis points. Recall that underlying Q1 margins before the impact of roll-in M&A, we expanded margins 60 basis points. However, headline margin was backwards 30 basis points, mostly due to the roll-in impact of the Buck merger. We closed Buck on April 3rd, 2023, so we won't see that roll-in impact in Q2 2024 and going forward. We are now also lapping the carryover impact of 23 raises that we have mentioned before. So we still believe we can expand second, third, and Q4 margins in the 90-100 basis point range. And don't forget my quarterly reminder that FX can impact how to compute that expansion. Not a big impact for Q2 2024, as we're currently expecting only a 10 basis point unfavorable FX impact. But as a reminder, here's the math to reflect that in your models. First, you would start with last year's Q2 adjusted EBITDA margin of 32.1%, then lower it by 10 basis points to 32%. Second, you need to make a margin expansion pick based off that levelized FX base. If you use our expectation of 90 to 100 basis points, math will get you to Q2 2024 adjusted margin of 32.9% to 33%. Another periodic reminder that future M&A could have an impact on these margin expansion estimates. More and more often, we are typically posting margins higher than most of our M&A targets. That doesn't mean we will shy away from great businesses that naturally run lower margins because we know together we can make that 1 + 1 = 3, 4, or 5, like Tom said. It's the power of our merger strategy when we combine with smart entrepreneurs, we are better together. If that causes some roll-in noise like Buck did, we'll just telegraph it and then explain it like we have done before. So there'll be no surprises. So even with the roll-in of Buck and an outlook of full year organic in the 7%-9% range, we are still seeing full year margin expansion of 60 basis points. That's 30 down in the Q1, then up 90-100 basis points in each of the next three quarters. That would be a terrific result and still allows us to make substantial investments in expertise, data, analytics, and digital client and carrier engagement tools. As for the risk management segment margins, you heard Scott say that we are expecting to deliver a margin of around 20.5% for Q2 and also around that level for full year. Let me move now to the CFO commentary document. Starting on page 3, this page provides you with the usual brokerage and risk management segment modeling helpers. A couple of comments here. First, FX. Relative to late April, the dollar has weakened against major currencies. So please take a look at both the revenue and EPS impacts we have provided here for the remaining quarters of the year. Second, on non-cash expenses, we have revised our estimate for earn-out payable expense within the brokerage segment. Okay, let's move to page 4 of the CFO commentary to the corporate segment outlook. Two items to call out for Q2. First, we've updated our interest and banking expense line. And second, the movement in FX through the end of May is creating additional unrealized FX remeasurement expense. So we have lowered our after-tax earnings estimate for the corporate line to reflect this. Obviously, FX could still end up being a positive or a negative earnings impact depending on where FX lands at the end of the quarter. Let's turn to page 5. This page shows our tax credit carryovers. Just a reminder on the punchline. It remains the same. Over the next few years, we will generate a nice cash flow sweetener as we utilize our tax credit balances, which were around $820 million at March 31st, 2024. And don't forget, that benefit shows up in our cash flow statement rather than in our P&L. Moving to the top of page six of the CFO commentary document, beginning this year, we included this disclosure to help you better model major components of investment income, premium finance revenues, and fiduciary income. There are many factors that can influence these revenues, including seasonality, changes in cash we hold on behalf of our clients, changes in our own cash balances, M&A timing, bonus payment timing, and additional borrowing. And of course, the rates we earn on those balances. While the Canadian and European Central Bank cut their target rates by 25 basis points, it doesn't seem as likely that the U.S., New Zealand, or the U.K. will follow in the near term. With that said, the forward-looking quarterly estimates have been updated for current FX rates and estimated fiduciary cash balances. Note that we continue to assume two 25 basis rate cuts in the second half of 2024 in the U.S. We hope this is a useful guide as you build your models. Moving down page 6 to M&A rollover revenues. You'll see we're expecting about $135 million of Q2 rollover revenue within our brokerage segment. And remember, that shouldn't change much given that we are so close to the end of the quarter. As for the risk management segment, you'll read that we are expecting about $15 million of Q2 rollover revenue. Please make sure you reflect these Q2 rollover revenues in your models and then make a pick for the back half of 2024 and full year 2025 based on our pipeline of opportunities. Finishing up with my typical comments on cash, debt, and M&A. At the end of May, available cash on hand was around $650 million. Our current cash position, combined with strong expected free cash flow in the second half, positioned us very well for our pipeline of M&A opportunities. In total, we continue to estimate $3.5 billion to fund potential M&A opportunities during 2024 and another $4 billion in 2025. So far this year, we spent about $500 million on mergers. And like Tom said, we do have a strong pipeline. And second half M&A activity can historically be very large. So there's still a chance we will spend most of the $3.5 billion. But if we don't, it will add to our $4 billion M&A war chest going into 2025, and it also opens the door for share repurchases. Either way, it's a really nice position for us. So those are my prepared comments. Just about halfway through the year, we are in great shape financially, operationally, and strategically. Our full year 2024 organic and margin outlook is unchanged, and the team is laser-focused on excellence. It should be another fantastic year for Gallagher. Okay, operator, we're ready to move to Q&A. Thank you. The call is now open for questions. If you have a question, please pick up your handset and press star