I'm pleased to introduce and start our second fireside chat of the day and introduce the management team of Willis Towers Watson. Our next fireside chat is scheduled to last until 1:40 P.M. this afternoon, and we have with us Carl Hess, who is the President and incoming Chief Executive Officer for Willis Towers Watson, Andrew Krasner, who is the Chief Financial Officer, and Claudia De La Hoz, and she serves as the Investor Relations Officer for Willis Towers Watson. During the course of our conversation, you are welcome to email me with questions at greg.peters@raymondjames.com, and also as follow-up after the conversation's over with, and if you have follow-on questions, of course, you can reach out to me, but you can also reach out to Claudia, who is generally really responsive to questions that you might have. With that brief overview or introductory comments, I'd like to turn the mic over to Carl, and before we begin with my questions, I wanted to give you an opportunity to sort of recap the third quarter 2021 results, especially in the context of all the investor conversations you've had and the time you've had to reflect since you've reported on the important points that you think investors should know about at Willis Towers Watson. Sure, Greg, and thanks, and good afternoon, everyone. To say the third quarter was a busy time for us is a bit of an understatement. I'm not sure we've had a less eventful time, but it would've had try hard. We're really actually very pleased with our third quarter results. We posted solid organic growth of 4% and margin improvement 120 basis points and solid EPS growth despite, and I do say despite all the disruption from the deal break. On July 26th, we announced to 46,000 colleagues that we're headed a sharply different direction. During the quarter, we appointed myself, we appointed a new leadership team, and we introduced a new vision, One Willis Towers Watson. One Willis Towers Watson's about working across our businesses, our geographies, our functions to achieve more and be better. We're planning on driving change through new priorities to grow, simplify, and transform. For those of you who listened into our Investor Day call, that's exactly what we talked about. We're going to grow by investing in talent, by capturing market share, innovating, expediting our capabilities in evolving markets, and bringing curated solutions to clients. We plan to simplify by streamlining down to two business segments effective January 1st, three geographies, which we're already done starting in 2022. That's going to enable us to deliver more efficiency through technology and standardization. Then we're going to transform our colleague and our client experiences by streamlining our infrastructure, fortifying our operations, and evaluating our real estate needs. We've seen some challenges in elevated attrition in certain areas of our business, mostly our Corporate Risk and Broking segment, or CRB, but we've seen that start to improve by the end of the quarter, and hiring activity's dramatically increased as well. Excellent. I think that's a good segue to talk about employee retention and recruiting. It really was, and continues to be, a popular topic on all the conference calls. Retention is hard to come by. There's inflation on compensation. There's a declining available pool. Can you give us an updated perspective on employee retention, not only from a legacy perspective, but I'm interested in producer teams that have left, or producers that have left that you might be engaged with and might be considering coming back now that you're not going to be Aon. It's amazing how we're not going to be Aon has been a draw back to the organization. At Investor Day, we'd already counted the numbers, and we'd had over 750 rehires into the organization this year. People really do believe in Willis Towers Watson as standing for something. I think that's helping. At the enterprise level, attrition rates have remained within our normal range. Yes, attrition's been most pronounced at CRB over the last few months, but we've now gotten to the point where core CRB headcount stats have started to improve. We have alleviated a lot of the uncertainty that was caused by the proposed deal and its subsequent cancellation. Having lifted those constraints, attraction and retention have improved, and hiring rates in CRB are up dramatically. To your point, Greg, we've been rehiring across a broad range of places. That's very intentional. There have been some high-profile rehires. We just announced one in aerospace and a few producers in the U.S., but that's not necessarily representative of the majority of our new hires, nor is that where we're aspiring to go, right? We're looking to find the best talent across the industry. We have attracted, for instance, our new head of Brazil comes from Aon. Yeah. Our new head of global FAC comes from ERS, right? Yeah. I think the proposition we represent is actually, I think, good. Yeah. That was welcome news versus the steady drip from the various periodicals that publish on you about people leaving. It's nice to see a change in tone there. It is a nice change. I agree. Yeah. The next area, again, you mentioned this in your opening comments about the strategy going forward, and the restructuring initiative is an important piece of that strategy going forward. You've established revenue targets, then you've also stressed margin targets. When you're cutting expenses then telling us you're going to grow at the same time, it somewhat seems to be moving in opposite directions. Let's focus on the restructuring piece first. Can you give us an update on how that's coming? You launched it in September. Here we are in November. What have you learned so far? You also have the experience of the legacy OIP program that wasn't your design, but failed. Give us a state of the union on the restructuring initiative as you're two months into it, how you see it going, and et cetera. Yeah. Thanks. We remain highly confident in our ability to hit the $300 million in expense savings we talked about at Investor Day. We took