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Text: I'm joined by Christa Davies, our CFO; and Eric Andersen, our President.
I'd like to start by acknowledging the tremendous work of our colleagues across the firm.
Our team continues to find ways to get back, not just to normal, but even better than before.
As we like to call it, the new better.
The idea of the new better started in the second half of last year with a series of regional and local client coalitions.
There are now 10 coalitions of leading companies around the world that we formed to export the societal and economic implications of the pandemic.
The Group rejects the idea of accepting a sub-optimal new normal and is working to find new better.
The work is ongoing and continues to offer meaningful insights into how leading organizations will work, travel, and convene in the year ahead.
And we're translating those insights into new solutions that are designated and designed to accelerate recovery from COVID-19.
For instance, we know that widespread global vaccine distribution is a key part of the solution and one that Aon is enabling, let me describe.
Recognizing limitations with current supply chain solutions, Aon colleagues from Commercial Risk, Rein [Phonetic] Health Solutions collaborated with insurance, reinsurance, InsurTech, and supply chain industry partners to develop a groundbreaking solution that uses sensors and analytics in the transportation and storage of vaccines.
The centers provide transparent real-time data and alerts if the temperature of a vaccine shipment falls outside the manufacturers' range, potentially allowing for mitigation efforts and helping to maximize the number of doses administered to the public.
It's just another example of how we're creating innovative solutions to move our industry and society forward.
We're also donating all 2021 revenue from the solution to an international organization working to help end the human and economic toll caused by the pandemic.
Turning now to financials.
Our global team delivered outstanding results across each of our key financial metrics, including 6% organic revenue growth, a very strong start to the year on top of 5% organic in Q1 2020.
Substantial operating margin expansion of 170 basis points, 16% earnings per share growth, and 91% free cash flow growth.
Within organic revenue, we continue to see strength in our core, driven by strong retention and net new business generation, and overall growth within more discretionary areas of revenue, with some areas coming back faster than others.
Commercial Risk delivered 9% organic, an outstanding result with very strong new business growth and growth in project-related work and double-digit growth in transaction liability.
Reinsurance delivered 6% growth with strong net new business in treaty and double-digit growth in facultative placements.
Retirement Solutions delivered 5% growth, and I would highlight strength in core retirement and double-digit growth in Human Capital.
Health Solutions growth of 4% was driven by strength in the core, offset by pressure in project work.
One of the areas we're seeing a little slower bounce back.
And data and analytics continue to see pressure from the travel and events practice globally, resulting in a 2% organic decline, so against the prior Q1 quarter of pre-pandemic results.
These results are an improvement from our Q4 earnings call outlook.
During the quarter, we saw better-than-expected macroeconomic growth, which positively impacted client buying behavior.
Looking forward, if macroeconomic conditions continue to be strong, we would expect mid-single-digit or greater organic revenue growth for the full year 2021.
And while our Q1 results demonstrate that our Aon United strategy is driving innovative solutions that address our client's biggest challenges, we keep seeing signs that we must move faster.
We see our clients justifiably focused on the economic impact of COVID-19, but they're also increasingly focused on other challenges, like climate change, supply chain disruption, reimagining, and reconfiguring how and where work gets done, the growing health-wealth gap, and cyber.
Our recent cyber risk reports highlighted findings from our proprietary cyber quotient evaluation, a comprehensive assessment of cyber risk maturity.
The 2020 data tells us that organizations across regions and industries are only maintaining a basic level of cyber readiness.
Specifically, only two in five organizations report they are prepared to navigate new exposures, and only 17% report having adequate application security measures in place.
And on a recent Grey Swan report, we look back at 40 years of corporate crisis, analyzing 300 examples that show the significant impact on shareholder value due to lack of preparedness.
The total impact represents $1.2 trillion in destroyed value and in 10% of the events, 50% of shareholder value was lost.
These risks and challenges are exactly what we want to help our clients assess and prepare for.