one on your telephone at this time. If you're on a speakerphone, please disable that function prior to pressing star one to ensure optimum sound quality. You may remove yourself from the queue at any point by pressing star two. Again, that's star one for questions. And our first question is coming from Elyse Greenspan with Wells Fargo. Let's just see what your question is. Hi, thanks. Good morning. My first question is on the wholesale business. So you guys are looking for a slowdown, right? The growth had been in the double digits in the Q1, and you're looking for it to go to 7%-9%. I think the Q1 was around 13%. So can you just walk through what's driving the slowdown within the wholesale organic growth sequentially? And can you also give us a sense within the Q2 what you're looking at for your open brokerage versus your MGA or binding business within the Q2 organic guide? Sure, Elyse. This is Joel Cavaness. So really, I mean, obviously, we had substantial growth in the last few years in both open brokerage and binding. We're still seeing fairly significant increases in submission count. Just to kind of give you an idea, we saw 46,000 new business submissions just last month. And that's a nice increase year-over-year, about 15% year-over-year increase in submissions. And of course, you need new business submissions to grow your business. And so we're seeing a lot of really good stuff there. As you're aware, property for multiple years had significant increases in rate. And there was a significant shortage of capacity, and that drove a lot of those prior year organic growth. We're still seeing increases. They're just not quite as robust as we had seen in prior periods or prior years. But it is interesting, and I've always looked at it and said that small business typically lags the larger accounts by a couple of years. So what we're seeing is now, while some of the larger renewals are seeing increases, not maybe not as great as they were in prior periods, but the smaller business is outpacing from a rate point of view the larger business. So we're seeing, if we look at property, larger brokerage accounts in the mid-single digits, while binding the smaller accounts, we're seeing double-digit increases. The interesting part is the development in casualty change. And we look at these things, Elyse, day to day today, tracking our data to make sure that we know and are able to give good client advice on what the market's doing. Casually, we're seeing brokerage up 10% and kind of increasing while we're seeing people being a little concerned over redundancies of reserves. I know you've read that. Auto's up 8 or 9. So things are still very positive. It may not be quite the increases that we've seen before, but it's still a difficult market out there, and we don't see that changing anytime soon. Okay. But within that, I guess, can you say, is the open brokerage organic still in the double digits in the Q2? Open brokerage, we're going to, because of open brokerage means a lot of different things. We have D&O in there. We have a big cyber book. We have a lot of different, of course, lines of business. So we're going to tell you it's looking like 8-ish, somewhere in that number on the open brokerage side. Binding, we believe, will be better than that. Okay. And then the change in earn-out payable went down modestly, I guess, from the last update, Doug. I know you pointed that out. Does that mean some deals are performing weaker than expected, or is there an FX impact? I just want to understand what's going on in that line. Good question, Elyse. That's actually just the impact of Willis Re since that had such a large earn-out associated with it. We're coming to the end of that, so there's not that much more impact from Willis Re. But by and large, there's nothing else behind that number that would be any different than what we see with our tuck-in strategy. So it's the Willis Re kind of coming through the python that you're seeing there. Okay, thanks. And then one more on the M&A pipeline. The disclosure that you guys gave, the pipeline, right, I think you said $550 million of revenue. I believe that was $350 million a couple of months ago. So the pipeline's gone up, but maybe it seems like deal activity is a little bit slower to start this year. I'm just trying to reconcile this. Is it just that, Doug, to your point, deals are maybe more second half heavy? Is something else going on there just with the pipeline and just maybe a slower closing of deals so far this year? So Pat, Elyse, this is Pat. I'll give you Doug can get into the numbers if you want, but the fact is, it's like any sales process, right? We're out looking for accounts all the time, and we're wooing them, and it's a big sale. And so that goes up and down. To me, as a sales leader, what I'm looking at is the pipeline. So I don't want to see that diminish from 350 to 100 and from 500 opportunities or 200 opportunities to 100. So the fact is the pipeline is very robust. It's virtually at an all-time high. I think the appetite for sellers moving away, frankly, from private equity, maybe looking more seriously at strategic is coming our way. Not seeing that in the numbers yet, but I feel pretty bullish about that. And so I think our outlook for M&A has never been stronger. Yeah, Elyse, I would just chalk it up to a little bit of that first half seasonality a little bit. I wouldn't overthink it at all. But I know that if I get involved in certain deals, our story is starting to resonate, like Tom said. This is your last home. This is your last name change. Get all the resources that you need overnight. Don't have to go through the journey yourself. Get enjoying a brokerage run by brokers. Get our niche resources. So I think our message is holding a lot up. It's heard considerably more today than ever before. Yeah, I mean, I think there's no doubt that our competition for the last five years has been do nothing. Why join Gallagher? At Gallagher, you've got to go on a new agency system. You've got to start working with people in India. That's all stuff you've never had to do before. And we'd like you to just stay in the geography you're in and do what you've been doing. And we'll go out and keep buying people, putting them together. And it's going to be easy. We're going to make 30 on 30 year after year. It's just going to be great. Multiple bites of everything. Well, now we're getting