Good morning, everyone. Glad you're here. For the fireside chat today, my name's Jimmy Bhullar. I'm the insurance analyst at JPMorgan. With us, we have Christa Davies, CFO of Aon, and James Platt, Chief Digital Officer. I'll ask them a few questions. Obviously we'll take questions from you as well. If you have a question, you could raise your hand during the session, and a few times I'll call out as well. We'd rather have it be interactive. For those of you who are listening in the U.S., I doubt there is anyone, but you could email me a question. Maybe I'll check my email a couple of times. Christa, maybe to start with, can you talk about the operating environment for your business? Obviously your results the last couple of quarters have been very strong. There are concerns amongst investors about the economy and how that's affecting demand for certain products. How is the environment overall for your business, and what are some of the positives, negatives you're focusing on? Thanks, Jimmy, and welcome everyone. We would say it's a very strong environment. We finished 2021 with the strongest results we've ever had at Aon, 9% organic revenue growth, 30 plus percent margins, double-digit underlying free cash flow growth. In the first half of 2022, we've grown 8% organically, expanded margins 50 basis points, and underlying free cash flow has grown double digits too. We expect to retain the same guidance we gave at the beginning of the year. Organic growth mid-single digit or greater, margin expansion for the full year, and double-digit free cash flow growth, starting with a free cash flow of 2020 of $2.6 billion straight off the GAAP cash flow statement, growing double digits to 2021 and double digits to 2022. A very strong environment for us. What we would say is we're very robust in any economic circumstance because we have positive impacts from inflation. They positively impact the values of what we insure on the health side, the commercial risk side, and the reinsurance side. Inflation has a positive impact on our revenue, and that will start to flow through with a three to four-quarter lag. In Q4, Q1 next year is the first time we'll start to see that. The second positive impact from the macroeconomy is interest rates. We manage fiduciary assets on behalf of clients, and so 100 basis point increase in the short-term end of the interest rate curve is $60 million top line and bottom line. The third positive impact from the macroeconomic is we're managing risk and we're managing volatility on behalf of clients. There are areas in this macroeconomic environment that are increasing in demand. Pension de-risking, given rising interest rates, workforce resilience, supply chain, and then big areas of new risks that are on the horizon, whether that's the climate regulation coming out of the U.S. SEC and helping clients manage their climate risk and solutions aligned with that, or cyber and the increased threat with ransomware. Jimmy, what we would say is we expect to continue to grow mid-single digit or greater. We expect to continue to grow margins, and we expect to grow free cash flow double digits in 2022 and 2023 and beyond. Okay. Inflation's obviously picked up a lot over the past year. Are you implying that majority of the benefit has yet to show up in your financials? You haven't seen much of it so far? We have seen the negative impact of inflation on compensation. We started to see that at the end of 2021, and we've certainly seen compensation costs increase in 2022. We have yet to see the positive impact of inflation on revenue yet. Look, what I would say is we're offsetting the negative impact of inflation on expenses with the great work that James has led over the last five years on Aon Business Services, where we're driving productivity increases each and every year to more than offset that inflationary impact on compensation. Okay. On interest rates, I guess we should think the U.S. investor has been surprised that fiduciary income has not picked up as much as they would've thought, that's because you sort of have to look at rates globally in your business. Can you talk about the lag there, and if you think about where fiduciary income is right now? It used to be a lot higher in the past- Yes It's declined significantly. How should we think about the lag to rates in terms of fiduciary income? Yeah. There isn't really a lag so much on in interest rates. As interest rates rise, we're holding money in 30 to 90-day money market funds, it's really coming through in a pretty immediate fashion. Your point on global is really important, Jimmy. About half fiduciary assets are in the U.S. and about half are outside the U.S. with EUR, AUD, and CAD being the next sort of biggest areas in terms of interest rates. You should see we manage about $6 billion globally. On average, short-term interest rates, 100 basis point increase in interest rates, $60 million top line and bottom line per 100 basis point increase. Okay. Maybe just moving on to margins. You've had a history of improving margins over the last decade, almost 100 basis points a year. As we look into the future, if you take a very long-term view, should the pace of increase be similar or should it be lower because the base is a lot higher? What's your outlook near term for margins as well with some of the inflationary pressures you might be seeing in your own business for your own costs? Yeah. What we would say is we've driven 1,100 basis point in margin expansion over the last 10 years, so as you said, about 100 basis points a year. We've had a strong margin expansion in the first half of the year, 50 basis points despite