a bottoms-up approach to identifying opportunities and make sure that the objectives we have are achievable and were carefully developed. We've identified targets, during Q3, we stood up our transformation management office, set up the infrastructure for it, appointed a leader of it, et cetera. Part of the transformation office's efforts have involved simplifying the structure and adjusting our matrix management. That's why we took excuse me, our four segments down to two and our four geographies down to three. We just want to make it quicker and easier to do business with us, we think that refining our management structure will help us to do that. We've already started the process of transitioning two segments and will be ready to launch in 2022. Though we've already identified the targets and have mapped out the journey to achieve those targets, it will take some time for the benefits to become evident. A bit of patience, I think is in order. The transformation project is about much more than just upgrading our technology and reducing our real estate footprint. It is about changing the way we work across the organization. We want to redesign our processes to improve operational efficiency in a way that's sustainable over time, that kind of transition doesn't happen overnight, right? Change efforts are going to go through a series of phases, which means while we build on executing our new capabilities, we'll need to run many of our legacy systems and existing processes in parallel, right? In order to avoid unnecessary disruption to our clients and our ongoing operations. We're modernizing the way we work to gain efficiency and agility, we want to do that thoughtfully and strategically, that does require a fair amount of time. For that reason, the cost we've identified to achieve the program, right? We've said it's going to cost us $750 million to achieve 300 in savings. The costs are front-loaded, the benefits are more back-loaded. Andrew talked about this at Investor Day. Right. Just a point of clarification on that. Because of OIP and you guys both got to see that sort of evolve, you inherited it. As we think about the end of 2022 and 2023, if you could identify some points that all of us could hang our hat on and see, hey, there's some progress. We can see the progress is emerging somehow, some way. I think that would be very helpful to establishing credibility of the program itself because of the investor memory, a muscle memory as it relates to OIP. Does that make sense? It does. I don't think we can just say, "Trust us for three years." Right? I think we've got to show you how we're progressing along the way, right? Good. How much have we spent? How much are we saving? Right? What's the direction, right? Yes. I'll leave it to my esteemed friend over there to figure out the exact way we talk about it. Oh, okay. Well, that's good. We'll keep Andrew up. He looks ready. He looks excited. Exactly. You talked about the revenue targets. I got to deal with what is known at this point, known is the historical reporting format. The biggest opportunity, the biggest challenge has been CRB. There's organic piece to it, there's a margin piece to it. Before we think About going forward, maybe you can address your perspective of the historical performance of CRB from a revenue, an organic, and a margin perspective, because I think the street's perspective of it is not necessarily positive. Yeah, fair enough. During 2019 and 2020, our organic growth rates for CRB were in line with the industry. Right. I think that's actually a testament to the strategy we had put in place beginning of 2018, of emphasizing our global lines of business. Our global network, our capabilities as a specialist broker were paying off. Obviously, then we entered into the deal with Aon and a lot of our progress on those got put into hiatus as we were trying to figure out integration. 2021 has been more of a challenge due to that, deal-related issues. Now that we have clarity on the future of the business, I think colleagues and clients have both reengaged. The worst of the disruption is behind us. We've talked about some of the headwinds we've got on the growth side for the next few quarters. We think that's just temporary. We expect CRB's organic growth to be mid-single digits over the long term, which is, I think, generally where the industry pitches the growth rates. CRB business being put on hold as we were figuring out the broader merger. We are looking to resuscitate the plans we had to further integrate Gras Savoye into our global business. Specifically, strategically looking at our global line to business structure, where our systems can better integrate, because Gras Savoye does run a number of systems that are particular to the French market and has a large affinity business, which carries with it some custom structures to it. With the Gras Savoye management team thoroughly behind us, we think that there are significant efficiency gains that we can get while preserving, I think, the spirit that has made Gras Savoye such a success within the French market. There are real benefits to be had for both sides, I think, by putting the global backbone of the Willis Towers Watson infrastructure further embedded to the Gras Savoye organization while using what's been a very strong brand for us and great talent to further deepen what we could do within France and the other territories that Gras Savoye historically covered. I know you've tried to steer clear of talking about attrition by business unit. Within CRB, if we take the FAC business out, exclude the FAC business, because there's been some documentation of who's left and et cetera. It's been a little harder for us to track the departures in Europe of the producer force that you have. I just thought about it as you were answering this. Can you give us some perspective on how the European piece has held up through the whole process? If you look at the people who are sort of subject to the rumor market the most. Yes. As you point out, the rumor had it that several of our European properties were proposed for