to integration time. And we better figure out a way to get public. And let me tell you, that ain't easy. Thank you for the color. Thanks, Elyse. Our next question is from Michael Zaremski with BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead with your question. Hey, good morning. Morning, Mike. Great to hear from you guys. So on the reinsurance, organic continues to be excellent. I was maybe hoping to unpack it a bit, and maybe Doug, you answered it and just said there's just increased demand. But I guess I would have thought last year incorrectly that given that the pricing decel, we would have seen some kind of a bigger or just a decel. But I know there's a lot going on there with the FAC build-out and some of the synergies. But maybe you can unpack it. Is it just all coming from increased demand, or are there other things we should be thinking about? Yeah, I got to say, Mike, we're pretty proud of the team. A lot of new client wins. The demand for capacity is there. Rate is still firm. It's not like the rates are going backwards a ton. So new client wins and increased demand from the carriers is driving that entirely. Okay. Switching gears a bit to the commentary you and others have been talking about in terms of your carrier partners are talking about maybe needing some more casualty rate in the coming years. I guess at Gallagher, do you guys and Gals have, I'm assuming you have data, especially from Scott Hudson's liability non-work comp business too. Do you guys have data and have your own internal view on what we're seeing on casualty? Well, we have daily rate information if you're asking about that, Mike. I mean, I can tell you last night what happened. I can tell you by line, by account, by geography, and I can tell you by niche. So what would you like to know? I guess it's Scott's team on the claims management side. Are they seeing an increase on the casualty side in terms of severity and/or frequency that you're seeing it too on the clients you're doing claims for? There is likely to be an increase. Absolutely. As the economy expands, we're seeing two things. Number one, you're definitely seeing an increase in claim activity, both casualty and workers' compensation. And then I think the general social inflation is evident in the claims information. And this is not a GB-specific, but the fact is that you're reading every day about nuclear verdicts. I mean, so I'm reading one today. Some lady fell down on a sidewalk somewhere along the line and just got an award of $13 million yesterday. Now, I'm sorry. My sidewalks out in front of my house aren't very stable either, but I'm not figuring I'm going to get $13 million. So the answer to the question is yes, we're seeing that in that data. We don't break that out specifically, so I can't sit here and tell you where that's happening line by line, geography by geography. But I can tell you anecdotally, yes, we're definitely seeing that. Okay, great. And I'm curious. I have a question that's probably for Scott Hudson. I'm not sure if he's still on the line. Yeah, Mike, I'm here. Okay, great. I guess it's probably for you, but maybe not. But we've got this question too about on the workers' comp side, whether you're seeing an uptick in health inflation. But I guess more specifically, Florida changed its fee schedules, increased the fee schedules there for workers' comp. If you're aware of that, do you think that's a phenomenon that we could see in other states increasing their work comp fee schedules? And if so, what's driving that? Thanks. Well, I think the obvious thing that's driving it is, I mean, there is some cost inflation that they're trying to help combat. At the same time, for us to be able to predict state by state as to what we would anticipate happening, I guess in some respects, we want the business to stay good for the claimants, good for the clients. But we don't really have a lens, I don't think, into what specifically would be happening state by state. But if one's doing it, yeah, we may see it in some others. Okay. And maybe I'll just try to split one high-level one lastly in for on wholesale. So clearly, some of the decels being driven by property pricing. But just curious, I guess if we think back to the wholesale market over just long cycles, the inflows have been based on just kind of overall profitability of the industry. And I guess, do you think that that old dynamic of if the traditional industry does do what they're expected to do and throws off double-digit ROEs, mostly due to higher interest rates in the coming years, is it right for us to think that there will be a continued deceleration in flow and/or price? Or is there just new dynamics that have taken shape in recent years that are just going to continue to drive flow into the U.S. marketplace? And that's probably for Joel if he's on. Yeah, thanks. I think that what the dynamic that you've seen is, obviously, with the admitted market having less ability to get rate as quickly as the non-admitted market, who obviously has freedom of rate and form all the way around, and their ability to have underwriters who specialize in catastrophic or very difficult-to-place risk, it really lends itself today to the U.S. market because you have underwriters, and that's what it really takes. It takes a very knowledgeable underwriter. And typically, the U.S. carriers have employed those types of people who can understand their portfolios and what the right pricing metric may or may not be. Now, of course, pricing doesn't really matter when you've had a cat because it's just going to be terrible. And of course, the prior year was fairly benign. And I think, obviously, forecasts are not looking that way. We've already seen a lot of activity, and the forecasts tell you that it doesn't look favorable for the coming months. We hope not. Obviously, we don't want anybody getting hurt. But it is a difficult market, and the admitted market has a much harder time navigating that marketplace. It is dynamic, no question. Hey, Mike, this is Mike Pesch. Just to give you some perspective from a retailer's side, we look at, on a monthly basis, our trading relationship with the four preferred wholesalers that we do business with. Over the last several years, and including this year and through this quarter, our premium that we throughput with each of those wholesalers is up well into the high single digits, if not