the inflationary pressures we've had. We expect to grow margins each and every year driven by three key things, growing organically, a mix shift to higher revenue, higher margin areas, so more data analytic intensive areas of our business. The third is really this move with Aon Business Services driving productivity increases every year. We would expect long-term margins, Jimmy, to get to the 40%-45% margin level. Because if you look at similar data analytic intensive businesses, that's where their margins are. In our business today, the more data analytic parts of our business are growing double digits and that kind of margin today. That portfolio mix shift has driven more than 50% of the margin expansion in the last five years and will continue to drive margin expansion over the next five years. On margins, in terms of inflationary pressures for your employee force, has that already been impacting you, or do you see more of that? Are there cost savings or other things that are going to impact your margins longer term because the pandemic, if you think about real estate footprint, work from home, technology, everything else? Yeah. I would say we've already seen the impact of inflation on our expense base this year. In terms of employees, we have paid our employees more. That's absolutely the right thing to do. We had great performance at the end of last year, so that was record compensation levels, and we saw that inflation increase again through 2022. I think that's already embedded. What we would say is offsetting that is the great work James has led over the last 5 years with Aon Business Services, where we are aggregating 20,000 of the 50,000 people at Aon into Aon Business Services. We're driving standardization of process, common platforms across it, consolidation of real estate, to your point, Jimmy, and then centers of excellence in Poland and India. Those things are driving substantial productivity improvements each and every year. Okay. Maybe, James, you could discuss Aon Digital Services and what are you doing? How is that impacting your own business and then your go-to-client strategy as well? Jimmy, digital for us is a pretty intuitive strategy, and if you start to look at how we apply it, and maybe you think of different client groups. In our largest clients, increasingly it's about integration, and it's about using technology to help integrate our solutions to large clients. Good example of that for the large clients would be our reinsurance platform. We built a reinsurance platform. Part of that is our facultative reinsurance capabilities. What we've been able to do is begin to integrate that model directly with insurers and large insurers and start to get it across the world. That's sort of digital for the large clients, very much about taking our solutions and integrating to them. In the mid-market clients, it's very much around service and providing our capabilities digitally to that segment and beginning to automate much more of the processes that they run back to front. How do we collect data from those clients? How do we process that data, and how do we provide our analytics and our consulting back to them in a digital way? It makes it much more efficient for them, and it allows us to create much better service. What it also does digitally in that middle market, it allows us to integrate our offers. Our human capital solutions and our health offer really is all about whether it's workforce resilience or well-being, and we're actually able to integrate those much more using digital technology. Where perhaps, I'm spending a lot of time and a lot of focus on only just a small segment. This is an area where if you went to the U.S. alone, it's a $65 billion premium market, which we have a very, very small share of today. We see digital in that segment as a huge opportunity for us to disrupt. What we're seeing already is traditionally we would not have gone after that segment. We couldn't make the economics work to the level we wanted to. There was a lot of very fragmented competition. The digital model, if you remember, we bought CoverWallet about four years ago. We've sort of taken that digital model we bought from CoverWallet and applied it to the small segment. Suddenly the margins we're able to create are above Aon's average margin. It's a very attractive segment from a performance point of view. What's more exciting is working with really two channels, our field offices, suddenly we have 20% growth plus in that segment in the field offices in the U.S. Our biggest distribution for small clients is ironically our largest clients. You'll have seen our recent announcement with PayPal as one example of how do we get to small clients through large clients using digital means, we think that's a massively attractive space. Whether that's payroll organizations, whether that's working with PE organizations, whether that's working with organizations that have franchisees, all of those are big growth opportunities for us using digital. The Chief Digital Officer is a new role at the firm, where are you in your own journey of improving your digital capabilities, how do you think you compete with your peers, the larger brokers, in terms of your digital capabilities? As Christa mentioned, Jimmy, we've done a huge amount of investment to bring Aon Business Services into 20,000 colleagues in a single managed organization. The starting point of that has been extremely powerful for managing cost over the last sort of 12 months. Part of that journey has been building platforms across the firm. Reinsurance, we had a platform already that when we bought Benfield, we bought