Greg Case
Chief Executive Officer at AON
Thanks very much, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to our first quarter conference call. I'm joined by Christa Davies, our CFO, and Eric Andersen, our President. As in previous quarters, for your reference, we posted a detailed financial presentation on our website.
Before we begin, as always, we want to thank our colleagues for the great work they're doing every day around the world, to help our clients and each other. We continue to live in a world where volatility, complexity and uncertainty are increasing, and in this environment, our clients are being asked to make decisions faster than ever. And as a result, we see strong and ongoing demand for our advice and solutions, as many of our clients realize that remaining in defensive or reactive mode is not sufficient. And in fact a pivot to offense is ultimately necessary to win and achieve their objectives.
Clients are telling us, there are two primary areas where they're urgently looking for competitive advantage, risks and people. Addressing these challenges requires that we bring the best from across our firm to enable our clients to make better decisions, which is the core of Aon United. Given these ongoing demand our strategy positions Aon as uniquely capable of helping clients go on offense and make better decisions that mitigate risks to their business and maximize the impact and engagement of their people.
Take ESG or environmental, social and governance as an example. These are major interconnected categories that cut across traditional silos. Our clients need a broad strategic view to understand and assess all the risks around ESG, and they need targeted solutions and capabilities to solve for these risks. Our recently published ESG impact report describes our work, helping clients address these issues as well as the impact across our firm. And we're delighted to report on our own progress against long standing commitments in these essential areas.
First on environmental. We're making progress toward our goal of net zero emissions by 2030 and have reduced our overall scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions footprint by 16% from our 2019 baseline, and by 4% in 2022 enabled by efforts like smart working and supplier centralization through Aon Business Services. On social and specifically around our colleagues, Aon United is not just a strategy. It's our culture and it reflects our commitment to inclusion, diversity and the well-being of our colleagues.
This year, we're continuing to embed I&D principles and practices, and to hold ourselves accountable with increased transparency and oversight at all levels of the organization, starting with the top, with our Board of Directors. On diversity, for example, we reported progress in 2022 on the percentage of female people managers and US ethically and regionally diverse managers. In 2022, we also enhanced focus on learning, development engagement and well being because we know that supporting our colleagues, is not only the right thing to do for them, but it also ensures we retain grow and develop the best talent to continue to support our clients.
And finally on governance, we highlighted Board review of top ESG and climate-related risks and action from our ESG Steering Committee as well as steps on cyber security and privacy, all in line with our long standing overall enterprise risk management strategy. While we're proud to report on these steps in our report, there's still work to do. And at the same time, we're even more excited about the work we're doing to help clients, as many risks connected to progress on ESG, align with our core businesses.
On the people side, for example, we continue to develop new solutions, while bringing together existing capabilities across different markets and geographies to address specific needs. One recent client facing significant organizational change realized many of our employees were unsure and unclear about titles career ladders, compensation mechanics. And at the same time this client needed to reduce cost, increased efficiency and simplicity which they knew would drive engagement.
To address, we brought expertise from around the firm. Our commercial risk team brought deep understanding of this client strategy and desired culture. Our Aon Business Services platform served as a powerful example of how we can help them simplify their operations and reduce costs. Finally, our Health and Human Capital teams brought a series of solutions, including optimization of global benefits and the skills, taxonomy strategy to increase employee alignment and engagement.
While their solution leverages many existing offerings, the real innovation was bringing these pieces together. Along with our Aon Business Services team we provided insight and change management activities around moving to a Business Services model, an essential piece of the puzzle for our client. The result, our client is driving increased engagement with a clear and more effective benefit structure and talent strategy and outsourcing capabilities that will help drive simplicity and efficiency, all enabled by our teams coming together as Aon United.
And we see examples like this across the firm every day, as we help our clients manage risk and support their people. They demonstrate the opportunity we have to continue delivering innovative solutions at-scale to address our clients' unmet needs at a time when doing so has never been more important.
Turning to financial performances, in the first quarter, we delivered very strong organic revenue growth across our solution lines, with 9% growth in reinsurance, 8% growth in Health Solutions and 6% growth in both Wealth Solutions and commercial risk solutions. In reinsurance, our teams were exceptional in guiding our clients through the 1/1 renewal environment, demonstrating the strength of our teams advice, data-driven analytics, modeling and execution capabilities.
In Health Solution, we saw the strength in core H&P and in human capital in a seasonally larger quarter for European health renewal as our team helped clients navigate the ongoing challenging environment for their people, encompassing employee health, rewards, engagement and well-being. In Wealth Solutions, our team delivered another very strong performance with 6% growth, driven by ongoing trends around regulatory changes like GMP equalization, pension risk transfer and a wavering impact of the fixed income market volatility, as our teams helped clients reassess and potentially adjust their strategy.
We would note that after two very strong quarters Q2, '23 will be impacted by performance fees in the prior year period. And finally, commercial risk solutions grew 6% in the quarter with strength in Europe and UK in their seasonally largest quarter. Overall, we observed the property market remains an area of increasing challenge and volatility. Market dynamics are causing reinsurers to shift risk appetite requiring primary carriers to accept more risks, which in turn means property placements turning more challenging for our clients.
In this environment, our strength and analytics, and the ability to respond to clients needs to cover in a capital agnostic way bringing capability across reinsurance and commercial risk is essential. Our capabilities enable us to assess and analyze integrated broking options, including traditional risk placement wholesale MGA, facultative, captive and insurance-linked securities. By helping clients assess options across capital sources, we ensure that we're able to optimize their own total cost of risk and risk appetite.
For example, one client came to us looking to consolidate to a single property intelligence program across 11 asset classes with over $80 billion in property values. Our team came together seamlessly across geographies and specialties to develop a program that leveraged traditional carriers around the world and accounts, successfully completing the program and driving significant cost savings for our clients, all enabled by the work we've done to breakdown barriers within our firm through Aon United.
Overall in the quarter we're pleased with performance of the strength of our Aon United strategy and Aon Business Services platform translated 7% organic revenue growth, with a 70 basis points of operating margin expansion, net of ongoing investment in the business for long term growth. In this period of ongoing external volatility and increasingly interconnected risk, the opportunity for us to help clients is greater than ever, positions us very well to continue to drive the results in 2023 and over the long term.
Now I'd like to turn the call over to Christa for her thoughts on our financial performance and long term outlook for continued shareholder value creation. Christa?