the low single digits. What that tells me is that—and you heard us talk about moderation in certain lines like property for large accounts—but it still tells me that tougher classes and tougher risks are still going to find their way to the U.S. marketplace because underwriters have looked at their portfolio, and they know what they want, and they know what they don't want. And so I do believe that that's going to continue to grow, at least from a retailer's perspective. I'm seeing that continued movement. Thanks for all the knowledge. Thank you. Thanks, Mike. Our next question is from the line of Paul Newsome with Piper Sandler. Please just see if your question. Good morning. I hope everyone's well. Wanted to expand, I was hoping you could expand a little bit on the comments on contingent commissions. And with full recognition, this is not the biggest number, but I think it's interesting in that it says something about what's going on with the business in general. But the first question is, is it fair to say that contingents for you are like many others in that it's kind of a pure profit source of revenue, and so it does have a little bit of a disproportionate impact on margins if it changes? And then the second question is, if you could expand sort of on the source of that contingent changes. I think I heard you say sort of essentially reserve charge issues, which suggests to me kind of a liability. Commercial liability is the source of the change. But please expand and let me know where I'm right or wrong. All right. So here, let's see if we can narrow that down. Most of that is happening in the U.S. and somewhat in Australia. And what we're finding is that typically we have some positive true-ups that go on, Paul, but this year we have less positive true-ups. And it's happening in some of the casualty lines where the carriers are saying to us, "Hey, our loss picks that we thought we had all year probably are too low." So they're increasing their loss pick. That has a slight impact on our contingent commissions. And again, like you say, the size of the number, when you're looking at $300 million worth of contingent commissions, we're talking about trueing it up a few million bucks here or there. So I wouldn't say that it's going to be systemic. I think it's going to be periodic as we do have some multi-year contracts. But it's a couple of million bucks here or there. But I just thought it was interesting, really a data point that talks about how casualty rates still are under pressure. I mean, that's more of the takeaway than $2 million-$3 million less on our revenues and $12 billion of revenue this year. But it's showing that the carriers are seeing deterioration in their historical loss reserves. No, that makes sense. I think I'm just, I guess, the reason I'm curious about it, even though it's small, is that at least on the carrier side, the big question in the Q1 was these general liability casualty reserves and whether or not they were majorly deficient. It sounds like there is a little bit of sensitivity for your business if we see continued concerns and reserve charges, but obviously not a lot because it's not a big number. That's really all I think. I think it's, yeah, I think net means it's just another data point to show that there needs to be some meaningful rate increases perhaps on the casualty lines still. That's really the data point that that should be viewed as. No, thank you. Super interesting. Appreciate the help as always. Thanks, Paul. Thanks, Paul. The next questions are from the line of Gregory Peters with Raymond James. Please just see if their questions. Well, good morning, everyone. Hey, Greg. Hey, Joe. So I guess for the first question, the analysts, your publishing analysts are going to be over the next couple of months, many of them rolling out their fiscal year 2026 estimates. And so you're pretty good about providing guidance several quarters out. I'm wondering, and I don't want to get too far in front of what you're prepared to talk about, but I'm wondering if you can provide us any sort of benchmarks on how we should be looking at fiscal year 2025. It's going to be a good question in there. It's going to be a really good question. Everyone wants to answer this one, huh? Yeah. Well, yeah, you said '26 in the beginning of your statement. Well, that's about '25. Yeah. It was very intentional, Greg. That was very intentional, by the way, because I just, if you look at consensus estimates, I think there's like eight estimates out there on 2026, but everyone's got a 2025 estimate, and you're talking about just the back half of 2024. So I was trying to get you to roll forward and sort of frame up 2025. And I know there's a lot of things that can change over the course of the next several months, but you're pretty good about providing some guidance on those. Well, listen, I think my reaction to it is that if there's a big storm that hits the U.S. this year or elsewhere in the world because of the high hurricane predictions this year, that would have a pretty big impact on 2025, but I can't see how it wouldn't carry into 2026. So you can't have a storm come ashore and have $ billions and $ billions and $ billions of loss and have that be a single year event. So that would be something that I'd watch. Casualty rates, I think they were in a steady climb over the next several years. So some might say 2025 looks a lot like this year right now with some upside potential on the—if we have an active storm season. Fair enough. Pat and Mike both mentioned. That's about as much as my crystal ball I got, Greg. Yeah, that's fair. That was a good comment. I appreciate it. Pat and Mike, you mentioned the net new business spread, both your comments and your—and I'm wondering, that sounds like just flat-out new business wins. I'm wondering if you can provide us some perspectives on what that net new business spread means and how it looks right now versus where it was, say, a year ago. Yeah, this is Mike Pesch. It's definitely up a point or two compared to this time last year, our retention. Just remember, in a challenging market, sometimes what we see is our clients test us a bit more and our retention slips. Well, many of the investments that we made over the last five years that I spoke about today and that you've heard me talk about and others talk about in previous calls talk about the impact of the client on some