a platform called GRiDS, and we then spread that across the firm and brought it across Aon. We learned from that journey that global platforms are a massive driver for us. We've been doing the same thing for health. We're now doing the same thing for our commercial risk business, and we've just done the same thing, for example, for our investments business. Getting global platforms that work not just in one region or one country, but literally across all of them. Those platforms are now giving us opportunities to start to begin to automate and digitize large amounts of our business now. We are early days in this journey. It's not that we have really started, in my mind, to utilize that anything or like as much as we could do, but we're beginning to see big positive effects. A small example would be policy checking. Policy checking for us is a time-consuming and difficult exercise. We're able to apply AI and other techniques to it, and suddenly the cost of policy checking to us, at least in the U.S. business, has dropped 70% just by applying automation. These platforms provide the basis that we, over the next few years, we will start to utilize to automate and digitize ever more of our internal processes. Where do you think your peers are in that regard? Are they comparable? Do you think they're behind, ahead? It's hard for me to have a proper view of our peers and our competitors remain pretty ferocious. I think what we can say is that we think our strategy and our Aon United strategy of not just doing this across one business line, but doing it in a highly integrated way. If you think about our two core drivers in this world, one of them is bringing data together to help us both run more efficient processes, also create better products, and one of them is using technology to integrate. We think that our strategy, our Aon United strategy of doing that across health, wealth, risk, et cetera, is extremely powerful and relatively unique in the marketplace. Yeah. Christa, how do you think about what differentiates Aon from some of the larger brokers like Marsh? Yeah, Jimmy, what we would say is it's our Aon United strategy for sure, where we're putting the client first and we're integrating and thinking through client needs, what are the best solutions. A really good example of how we're bringing that to life for clients is we have our Enterprise Client Group, which we formed last year, last September, where we're bringing together our top 500 clients globally and having one person who brings the whole of Aon to that client. Because if you think about client needs, a client is dealing with climate change and thinking about how do I assess my climate risk? How do I quantify that climate risk? How do I decrease or manage that risk if I have a climate event? Actually, that requires our reinsurance modeling. It may require some health analytics if they're a health business. You're going to bring different capabilities across the whole of Aon to help serve that client need. Jimmy, that's driving double-digit growth for us in really important new areas like climate, like intellectual property, like cyber. For us, we would say this Aon United strategy, clients first and bring the best of Aon to all of our clients, is helping us win more. Jimmy, if I can just maybe add to that, because Christa described the largest clients, that same strategy works at our smallest clients. If I take you to an example that we're actually quite excited about, the trucking industry. Extremely hard for small firms with a few units to actually get the right cover. What we're able to do is to work with a set of markets. We've traded cover for large trucking organizations to bring that to the small market. We're also able to then work again with reinsurance to sort of support that and make sure it works. Plus, we're then able to bring multiple products to that small segment. Not just risk, but also benefits for small trucking firms and then distribute it digitally. This Aon United strategy, fantastic at the large client end, but also incredibly important for us at the small client segment. You mentioned the tailwind that you'll see from higher inflation in the next year or so. How do you think about some of the headwinds in your business, potentially because of maybe a slowdown in the economy and exposures that are insured declining? Similarly, pricing has been really good. Now there are concerns about, especially on the commercial side, pricing slowing down. What are some of the headwinds that we might expect to counteract that strong growth other than maybe the comps getting difficult? Jimmy, what we would say, and we have said consistently is, as we think about market impact, it's both pricing and insured values. If you did the correlation over the last 30 years, actually there's no correlation between insurance pricing and our revenue growth. There's a very strong correlation between GDP and our revenue growth and particularly the underlying drivers of GDP, whether that's asset values, corporate revenues, or employment levels. For us, we're looking very much at GDP, Jimmy, and thinking about how does that impact our business. As I mentioned earlier, actually, there are sort of 3 positive drivers of our business that are coming in this particular macro environment. One is inflation has a positive impact on inflated health premiums, commercial risk premiums, reinsurance premiums. The second is interest rates, and they're obviously impacting our fiduciary investment income, as we talked about earlier. The third are these new areas of risk, which 5 years ago didn't exist. If you look at the S&P 500, 85% of