In another great example, our Human Capital and Commercial Risk teams realize that their client in the life sciences and med-tech space had not done an assessment or quantification of cyber risk for their business or products.
Our team analyze risks across infrastructure, technology, vendor, and digitally enabled products and quantified potential losses or impacts as reputation business interruption, or [Indecipherable] revises.
In response to this prioritized and quantified risk assessment, our client strengthened their own security measures and changed their insurance coverage, increasing their preparedness and reducing potential future volatility to their business.
A topic that's more critical than ever for companies in the life sciences industry.
Looking forward, this is a process and a solution offering that makes innovative cyber solutions more accessible to our clients in the life sciences space.
As we look to our pending combination with Willis Towers Watson, we're confident their insights and capabilities will be a compelling catalyst to this work.
As we brought together the executive committee that will be in place after the close of the combination, the potential is clear than ever.
We have an opportunity to be more relevant to clients at a time when they need us the most.
Another example, our Aon team is currently advising a client on the integration of their largest transaction to date, a complex global merger that's moving very quickly.
Colleagues from Data Analytics, Retirement, Health and Benefits, and Human Capital came together to advise our client on harmonizing their people programs while balancing synergies and deal objectives to drive employee engagement and retention, as well as a shared vision from day one.
Our client is relying on Aon to help them protect their greatest asset, their people.
We know that the combination with Willis Towers Watson will enable us to bring together our combined capabilities and then each company’s client insight around health, retirement, and engagement will improve and accelerate our ability to deliver projects like these for clients.
In summary, our first quarter results demonstrate the continued success of our strategy and position us with momentum to drive improvement on our key metrics over the course of the year, building on the track record of progress that we've delivered over the past decade.
The events in 2021 continue to highlight unmet need and growing demand from clients around their biggest challenges, which we know are best addressed by our One Firm Aon United strategy.
Our ability to address client need and accelerate innovation will only get better in our pending combination with Willis Towers Watson, which continues to increase our commitment and excitement to the potential of the combined firm.
As Greg mentioned, we delivered a strong operational and financial performance in the first quarter to start the year, highlighted by 6% organic revenue growth that translated into double-digit growth in operating income, earnings per share, and free cash flow.
Our Aon United strategy has enabled continued growth across our key financial metrics.
We look forward to building on this momentum through the rest of 2021 and in our pending combination with Willis Towers Watson.
As I further reflect on the quarter, we delivered organic revenue growth of 6%, driven by ongoing strength in our core business with an uneven recovery in our more discretionary areas.
I would also note that total reported revenue was up 10% including the favorable impact from changes in FX, primarily driven by a weaker U.S. dollar versus the euro.
Second, we delivered strong operational improvement with operating income growth of 15% and operating margin expansion of 170 basis points to 37.4%.
Stepping back, our goal is to deliver sustainable operating margin expansion over the course of the full year, as there can be volatility quarter to quarter given the seasonality of our business and timing of expenses, including long-term investment in growth.
In Q1, margin expansion was helped by two factors.
First, organic revenue growth exceeded our Q4 outlook due to the impact of macroeconomic factors and client buying behavior.
Second, Q1 2020 had higher expenses in areas like T&E and investments in the business, which made for an easier comparable when compared to our expectations for the rest of 2021.
Looking to the rest of 2021, we anticipate investment in the business and some potential resumption of T&E later in the year.
Looking forward to quarterly patenting of expenses for the balance of 2021.
As we described last year, we reduced certain discretionary expenses at the onset of the pandemic, given the significant macroeconomic uncertainty.
And then returned to somewhat more normalized levels of spend in the back half of the year, as macroeconomic conditions improved and the outlook stabilized.
In 2021, compared to 2020, we expect approximately $200 million less expense to be recognized in the fourth quarter, offset by approximately $135 million more expense in Q2 and $65 million more expense in Q3.
Put another way, we expect $135 million of expense to move from Q4 to Q2 and $65 million of expense to move from Q4 to Q3 when comparing to our expectations for the remainder of 2021 to prior year results, prior to any growth occurring.