of those investments. The good news is we're seeing our retention hold steady and even in many cases improve. So when you have that as a starter, then when you tack on new business, which has been very robust, we are winning more new business. I've talked about that in the past that even though we compete 90% of the time against smaller brokers, our wins of $100,000 or more make up 54% of our overall takeaways. And so that's a significant number. And then when you have the base in retention that's holding steady or slightly improving, that's where you get that spread. And so it's a point or two higher than we were at this time last year. When you look at our pipeline and we look at it every day, every day I go in the office, I turn on my computer, I look at our CRM, and I can see our pipeline, and it's better than it was by about 20% over last year. So when I look at that pipeline, like Pat talked about M&A, and then I factor in what we've actually closed one and the size of accounts that we're winning, I'm very bullish on that new business spread. Greg, let me pull out too the beauty of that whole model. This is why the private equity people have been in so strong. I mean, our retention rate's about 94%. So you got to figure that at least two are going broke, right, or getting bought. So we are approaching 100% renewal of eligibles. That's a mind-boggling number. I can't think of another business that keeps 90% plus. Indeed, the insurance brokerage model is attractive, no doubt. I guess the two final questions are going to focus on Patrick's comments. First of all, Patrick, you mentioned SmartMarket, and this has come up. I've asked you about this before. It seems like it's growing. The number of markets, you said 20 markets. I'm not sure that's really changing, but maybe you can provide us some perspective on how SmartMarket is growing, if it's a premium number or what metrics they're looking at. And then I'll have another question, and then that will be it. Yeah, I'm happy to answer that. In my comments, those comments are around what we're doing in SmartMarket in the U.K., New Zealand, and Australia. So SmartMarket is very developed in the U.S. There's over 20 carriers on it in the U.S. It's somewhat developed in Canada where we're in the high single digits. And then the 20 scattered in the U.K., Australia, New Zealand is just gaining momentum. So we expect more carriers to come on the platform each year. It is how we go to market now, but the other parts of the globe are just lagging a little bit of the U.S. So just for—yeah, go ahead. Mike Pesch, I would just tack on to that. So just remember that the SmartMarket strategy was basically to connect buyers and sellers. So it's a digital way for us to connect our 1,600 producers here in the U.S. and then more across the globe with our carriers and their appetite. And so that's the premise of it. But we also went in on it going, "We don't want to dilute the experience for the 20-25 carriers. We want to make it significant to them because it is important to them in how they trade with us." So we're very now specific and prescriptive on how we go about assigning or asking other carriers to participate. All the while when we go into our negotiations, whether it's a one-year or two-year or three-year agreement with our existing carriers, we talk to them about the premium throughput that they're now seeing. So we did just in the U.S. about $425 million of revenue acquired last year. Rough math, that's $3.5 billion-$4 billion of new premium that's on the platform. So it gives those carriers that may not be trading with those independent agents and brokers the opportunity at a significant amount of additional opportunities and accounts. So that's part of our negotiation with them to get increased fees on our SmartMarket platform. So it's constantly in development, but we're not going to dilute the experience for the existing carriers. We want to make it as robust and complementary to their appetite as possible. That makes sense. Patrick, the final question I had, and I know this is a more macro question, maybe not, but you talked about Gallagher Futures in the summer intern program. You hear about worker shortages in various geographies. I'm just curious about how the budget is for that this year versus last year, how the number of people coming into those programs this year versus last year look in the context of what is presumably a tight labor market? Yeah, we've got a very robust internship program and programs like Gallagher Futures. Gallagher Futures is a U.K.-specific, bringing new people into our industry, into our business to do multitudes of different jobs from sales to service. We call that Achieve in the U.S. We call it Gift in Canada. But the internship program in the U.S. has upwards of 480. The internship program in the U.K. is somewhere in the 50 range. We're finding really great candidates all around the globe, and we're trying to grow our own. So that's growing our own from straight out of college to growing our own from people that might have started in a different industry. But I would say the labor market is pretty good for us right now. We're getting the right amount of candidates for the job openings that we have, and we think we're doing a good job of developing new people in the industry. Got it. Thanks, Greg. The number is about $15 million a year, but I would say that we're investing on what I would call very green talent. I'm not talking about a producer hire that's got 20 years of experience that joined us. I'm talking about these are folks that by and large are interns, externs, career switch folks. So it's about $15 million a year that we're spending just on compensation related to those unvalidated producers. It takes us 2 or 3 years to develop them. So it's a big investment for us, and I think it's important for this industry to be able to bring folks into the business and get them trained up, and then they can have terrific careers. We've proven that Gallagher over 50 years in the internship program. Our interns are leaders, not only in production, but our branch managers, our regional managers. They even move into the support functions that several of the CFOs in my group used to be interns, maybe in college. So this is an important lifeblood, and we think that this will continue to pay huge dividends. If we can take it to $30 million, we would. Greg, I