the value of the S&P 500 are intangible assets. There's no risk management solution for intangible assets today. We can now value your patent portfolio, in a way where insurers are actually willing to underwrite it, and you can lend against that. We've now created over $1 billion of debt that startups can actually borrow against to create capacity for them to grow. Jimmy, I would say whether it's areas like climate or cyber or intellectual property, they didn't exist 5 years ago. Yes, we see some macroeconomic headwinds, but actually our business is to help clients manage risk and manage volatility. There are lots of areas of our business, pension de-risking, workforce resilience, that increase demand in times of volatility. Maybe shifting to cash flow. You've spoken about growing cash flow double digits. Last year was depressed because the Willis transaction. How do you think about cash flow in the next few years? Thank you for the question, Jimmy, because we love free cash flow. It's definitely how we run the firm and allocate capital. It's one of my most exciting topics. Jimmy, you are one of the people who focuses most on it, and we deeply appreciate that. We run the firm on free cash flow. We value the firm in a discounted cash flow fashion. We allocate cash based on return on capital, cash on cash returns. Our highest return on capital opportunity remains share buyback because we value the firm on a DCF basis, and it values us substantially above where we're trading today. In fact, substantially above our all-time high. The return on capital share buyback is exceptional. As you look at free cash flow for the firm, starting with 2020, because we recognize last year was an unusual year, 2020 free cash flow, straight off the GAAP cash flow statement, cash flow from operations less CapEx equals $2.6 billion in 2020. That grows double digits to 2021, that grows double digits to 2022. That's the right starting point for free cash flow in 2022. We think we will grow free cash flow per share more than double digits because we're obviously allocating that capital to buyback. We think we will invest a lot in share repurchase because of return on capital. Equally, the M&A pipeline is very, very attractive, particularly in areas like Insurtech and digital, where James, you're leading and maybe you want to talk about the M&A excitement we have there. Christa, I'd add that taking this role on, part of the attraction of this role was the fact that it is such a great time to actually think about acquiring. If you look at a lot of the firms out there, the Insurtech firms particularly that had been highly overpriced, those prices have come down. A number of them have failed. Actually, we look at quite closely why we think the market is in the situation it is, and we think the two simple reasons of why they've struggled, one of them is distribution, and have they got privileged and efficient distribution? We think the answer for many of them is no. We look at them in terms of the products. Were they able to create differentiated products for their clients? We think the answer broadly is often no. Those are two areas that Aon brings to anybody we do acquire. The question here is there a synergy? We have, as I mentioned earlier, highly privileged distribution through our clients, through our field offices, and we have the ability to create highly differentiated products. We look at these firms, and suddenly you say, "Look, they have a lot of learning." It's learning that we like, three to four years often of sometimes failing, but it's still strong learning. They've built models that are attractive, and they've certainly invested heavily in technology. We think this whole Insurtech space at the moment is extremely attractive to us to bring them in. What we've also done over the last four years of CoverWallet is we've learned how to integrate and how to bring our business onto that platform and utilize it to grow. That whole combination of our own learning, the attractive market, the prices at the moment, it creates a massively attractive partner. Public valuations obviously have come down a lot, in some cases over 70%, 80%. Did private market valuations go up to the same extent, and have they backed off a similar amount, or how do you think about that? Yeah, look, I think it's a funny market at the moment because of where you could argue the mispricing there had been compared- Yeah to the opportunities for many of them. None of this is simple, but actually, ultimately things will likely reflect the public valuation. Okay. Were there deals that you would have liked to have done, you just couldn't make sense of them financially, that we should assume that you'll be more active just for that reason? Jimmy, there are masses of fabulous capabilities out there that people have invested huge time and space in. There's a huge amount of talent in this marketplace, and if we look at CoverWallet, when we acquired Cover, we acquired some fabulous people who really had great capability. We think for us, this is a place where not only will we get the capabilities, we will also acquire talent. I would say, I think we've learned how to manage and work with that talent in ways that are pretty unique. Yeah. Christa, how about M&A for the traditional type of brokerage properties that you might buy? Is the competition for those still pretty high, or are you seeing less competition from private equity? Yeah. We would say it's still extraordinarily competitive, Jimmy. We would say generally our M&A strategy, like our organic growth strategy, is less on buying books of business, because actually the return on