This shift, representing about 2% of our annual cost base is primarily due to the actions we took and highlighted last year, including the reduction of certain discretionary expenses, including variable compensation in Q2 and Q3 of 2020.
This shift also spreads our expense base more evenly across quarters, though we still do expect the occasional variability and lumpiness in expenses.
This change will have an impact on quarterly margins, reducing margins in Q2 and Q3, and increasing them in Q4.
However, it does not change our expectation of full-year margin expansion for 2020-2021.
As we stated previously, our goal is to deliver sustainable margin expansion over the course of each full year, driven by accelerating revenue growth, portfolio mix shift to higher growth, higher margin businesses, and leverage from Aon Business Services.
Aon Business Services is focused on innovation, as well as effectiveness.
Recently our Aon business services team saw an opportunity to improve premium accounting with a blockchain solution.
The team works with a carrier partner and the insurance industry's standard-setting group to design and develop the clearing house to premium transactions.
This process has been live since the 1st of January 2021 and has over 13,000 transactions executed.
It's already improving the speed at which errors are identified and resolved.
Over time, we expect our major carrier partners and other brokers to join the platform.
We see this as a significant opportunity to improve the client experience with higher quality and reduce inefficiencies across the industry.
As with other Aon Business Services process improvements, efficiencies in this new blockchain process enable our colleagues to spend more time with clients and on higher value-added activities.
Turning back to the results of the quarter.
We translated strong operational performance into earnings per share growth of 16%.
As noted in our earnings material, FX translation was a favorable impact of approximately $0.18 in the quarter.
If currency to remain stable at today's rates, we'd expect a $0.04 per share favorable impact in Q2, a $0.02 per share favorable impact in Q3, and a $0.01 per share favorable impact in Q4.
Finally, moving to cash and capital allocation.
Free cash flow increased 91% to $532 million, primarily driven by strong operational improvement, a decrease in restructuring cash outlays, and a decrease in capex.
I would note that we do expect capex for the full year to increase modestly as we invest in technology to drive business growth.
Looking forward, we expect to drive free cash flow growth over the long term, building on our 10-year track record of 14% CAGR growth in free cash flow, including 64% growth to $2.6 billion free cash flow in 2020.
We remain incredibly excited for the long-term cash flow potential of the pending combination.
We make capital allocation decisions based on our ROIC framework, highlighted by $50 million of share repurchase in the first quarter.
As a reminder, Q1 is our seasonally smallest quarter for free cash flow, due primarily to incentive compensation payments.
We also repaid $400 million of term debt in February.
Looking forward, we expect to remain highly focused on closing and then successfully integrating our combination with Willis Towers Watson.
Following that, we expect to continue to invest organically and inorganically in innovative content and capabilities in priority areas to service our client's unmet needs.
We remain very confident in the strength of our balance sheet and manage liquidity risk through a well-laddered debt maturity profile.
In the near term, we expect to continue to manage our leverage ratios conservatively and return to our past practice of growing debt as EBITDA grows over the long term.
As I look towards our pending combination with Willis Towers Watson, we remain incredibly excited about the potential for growth in innovative solutions to clients and the shareholder value creation opportunity.
We are continuing to work collaboratively with the appropriate regulators to gain approvals and we've offered remedies.
We continue to anticipate $800 million of cost synergies, taking into account the remedies offered.
We would expect to allocate any divested proceeds according to our ROIC framework in which share buyback continues to be our highest return on investment.
We are working toward the close in the first half of 2021 subject to regulatory approval.
In summary, our first quarter results reflect continued progress building on a decade of momentum, driven by our Aon United strategy and underpinned by our Aon Business Services operational platform.
We remain incredibly excited about closing out the pending combination and beginning the integration process with Willis Towers Watson, which will continue to enable long-term shareholder value creation.

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q1 revenue rose 10 percent to $3.5 billion.

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