think a dynamic here, less than 5% of the kids in college will take an interview in insurance. And so we are out telling a story. Of that 500, you probably have 150 that are friends and family. And so you're getting another 350 to look. And the first-year interns were very clear. Look at the greatest business on the planet. We're going to decide whether we want to invite you back for a second year or not. That's based on your behavior, capabilities, and what we like or think of you. And you have to make that call as well. So of the 500, probably out of that 350, 100 come back the next year. So it's a pretty good program that we keep. If anything, I'd like to see our yield go higher. And then right now, of that 500, we'll recruit, what'd you say, Mike, about 200 of them will come in? Yeah. I can tell you statistically, our first intern was in 1967, and we track it all the way back to then. One in four that walk in our door will stay with us their entire career, statistically over that timeframe. That means we offer jobs to about half, and half of them stay with us throughout that timeframe, their entire career. It's a great investment for us. Then when you talk about the growth of it, a lot of it happens organically because many of the merger partners that join us never had an internship program. When we go into a geography where we just acquired a great new firm, we teach them how to do it. We show them what the impact could be on their business. And then we ask them to go out and bring in 1, 2, 4 interns over the summer. And so it just keeps growing and growing organically and also based on the number of deals that we do in the previous year. Yeah, just a follow-up on that point. So if you do an acquisition and there's earnouts associated with that, and then you're asking them to hire interns, does that expense penalty go against—and I know it's rather minor—but I'm just trying to understand where the cost of that is born. Is that born at corporate, or does that go into the new entity that you just acquired? Yeah, Greg, it's a fair question. I mean, look, that's why we acquire the firms that we do. We're not buying firms that want to turn over the keys and send in a check every month. We want to buy firms that are looking for the future, 10, 15, 20. So they know about it. When we do our due diligence and when we do our first and second meetings, we're talking about, "Is that important to you to have young talent coming into your business?" And if so, we'll teach you how to do it. So it's a very collaborative thing. The expense gets borne by the merger partner, but it's an investment. We want our merger partners making investments. We can prove to them and show to them that it will pay off. And it pays off rather quickly now that we have 30+ niches where a young person can come in and align with real estate or transportation and construction and all of a sudden be far more impressive in front of a client because they have a co-pilot next to them who knows that business inside and out. I can just speak personally. I have a daughter that started a year ago, and she already got her first win. And she specializes in healthcare, and she had a co-pilot who knows everything about long-term care. And it was great. It was a very proud moment for me. But I'll tell you what, when I started in this business, we weren't quite as sophisticated as that, and now we are. gives those kids - and that's what we talk about merger partners about - is this is an opportunity for you to grow your business. Okay. Well, hey, Pat, I love the 5% comment. I hadn't heard that statistic before, but thanks, everyone, for your detailed answers. Thanks. Thanks, Greg. Our next question is in the line of Mark Hughes with Truist Securities. Please go ahead. Good to see you. Yeah, thank you. Good morning. Just wanted to make sure that I had the right basis for comparison for a couple of the stats. The North American retail, I think, expected to be up 6%-7% in 2Q. What was that in 1Q? I'm digging that out here. Let me dig that out, but I think it was about a point and a half higher. Okay. I was going to ask the same question on U.S. renewal premium. I think expected to be up 5%. Just wanted to make sure I had the right basis of comparison for Q1. Yeah. Well, listen, I think that's heavily property weighted, but I think it was down 2.5%, something like that. Your stat, Mark, on what I commented on of about 5% for rate and exposure combined is correct. Yeah. Yeah. And then, Doug, I think you said it was roughly 7.5% in Q1. Yeah, that's right. Okay. And then, Pat, you gave us some, and I think Mike also talked about the casualty pricing up 9%, I think, in North America, perhaps it was the U.S. Any way to either give the comparison for that, and what was that in Q1 or break out? I think you combined Umbrella, GL, and commercial auto. Just trying to get a kind of a like-for-like view of those lines or those lines in aggregate as we think about 2 Qs compared to 1 Q. Yeah. My comments were around GL, umbrella, and auto in the Q2 up about 9%, which is what we saw in the Q1. So that continued trend of 9 or high single digits is ongoing. Understood. And then you talked about reinsurance casualty being a little tougher, more challenging. Did you give a rate change or kind of directionally kind of what you saw in casualty reinsurance rat es? We don't have that stat for you. Yeah. We did give it, Mark. Here's the thing. The demand is increasing so much that I think that what you're seeing is just as you start to get higher in the towers, it kind of muddles that rate environment just a little bit too. Let's put that down. Understood. And then any general comment? I think workers' comp, kind of similar to last quarter, up 1%. Any expectation? And I think you've maybe touched on some of the drivers, the medical inflation, that sort of thing. Any expectation that that has the potential to transition to be a little more productive as we go through the next couple of quarters? That's a very interesting line to me, Mark. It's very flat. We talk about an increase of 1%. I call that flat. And it looks like it's going to stay flat. And it's interesting because the underlying medical costs are inflating. And I'm surprised that—and you do see fee schedules. That question was answered earlier. Those are increasing in the states. So it's interesting. And I do not see pressure for that rate to go up. Yep. I think it's more of a long-term issue on that, Mark. I think that as wages go up, workers' comp premiums have to go up, right? As medical inflation goes up, workers' comp premiums have to go up. It just seems to be that we're not feeling it quite as quickly as maybe any of us would have expected. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thanks, Mark. Our next question is from the line of David Motemaden with Evercore ISI. Please proceed with your question. Hey, thanks. Good morning. David? Hey, good morning. I had a question just on the primary RPC, excluding property. That was up 6%-7%, or you're seeing up 6%-7% in the Q2. I'm just wondering what that was in the Q1 and if you're seeing that accelerate at all. I know there's some mixed impacts, but just wondering if we sort of strip out the property side of it, what you're seeing on RPS. Just wait a second for that. Yeah. I think that we're seeing about a point higher than what we had talked about just overall when you strip out property. And I think it's important to understand property is about 30% of our book. For everybody to understand, we talk about property, but casualty is 70% of our book. It gets a little muddy when you throw a package in there a little bit. But by and large, the property book for us is about 30% of the total premiums that we write per place. Got it. That's helpful. And then just a question for Mike Pesch. You had mentioned lower April midterm policy adjustments. It sounds like that sort of normalized in May and June so far. But I was wondering if you could just elaborate a little bit on what you saw exactly and if that has changed your outlook for growth at all. Yeah. David, I don't think it's changed our outlook for growth. I think it's sort of an indicator for us on the healthiness of our customer base and what we're seeing in terms of endorsements or audits that come through. April, while it was lower from previous year, April, we are seeing promising things in May and June. And so right now, it's not causing me any concern that maybe there's some overall economic factors. We had lower endorsements on D&O, which, again, we all know the D&O market is still a challenging market from a reduction standpoint. We are starting to see that sort of smooth out a bit as we get into the latter half of this year. I think the rate overall on that specific line, albeit as a percentage of our overall writings is smaller, is starting to stabilize a little bit. But it doesn't cause me any concern, David. And David, this is Doug. Let me just make sure you understand. We are still seeing net, net, net positive endorsements, audits, net endorsements over cancellation. So it's still a positive number. It's just not quite as high a positive number as it was last year in the Q2. Got it. Okay. Understood. Thanks for that clarification. And then also just in the Mike and Doug, I think you both mentioned just rates increasing in the middle market by more than in the large market, which is pretty consistent with what we've been hearing and seeing. Just wondering how long you think that differential can be sustained, how much I think, is it 1 year, 2 years? I guess, how are you guys thinking about that? Yeah, David, it's hard to predict 1 and 2 years out how that may still be performing. I would say, look, the mid-market business, again, as we said earlier, I think Joel said it, it sort of lags the larger account space by a year or 2. So I think we have a runway here for quite a bit of time with our mid-market and smaller business. But they're affected by a lot of things. When you think about mid-market, of course, we all talk about the catastrophe-prone areas, Florida, California, things of that nature. But CNN just reported just a couple of weeks ago that through the first, I think, four months of 2024, there were 1,200 recognized tornadoes, and the average is 800. That's a 50% increase. That has a material effect on manufacturers in the heartland and other middle market and upper middle market accounts that are affected by these sort of storms. So we always talk about the impact to the coastal areas, but the impact is coming in the middle of the country and other parts of the country that no one expected, including flood. So I think that tends to affect the middle market accounts that don't pay nearly as much premium or take on as much risk. So I can see that. That's a factor. When you look at how much risk a large account can take, that's a huge mitigator of premium. I cannot take a $500,000 retention on my plan. Sorry, I'm a middle market account. It's not going to happen. I can't take it. I'm buying down to $100 or $50,000. And if I'm XYZ Fortune 1000 company, I'm taking that retention to $1 million. And that is a huge mitigator of rate. So that's why, in my opinion, that along with the fact that size has its differential and typically has more professional buyers. Not that our brokers aren't professional, but they've got to deal with a totally different buyer and a totally different mentality when it comes to risk in the middle market versus large. Got it. Thank you. Thanks, David. Our next questions are from the line of Katie Sakys with Autonomous Research. Please proceed with your questions. Hi. Thank you. Good morning. Circling back to the discussion on RPC, I think a quarter ago, U.S. retail renewal premiums were looking to be up around 7%, which I believe included property. Management noted a feeling there could be a tick up to that over the remainder of the year. I recognize that we aren't quite at the midpoint of the year yet, but that tick up hasn't yet been the case. So I'm wondering what's changed in the last 12 weeks and how has your outlook on U.S. retail pricing shifted for the remainder of the year? Well, I think that we factored in everything that we're seeing thus far. We haven't been betting on a turn in the property market when we're looking at our outlook for the rest of the year. For us to post in that 7%-9%, or maybe it's a little narrower to that 7.5%-8.5% range, something like that. We factored in everything that you've heard today in trying to get to that number. But what we haven't factored in is a sudden spike in rates because of a storm. And we haven't factored in a dramatic uplift immediately from casualty rates. So what we're seeing now is what we factored into our guidance for the rest of the year. Okay. Got