capital just isn't high enough for us to invest in that M&A versus share buyback. What we're really investing in is content and capability we can scale globally. If you look at the acquisitions we've done over the last four or five years, we bought CoverWallet in the digital space to help us scale out a digital opportunity. We bought Stroz Friedberg actually, which is where Farah joined us from, in the cyber space. We bought 601West in the intellectual property space. We bought Tyche earlier this year, which is capital modeling for insurance companies. These are content and capability underpinned by data analytics, which allow us to grow whole new markets. What you won't see us do is buy books of business, because the return on capital just doesn't stack rank high enough. One interesting point around that is obviously Tyche excepted because it's still early days. Each of those businesses we bought now didn't start working globally, now all work globally for us. Does the decline in valuations for some of the businesses that you might have been interested in acquiring, does that imply that you would see a little bit of a shift towards acquisitions versus maybe buybacks in the near term? Jimmy, we evaluate everything. What I would say is we have a plan at the beginning of the year about how we intend to allocate capital between buyback and M&A. We have a capital planning meeting every month where we're optimizing that pipeline live. It's very much based on the opportunity, and we certainly hope to buy some great capability at very, very attractive prices. Okay. Maybe we'll take some questions from the audience. I think there might be a mic around here. Let's see. Maybe I'll ask another one on M&A. For many of the deals that you're buying, who are you competing against for those? Is it traditional brokers, or are there firms from other industries? I might start, but you can jump in there, James. I would say, actually, for the last couple of ones that we just talked about, there was no competitor. They were raising capital, actually, is what they were doing. Or we had a long-term partnership. I think that was the CoverWallet situation. It often isn't a competitive situation. What we're doing is we're saying, actually, climate, it's a huge area of growth for us. We're investing in this. We're going to get to know the whole ecosystem. We're going to bring in climate capability to help us. By the way, we already have the best weather modeling on the planet in our reinsurance division. We already have the weather modeling piece. We need just some more on the regulatory piece. Jimmy, I think for us, what we're doing is we're going out and getting to know the ecosystem and building relationships well in advance, and often a commercial relationship first. James, you've done this in the digital space, maybe you want to talk about that. I think what's interesting in, as you say, these relationship-based ways of actually us acquiring, I think every time it becomes a conversation. What we find, as I say, in the digital space particularly, is a lot of the founders, they've invested significant portions of their life to what they've been creating. Yes, obviously there's financial reward, and that's important, but there's also they've built a team that they've invested that time. They want it to go somewhere where they can see it succeeding and surviving. That's been important to them. Certainly, that was a case in the CoverWallet case. It was a part of the Tyche case. By building the relationships and actually understanding them and talking about how we can work, as I say, this model of us bringing capabilities, us being able to globalize, it hasn't been very much active competition. Who are our competitors? If you look at the marketplace, a lot of the players we're interested in are serving multiple insurers. That sort of limits at some level insurers as purchasers. We're a pretty attractive place in the insurance ecosystem. On M&A, can you talk about the lessons learned from the whole Willis experience and for you and for the rest of the industry, are very large combinations, at least in the foreseeable future, off the table, you think? Look, Jimmy, we loved the Willis Towers Watson transaction, and we sincerely wish we could have concluded it. We had it approved in every jurisdiction around the world, including the EU, across 58 different countries, with an excruciating process with DG Comp, extraordinarily thorough. We really just had one country in the world, sadly, the U.S., where we could not get it done. I think for us, Jimmy, it really came down to a bet on Aon United. I think what the U.S. regulator really required was for us to compromise the Aon United strategy in a material way, and that just wasn't worth it for us. One of the things the acquisition really forced us to do, Jimmy, is when you bring together a firm and you do work on integration for 18 months, it forces you to actually refine your own strategy and your own operating model in a way that you don't document it and describe it in detail when you're running your own firm. It's why we accelerated out of this in July 2021 to finish 2021 with the strongest growth we've ever had in Aon's history, 9% growth, the highest margins we've ever produced, and very strong underlying free cash flow. I think we learned a lot of lessons, Jimmy, around the operating model of Aon and how to bring together the best of regions where we run the P&L closest to clients in an Aon United way and solution lines driving innovation and growth with these client segments, enterprise client at the high end, and Digital Client Solutions, which James