disposition during the merger process. I think Willis Re was clearly where it was felt the most, where you had largest market concentration and two very different strategies for what was going to happen to the business. That played out a lot of that in the press. FAC is another example of the London market being as strong at the uncovering rumor and fact as it is, you see that play out as well. The broader business that we have in Europe, which is not the same as London market specialty, but it's what we'd call retail. It's very client-facing. Sort of the farther you get away from reinsurance and specialty, the more stable you tend to have business results. Makes sense. Right. Yeah, the fact that they were under the microscope for merger didn't help, but don't extrapolate from what you read about the London markets, I guess the way I'd put that. Thank you. Then one other point on CRB before I pivot to HCB would be the perception of tailwinds from a pricing perspective in property casualty insurance. That has definitely seemed to be a common theme for all the brokers. Obviously, that should be benefiting you to some degree, but it's not an area that you've really commented on because you've been focused on just stabilizing the ship post-deal break. Maybe you could spend a minute and talk about your perspectives on pricing in the property casualty market. You've got a lot of experience around this, I know you didn't include this as part of your 2024 guidance, but I'm sure you have a view on how pricing is going to evolve over the course of the next 24 months. Well, 24 months is a long time, Greg, I'm not sure anyone's willing to commit to quite that long-term a view, right? You do have markets where insurers are looking to recover what they perceive are their outsized loss ratios the last several years, that's usually a multi-year conversation, right? It's not an immediate conversation. You do need to recognize that when you're looking at the brokers, though, that clients always have a choice, right? Our clients can decide to purchase less to offset price increases. Right. Even if you accept there's a tailwind for the overall insurance industry, that's not necessarily distributed equally amongst all the players in the insurance value chain. Makes sense. It's also another comment we've heard. Let's pivot to HCB for a second because I kind of view that business as sort of the crown jewel of Willis Towers Watson insofar as it's been probably one of the best performing business units in terms of at least just pure margin improvement and results. I guess maybe you could help us understand going forward what you see as the drivers of not only revenue growth, because part of that business is the pension actuary business that really doesn't grow, but also the levers for margin improvement in that business. Yeah, sure. Maybe I'll attack this bit by bit, but I do want to say that we love all our children, right? I understand. They're all my grandchildren. That was my comment, not yours, fair enough. Our retirement business, we have incredibly strong proposition in a very mature defined benefit business and with really high client retention. That is a place to build from in the emerging defined contribution market. We already have, I think, the number one proposition for a DC platform in U.K., which is one of our strongest retirement businesses, called LifeSight, an emerging platform in the Netherlands, and some opportunities in the U.S. with the passage of the SECURE Act that still look promising and we'll look to investigate. That's a natural adjacency for us to look to. On the health and benefits business, and our talent reward business, the demand for discretionary work has picked up nicely, and it was a very nice promising pipeline. On the talent reward side, the tight labor markets actually help here because they drive spending on HR consulting work to drive attraction and retention and employee satisfaction. A really key part of attraction and retention. Similarly, on the H&B side, the U.S. legislative changes always drive activity as clients are trying to figure out how to react to that through strategic benefit reviews. With regard to the margin side of things, yes, we've nothing to complain about with our margins in HCB, but we do think that we're going to get incremental enhancements both from enterprise wide initiatives, but operating margin improvement through leveraging our global platforms, shared processes, a shared services approach, automation in right shoring, efficient location management. Then as we continue to build out our company-wide data analytics capability, that should lead to developing new solutions within this segment as well. That makes sense. I feel, and again, this is my perception, may be different. Reality is oftentimes different, but my perception would be that there was really a level of integration that was starting to transcend between the health and benefits side, pension side, and the traditional commercial brokerage side pre-Aon Willis Towers Watson. I guess, if that perception's right, now we're at Dealbreak, how do we get back to that place, that level of integration, where you have a collaborative team that's working in one business unit, work with another business unit, who really they may not be interested in doing that. Everything's legal. We've actually both introduced some new efforts, as well as resurrected some efforts that were designed to continue that, right? On the new side, we've introduced the innovation and acceleration function that's designed to basically make us better at commercialization, right? We're really good at developing new ideas and turning them into a client project. Right. maybe we've been less good at turning them into 1,000 client projects. That's, I think, a key initiative for us. The second is actually standing up a sales and client management function that's cross-organization, so that we have a common way of approaching our diverse client base and bringing- the best of Willis Towers Watson to that client. That is something we had started in on prior to the Aon combination