it. Thank you. Thanks, Katie. Our next question is from the line of Dean Castagnetti with KBW. Please proceed with your questions. Hi. My first question was back to casualty reinsurance. As we continue to see accelerated primary casualty pricing, do you suspect any changes maybe to ceding commissions or terms and conditions as well? Oh, I think that's always our responsibility. Whenever we're negotiating in a more difficult situation, those items are on the table. Having said that, it makes our professional capabilities more valuable, gives us the opportunity to sell more, and we earn our way. We earn our living. So to me, of course, they're on the table. The net-net is a benefit to us, though. Got it. And then just real quick, my second question back to M&A. As we go into the second half of the year, do you suspect any changes to M&A multiples? No, I wouldn't expect a significant change in multiple. I think that we might get more opportunities for those that see we are the right spot for them to spend the rest of their life. And I think that we're going to have that message is getting louder and louder. And we didn't say it, but the confusing capital structure that PE firms are now using in order to buy brokers. I'm telling you that the magic that has been hidden behind a cloak on that is going to become more and more known where sellers say, "Let me get this right. I give myself to you, and I take back equity that's different than you have." I got to tell you, these folks are smart, but when they have partners that get to eat first before they do, that message is not going to be well received by the smart ones out there. And I'm telling you, we have one equity, one company. We all pull on the same oars for the same ship, and we don't eat before they eat. We all eat at the same time. I got to tell you, it angers me that there's some folks out there getting duped on this. Well, look, I think duped is exactly right. The other thing is, one of the things I'm very proud of is we have a participation across the enterprise of people in our employee stock purchase plan. So you can join in with the company. You could be somebody at a normal desk, and you can participate in the growth of the enterprise. And guess what? There's four people at the top of a private equity deal that make any money. Well, great. And now that payout on the second bite, which all these people are so happy about the fact that their owners have so much equity in the future, isn't this wonderful? We're all investors together. And now they want to have themselves eat first, and you lag behind. And by the way, I don't see a lot of transactions happening that are getting those sellers out. And it's coming up on 5 and 6 years. And yeah, maybe you'll find another PE firm that'll trade it. But I think we're going to see a line at the door trying to go public. And that's going to be interesting in itself too because you guys are all going to be you guys and gals that are on today are going to make those decisions as to whether there's a differentiation that's positive between someone new to this game and someone like ourselves that's been playing it for 40 years. I got my bet down. Next question. Yes. Our next question is from the line of Mike Ward with Citigroup. Please proceed with your questions. Hey, thanks. This is Charlie on for Mike. Sorry to go back to workers' comp. I just wanted to see if Scott Hudson or the team could touch on utilization trends and to what extent that is or isn't contributing to the severity you were talking about there. Can you clarify when you say utilization trends, exactly what you're asking? I guess mix of injuries or procedures or I guess, and NCCI did a lot of work on this in the middle of the year and just kind of trying to get a sense of whether some of the offsets to medical price inflation in the past are waning or still a helper, but medical pricing may be stronger. I don't have any information that would say the mix is changing whatsoever. There's nothing specifically that we're seeing or have looked at that would lead us to that conclusion. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Our final question is from the line of Elyse Greenspan with Wells Fargo. Please proceed with your questions. Hi, thanks. Thanks for taking the follow-up. The first one, the $750 million earnout, Doug, that gets paid in the Q1 of next year to Willis Re, the Willis Re earnout? Listen, I don't know if it's March or April next year, but I think it's April. Yeah. Let me go back and connect with my thinking. I think it's April of 2025. So it's not a March payment. It's an April payment. Okay. Thanks. And then on M&A, just fleshing out some of the discussion, it sounds like you guys are pretty bullish on deals that come to fruition in the back half. So your prepared remarks comment, Doug, about if you don't use the cash that you have, maybe share repurchase enters the equation. It sounds like that would more be a 2025 versus a 2024 event. Oh, I don't know. I don't know if I'd say that. I think we'll take a look at what our cash flow looks like. We'll see what our pipeline looks like. And if history has been pretty consistent, the Q1 is a little small. If we get to the end of the summer here and it looks like we're not having a lot of stuff that's going to close between now and the end of the year, it doesn't mean we wouldn't go into the market sooner than the end of the year. Okay. And one last one on that pipeline that you guys provided, the $550 million, how does that skew U.S. versus international? Well, we're actually seeing more weight in the U.S. than we are, let's say, in the U.K. right now. Okay. Any other international areas that make up a good portion of that or nothing that you would call out? No, I wouldn't say a good portion of that. Okay. Thank you. Thanks, Elyse. Well, thank you, everybody, for being with us this morning. We appreciate it. I think you could tell from our comments that from my vantage point as CEO, the team continues to execute very well. I believe we have all the ingredients, regardless of the market environment, to continue our financial performance, which is excellent. I look forward to speaking with you again during our Q2 earnings call at the end of July. Thank you for being with us this morning and have a great day. This does conclude today's conference. Thanks, everyone. You may disconnect your lines at this time.