is leading, with the small commercial and gig worker and consumer opportunity, which is a huge growth opportunity for us. We feel really good about the M&A pipeline, Jimmy. I'd say it's mostly focused on these big new growth areas for us around content and capability, climate, IP, cyber, workforce resilience, health, and digital. A lot of those underpinned by data analytics. A lot of what we're buying is content and capability we can scale via our data analytics into global new businesses. Jimmy, I just had one more thing about the experience that I think culturally for us it's been extremely strengthening because actually, as Christa says, as you go through that journey, it pulls together the firm. As you come out of it, you're able to leverage that. As you say, we are a very different firm now than we were not just before the experience, but at the end of it because of the new model that we've sort of created and the acceleration that's given us. It really has probably taken two or three years off our cultural journey of creating an Aon United firm. Here. Thanks. We'll go to JPMorgan people later. Go ahead. Hi, guys. Very clear message on impact of inflation and interest rates. I think you did mention you did see some macro headwinds. I was just wondering if you could elaborate on that and what possible impact, A, what are you seeing and how will the business respond? We're not seeing a lot, I think is where I would start, because if you look at the first half of the year, 8% organic revenue growth, 50 basis points margin expansion, strong underlying free cash flow. We're seeing strong top line margin and underlying growth. There's some volatility in the economic environment. There's some uncertainty is what we would say. Look, what we would say is there are some more discretionary parts of our business, health and wealth are sort of the areas. Health just finished Q2 with the strongest growth it's had in years. We're not seeing it yet. We recognize that people are seeing it, and we're not saying that there aren't certain areas of our business. M&A actually would be one good area where, are M&A transactions lower this year than last year? Yes, they are. Are we still seeing good growth in that business? We're seeing strong results in that business this year. Yes, there's some, but very little so far. We're obviously watching it very closely and paying close attention. I would say it's offset by a number of areas where we've invested in content to help us grow in areas of demand at the moment. Climate's definitely that case. Cyber is definitely that case. Workforce resilience, unbelievable growth in that business for us at this point in time. I think, Christa, just coming back against those headwinds, as our clients find this environment difficult, we genuinely believe and we see a flight to quality. If you see lines like D&O, which has had a lot of significant pricing increase, our ability to model and to find more thoughtful, innovative solutions for clients to actually manage that cost obviously is significantly greater than many of the other competitors in the space. People come to us and we see that across multiple lines. This environment for us, in terms of underlying growth, is actually really helpful. Actually, just to reinforce this point, we saw that in 2008, 2009, 2010, a flight to quality, substantial. We see that again now. What we would say is if you looked at the top four global brokers, in commercial risk, our largest business, less than 30% global market share. It's a very, very fragmented industry with an enormous tail. We do see a flight to quality because if you have substantial increases in D&O, actually, we've developed a new solution where you're doing D&O analytics on your claims history, volatility, et cetera, plus actually human capital, because a lot of D&O comes from people risk. Our human capital analytics plus your D&O analytics has created a new solution we've gone to clients with that's actually resulted in substantially less pricing increases for clients. Those kinds of new solutions are really, really important at times of increased volatility. Cameron? Yeah, I am. Did your questions get answered? Yeah. Okay. Sure. I guess just to go back to M&A. I guess the digital side are would-be targets. Are those conversations on ice right now because of valuations or their own lack of visibility in what's happening in the world? Or do they view you guys as a platform to really grow their business and do those conversations carry on and potentially just back out the deals next year look fertile on that front? Thanks. I mean, Cameron, we would say the conversations have accelerated recently because James has done an amazing job building an ecosystem of partners that we actually partner with commercially and know in the digital ecosystem, a very broad range of 50-plus partners, over time. Two years ago, those valuations were sort of slightly insane. Many of them had great content and capability, but the economics didn't work for us. Today, actually, we're having tons of conversations. James, you may want to just jump in here. Yeah, no, there's a slight irony to the timing of the question because it's the ITC conference in Las Vegas at the moment, which for those that aren't aware is one of the largest global Insurtech conferences, and we are, I'd say, there in force, actually talking to a whole set of potential partners who we think have capabilities that we would absolutely like to acquire. As you say, Jimmy, as you said earlier, we've still got to wait for public and private to even out and get to the right sort of thing. The conversations at this