and put on pause. We're not starting from square one on that, but I'm actually very excited at what that can do to actually continue to bring us together as One Willis Towers Watson. Okay. Thanks for that answer. The final sort of, it's the same question, of CRB and the broader organization. But, through the meat grinder process known as the Aon, proposed merger with Aon, we had also heard of a number of health and benefit brokers that have left, through going elsewhere itself within HCB. Whether that's true or not, I guess, doesn't much matter, but maybe you can speak to recruitment in that business, considering now that you're not going to be Aon. Yeah, we think we've got a strong proposition in health and benefits that- Yeah it's a competitive market for talent, but we think we've got a great place to attract talent to. The fact that we have such strength in both consulting and broking. Yeah In our health and benefits business really means that we can accommodate a great range of players within that. The intellectual capital that sort of delivers solutions, whether it's in insured or self-insured form. Right Is actually quite a good story to attract the best talent in the industry to. Okay. I'll ask a couple more operational questions on the other two segments. Then I'm going to pivot. We have just about 12 minutes left. I'm going to pivot to just some capital management questions and other issues that have come up with other conversations. Certainly don't want to cheat Andrew out of some time in the sunshine. Oh, no. We need him sweating. Yeah. Let's go back to the other segment, the segment that you ran for a number of years, IRR, is obviously fundamentally changed on Dealbreak. Willis Re is going to be gone. [Max], Miller, they've been sold. Talk to us about just the remaining businesses at IRR. What are they? What are their growth? What are their organic characteristics? What are the margin characteristics? Exclude the businesses that are being divested. All right. We have two major businesses left, right? One's our insurance consulting and technology business- The ICT which serves the insurance industry, right? Yeah. Over half of the business is software. It's software that helps the industry deal with things like pricing, rate making, underwriting, policy management, and then consulting around that. The consulting and technology propositions are actually quite linked. We also have quite a bit of M&A work that goes through there as well as the insurance industry consolidates or spins off. A lot of actuaries in that business, along with technology people. Drivers for that business are the growth of the industry as a whole, new creative things in the industry. Someone's got to help people come up with product, and that's us. Then we sort of handle a lot of the life cycle around that. We think that business should be growing in mid-single digits going forward. It's had a pretty good run of it recently, as industry activity has generated extra work for us. The other is our investments business. Again, this business is mostly investment management, but also investment advice at the same time, principally for pension funds. There's a big overlap with our retirement business that we think we can increase significantly. Drivers of that are-- Sorry, that business is group average profitability, and again, growth rates in the mid to single digits we see going forward. We think the opportunities there are the continued demand for OCIO or outsourced chief investment officer services, where people basically turning the fund over to us to manage. Yeah Rather than just advise. It now represents over half of the revenues for that business. We think that will continue to increase. The margins for that work is higher than for traditional advisory work. When you talk about the software piece, I'm just trying to think of other companies that are in the market offering similar types of services that you are. Well, I think Duck Creek would be. Okay, exactly. Guidewire, Duck Creek, those are all competitors of yours in that software space. Is that correct? Yes. Before we pivot to the capital stuff, so we have to talk about BDA. We have to talk about it not from the businesses that the private health insurance exchange or the public health insurance exchange business, but we have to talk about it from the Medicare Advantage business and TRANZACT. I think considering the news coming out of some of those standalone entities, it's just worthwhile stepping back and reminding everyone what the difference is with TRANZACT versus these other models. Some of them are quite challenged at the moment in time. Help us sort of bridge the gap of why it's going to be different with Willis Towers Watson than we see it with some of these others. I'm speaking specifically, Carl, about like the eHealth and GoHealth of the world. Yeah. Maybe I could pick four things that I think differentiate us beyond just actuarial capability that lets us feel Thank you a bit more confident in our lifetime values calculations. First of all, we use an internal agent workforce to get this stuff done, and we've been doing that for a while. History on that, I think, is important. We also have a similar model going in our B2B2C version of this in Extend Health. There's two strands of history here that I think gives us confidence in our model there. Second is we have an incredibly close partnership with our carrier clients. That drives higher quality enrollments. The lead streams we get via the carrier channels are a differentiator for us. Third is we've actually differentiated and diversified our lead sources, and so that actually helps us optimize on a more real-time basis as the costs of acquisition through various different channels fluctuate. TV advertising rates can vary a lot, and that'll affect the cost of acquisitions, right? We have other ways of getting to the end consumer beyond just that. The mix of unique channels we have. For instance, we've got one targeting Spanish speakers. Getting to the very large and growing Hispanic MA set. Some partner specific campaigns just simply