stage aren't easy, but we see a number of different areas where we could accelerate our progress by acquiring. The IPO market drying up would actually be a positive in terms of your ability to acquire- Absolutely. Look, I mean, if you go to a lot of the firms that obviously invest in these, they privately would say to us, "We want to talk to you." Can we get to agreement on price is a different question. I think when you were going through the Willis deal, there were a lot of concerns, especially coming out of it, about retention. There were some high-profile people who had left. Your results have been fairly strong. Can you point to any metrics that would sort of give us an idea on whether there was disruption? Has that dissipated, or was there not as much disruption as maybe people have talked about outside? Yeah. Jimmy, we look at sort of two key metrics internally to sort of measure this. One is voluntary attrition, people who left that we didn't want to leave. We would say that voluntary attrition in 2022 is less than voluntary attrition in 2019, sorry, which is the sort of pre-COVID benchmark year. We're losing fewer people this year than in our sort of historically normal pre-COVID years. We would say that's one great metric. We're retaining the best talent at Aon, which is great. The other is we survey our employees, and we do engagement surveys every couple of months. Our engagement survey is the highest it's ever been. It's in the eighties. This is best in class across all industries. The thing that's coming through very, very clearly in the engagement survey is two key things. One is, I'm extremely grateful for how my manager invests in me, my career development, mentoring, and particularly during the pandemic, wellbeing, et cetera. The second is smart working. I'm able to work in a very flexible way, in the right way for my clients and my business. Jimmy, those two things indicate to us that we're doing very well in retaining the best talent and attracting the best talent. We would say we've been very fortunate in being able to hire some great talent, particularly over the last 12 months. I think one of the things that, again, our strategy and our approach of taking a united approach across all of our business lines has allowed us to also pivot to talent maybe we wouldn't have hired traditionally. We are taking an ever-increasing industry focus. Our clients work in industries, we require a significant amount of expertise in those areas. Now rather than saying, "Hey, if we're going to go into financial institutions, let's find a financial institutions insurance person," we're actually just going and finding financial institutions people and actually bringing and helping them understand our solutions. That has opened up a huge new pipeline of talent. You talk a lot about the climate risk opportunity. Perhaps if you could quantify that across the value chain. What are we looking at in terms of needs? What's your business opportunity in this, and are the underwriters willing to accept these risks? Great question. I would say there are two areas where we're broadly helping clients. One is on the climate transition. One of the challenges with transition is there's transition risk, and if we can help clients de-risk the transition, that's one area. The other is with just modeling the impact of climate and then helping if you have a climate event, navigating that. Maybe I'll just do one example of this, and James, you can jump in here. On the second, modeling the climate impact, obviously big SEC regulations, trying to figure out what your impact is. If you're a financial institution in the U.S., you may have a big mortgage portfolio and you're trying to assess what is the climate impact across your mortgage portfolio. We actually have the best weather analytics in the world. We can actually analyze and determine the impact and the outputs for your sort of modeling of what is that climate impact of your mortgage portfolio. We actually have catastrophe bonds where we can actually place risk primarily with pension funds. They're sort of alternative capital providers. If you have some climate impact in these geographies around your mortgage portfolio, then this catastrophe bond kicks in. We traditionally did catastrophe bonds for insurance companies, and we're now doing them for big commercial clients as well. A big West Coast tech company who had, as you can imagine, a big property portfolio on the West Coast, maybe in an earthquake zone. You can imagine the kinds of cat bonds that you can do or in emerging markets. We did a cat bond across four countries in Latin America, Mexico, Chile, Peru, and Colombia. It turns out that actually quake risk in those four countries is uncorrelated. Hence, we were able to get the World Bank to actually put up $1.4 billion to fund that cat bond underwritten by pension funds. There's a lot of where you're actually doing, and I think our unique value proposition here is you can do the modeling and then you can provide the solution. James, you're in the middle of this with clients too. I think what's interesting, Christa, you've mentioned, our core climate modeling has been in our reinsurance business. That is where we've built this capability. What's happened, what we've been able to do is, as you say, Christa, is use it in our risk and with our core sort of corporate clients on their property portfolios. What we're also beginning to understand is climate affects employees as much as it affects buildings and property. We're taking some of that climate modeling and then working with our clients to understand how might this affect your employees? How