I think let us operate in a more efficient way and a more targeted way across all these different environments. I wouldn't underestimate the effect of that B2B channel because we've got not just the TRANZACT business, but that what was Extend Health business- Right side by side, and we're able to take advantage of synergies between the two ways of doing business. Should I infer from that comment that as the population of people you're serving through Extend Health migrate onto a Medicare Advantage program, that you're sort of populating TRANZACT into that or inserting TRANZACT into that customer population? Is that? It's not quite that simple, right? We have existing call centers that segregate the two groups, right? Yeah. we're taking advantage going forward of the overlap in service models. Yeah. Just the other piece, because you said you've had this legacy internal agent model that's gone on from the early days of TRANZACT. Should we infer from that the reliance on these third-party calling centers and uncontrolled call centers has really been a smaller immaterial part of TRANZACT? You've got 2 stages here, right? You've got an initial call, which doesn't have to be handled by an agent, and then you've got the. Yeah enrollment, which does, right? Yeah. We have not moved away from having that 2-stage process. We've got a variety of ways of getting the initial lead qualified before we're. Yeah turning it over. I think to just go to a pure agent type model would be. I'm not sure that would be the right way of going about this, what you're saying. Got it. All right. Well, thanks for spending a minute on that. It's quite topical right now, as you know. Andrew, let's give you a chance to unmute your mic. There's a lot of questions around capital management. You've got a stated objective to buy a bunch of stock back by the end of next year. You've got cash on the balance sheet. You've de-levered to some point. Sort of wrap up your view on capital management as it stands today. I know it's not going to be a lot different from what you said at the investor day, but still it's a good opportunity to rehash that in context of the stock price and everything else. Yeah. No, I absolutely agree. If you look at the stock price right today and where we think it should be, there's clearly an attractive return opportunity there to deploy capital into share repurchases. We committed to returning $4 billion of capital via share repurchases. We executed the 1st billion earlier this year. The next $3 billion that we committed to start this year and wrap up by the end of next year, that is on track to take place. Beyond that, we have free cash flow generation, which we targeted at $5 billion-$6 billion over the next couple of years. Our primary focus on that cash flow is to return that to shareholders that'll be via share repurchases unless other investment opportunities come along, which can generate a higher return. Given where our share price is today, that's a very high bar. That's how we're thinking about capital and share repurchases over the next three years. I did note in your slide deck, there was one of the bullets had changed on the capital allocation, it was the last bullet. Something about tuck-in acquisitions might be considered. I know most of the investment community really doesn't want to hear about M&A, but maybe you could just spend a second and just talk to us what you're thinking about. Obviously, you've identified share repurchases a top priority for use of excess capital, but I did note that bullet point. Yeah, sure. I think we've been consistent about this and that if we do undertake M&A activity, one, return has to be there, again, benchmarked against share repurchases. Strategically speaking, we'll be looking at smaller, bite-sized things where we would be looking to enhance some of our core capabilities or fill in geographic gaps. I think a good example of that is the transaction that was announced, that it was back in September. We were looking to expand into Israel through a new presence and partnering with a fantastic company to do that. I think that's a good example of how we're thinking about sort of these tuck-in or bolt-on acquisitions. Yeah. The impression from that is it's small tuck-ins, nothing that derails your initiative on share repurchase and dividends. The transformation efforts, right? Yeah. Transformational M&A, that is not something that is on the docket. Right. All right. Well, we have one minute left, I guess the final question I would have, and Andrew, this is a good opportunity. It's a nitpicking question, but I feel like it should be covered, is just the part of organic that included disposals in it. As we think about the benefit that happened through the first nine months, when we think about 2022, how much of that benefit did we get through the first nine months that we should pull out of the first nine months of 2022? Excuse me, 2021 versus 2022. No, it's a good question, I understand where the perspective's coming from. If you look through the footnotes of the financials and the disaggregation of revenue, we do provide some detail there to allow folks to complete their own analysis. I think year to date, it was about $70 million or so. If you look back through our history, there's always a level of that activity that's just part of the ongoing business activity. Normally, that's averaged about $20 million a year. Okay. All right. There's the 70 that we saw. Fair enough. I appreciate the clarification. I know you've said it before, but it has come up. Yeah. No problem. We've hit our 40-minute time allotment, and I could frankly talk for another hour with you guys, but you don't have the time, and I've got other things I got to do here, too. Thank you very much, Claudia, Andrew, and Carl. For everyone listening in, I just want to remind you can reach out to Claudia, who's very responsive, very helpful, certainly have been helpful to me in answering questions, and of course, you can email me. Carl, Andrew, Claudia, thank you for your time. Thank you, Greg. Thanks. Thank you. Have a good day. You too.