might this affect how they work, what their needs are going to be in the future? How do you as a client build solutions, benefit solutions, whatever it might be, to actually attract and manage your workforce through climate change? Some really innovative thought for ways of applying what is ultimately to start with a reinsurance modeling capability that looks forward, bringing it, as I say, through the whole range of what we do. Anything on the regulatory front you're watching, specifically there's talk of a 15% minimum global tax rate. In the U.S., there's also talk of a potential 1% tax on buybacks. Not sure if that would apply to you based on how you've. Any comments on those? We're obviously paying very close attention, Jimmy. There's a range of different regulations on the tax front in the U.S., as you highlighted, in Europe, in many countries around the world. What we would say is we're an Irish domiciled company. We run a global cash pool. We run a global capital structure. We continue to manage things on a global basis from Ireland. We feel really good about our tax rate going forward. We don't give forward guidance. What we can say is over the last 5 years, our underlying tax rate's been 18%. Very stable, it goes up and down in any one quarter based on discrete tax adjustments, which can be positive or negative based on your resolution with tax authorities. We feel really good about where we are. Would the dividend or would the tax on buybacks apply to you as you understand it now? We're an Irish company, it's really a tax on U.S. companies. Yeah buying back shares, Jimmy. Yes. Maybe as you've talked to investors since earnings, what are the questions that come up a lot, and are there any misconceptions or misunderstandings about your business short-term or long-term in the investment community? The biggest question I think on everyone's mind is macro. I think everyone's trying to figure it out, and I think there's a lot of questions and maybe perceptions that macro is worse than it perhaps is, certainly for us. I think that would be one misconception, Jimmy. I think 8% growth for the first half of the year, guidance of mid-single digit greater for the full year and for 2023. That would be one thought. The biggest, I think, disconnect for us is free cash flow, as you know well. I think if you look at our stock, it doesn't trade on free cash flow. It trades on EBITDA, it trades on EPS. That's really strange for us because we produce substantial free cash flow growth each and every year. It's why we're able to buy back stock at terrific returns on capital because there's a disconnect between how we value ourselves on a DCF basis and how we trade. Maybe Christa, just one more which we do get questioned on, is about margin. Yes. Where our margin can go to and, again, if you actually look at our continued shift towards data and analytic businesses, and we believe whilst we've started our Aon Business Services journey, we've got a long way to go on that. We think there is real great room around margin. Great point, James. I think based on the work that you've led over the last five years in Aon Business Services, and frankly, the investments we've made in data analytics, we do think of ourselves in 10 years' time more like a data analytic company than a professional services firm, hence having long-term margins more in the 40%-45% range. I guess no broker meeting's complete without a question on pricing. You do see, I think the last several years, commercial prices have gone up on top. You've gotten rate on rate on rate. It seems like there's more pushback from the brokers recently, more pushback from clients. Many of them are increasing retentions. How are you seeing, one, the pricing environment right now, and how have your clients been responding to increasing prices over the past several periods? I think it's a great question, Jimmy. We would say, look, we serve clients, and we are helping clients to manage pricing increases by applying the data analytics, by helping analyze the risk, by understanding the capacity in the marketplace and helping them figure out how much should they retain, how much should they put in a captive, how much should they place in the market? How can we prove that their risk is actually more attractive? How can we pool it with other risks to make it more attractive? James, you're in the middle of this, what would you add? I think you've summed it up pretty well, Christa. I think that we have huge opportunity. We do. Jimmy, I would say, look, I think price is obviously top of mind for clients, and it's one of the reasons why, James, you said earlier there's a flight to quality. People are moving and we're gaining market share over the last couple of years in particular. In times where prices increase, actually they need the data analytics we bring and the solutions we bring to help manage their risk and create new solutions to navigate the pricing increases better. Christa, maybe one thing to add is, for our clients, we are not a cost. We're a value play. I think that is fundamentally important, i.e., what we do allows them, particularly at times like this, to grow more, to invest more. Actually, it's about protection for them and the ability for them to grow. Our conversations with clients are not all about cost. They're about, hey, how can the client invest in the solutions we're providing to help them grow? Any last questions from the audience? Okay. I guess we'll end it with that. If anyone has questions, you're welcome to reach out to me, you're welcome to reach out to the Aon team as well. Take care. Thank you so much. Thank you.