Alistair Lester, CEO of Aon M&A on protecting and enhancing returns
Alistair Lester is CEO of Aon’s M&A and transactions services business in EMEA. This is not the conversation you think. Aon has spent recent years building out its capabilities across the risk spectrum.
Transcript
Ross Butler:
Alistair, you are the CEO of Aon’s M&A business in EMEA, but it’s not your first bout there. You started in the graduate scheme some 25 years ago, and in the mid 90s working for private equity clients. And I wanted to start by asking you to what extent has the insurance services industry over that quite long timeframe responded to the pace of change in the world and the risks that businesses and private equity firms face today?
Alistair Lester:
There’s been a huge amount of change of course, in the world. The insurance industry is not renowned for being particularly speedy in terms of pace of change, but actually there’s been a pretty significant amount of change within the insurance industry and particularly within the part of the insurance industry and the broader professional services aspects of our world that faces off to the M&A and private equity ecosystem. When I think back to being told that what we did for private equity firms was a niche part of our industry and a niche part of a firm that I previously worked for.
Alistair Lester:
I think we, as an industry, are really only just starting to embrace the scale of that relationship opportunity in the same way in the last three, four, five years, a couple of good examples of what’s really driven that Ross. If you go back two, three years, if I said to a PE firm, what do you think of Aon, Aon could do to help you? They might say, I know you, we talked to you on the limited partner side, you’ve got a big investment management arm of your business, and we talked to them about LP investments, or you are an LP in our fund or, or they might likely have said insurance due diligence. And they might’ve said something more recently, this warranty and indemnity insurance, or as we call it in the US, reps and warranties insurance product, which has genuinely exploded in the last four to five years in utilization in PE.
Alistair Lester:
And yes, we do all of those things, but what’s really exciting for us is our ability over the last few years as our industries evolve, and as Aon has evolved to bring multiple advisory capabilities, multiple advisory work streams to life on the one hand and multiple or an increased number of financially motivated insurance instruments to bear on the other hand and much more sophistication and science around how we really do develop, deliver value in the portfolio. So when you have that conversation now with clients who’ve been on that journey over the last three, four years, they would absolutely recognize our industry. And particularly our firm, I think, has been leading the charge in areas like cyber consulting, in intellectual property consulting and advisory and valuation, of course, in risk and assurance in the broad set of human capital from retirement benefits, but also talent reward and compensation aspects of deals.
Alistair Lester:
Then on the instrument side, looking at the adjacencies to warranty, and indemnity insurance like loan contingent risk insurance, be that tax insurance be that litigation insurance we’ve pioneered a product called judgment preservation insurance. We’ve pioneered the ability to wrap insurance around your intangible assets or intellectual property. You can potentially use those instruments as collateral, which enable you then to access different forms of financing. So really the big change has been this institutional-industrial realization there is an opportunity to marry up what has traditionally been seen as a relatively lazy, perhaps enormous pool of insurance capital with all the parts of the capital markets and bridge the two in a way that drives value into private equity deals, because as you and I both know, private equity are just so hungry for what they call new technology and new ideas, and that’s been a fantastic accelerator for what we do.
Ross Butler:
Why is AON providing the services that it is providing? What’s the journey from your insurance services capabilities to the services that you’ve currently just outlined?
Alistair Lester:
The world lives in a world of risk, and Aon as a firm is all about risk. We are a risk business. Insurance is an instrument that can help clients manage their risk. But what we don’t do is just deliver insurance products. We also deliver a range of advisory capabilities that help clients understand, identify and mitigate risk insurance instruments are just one part of the mitigation aspects of how you deal with risk. Every deal that any client does, they price risk into their deal, and they deal with risk in a deal in different ways. Maybe they priced chips. Price chips are a result of people identifying risks they’re not comfortable with. Maybe they seek contractual recourse against the seller against the counterparty, and maybe that contractual recourse is somehow secured through escrows. Maybe, as a buyer, if I identify risk in a deal, I defer an element of the consideration to see if that risk crystallizes, and if it does, I’ve protected myself because I’m not having to pay my deferred element of the consideration. All of those things are well-established approaches to dealing with risk in a deal. Those risks need to be identified for people to be able to understand them and then come up with solutions for them. So, the exciting point is we think those three buckets of price-chipping contractual recourse, and deferred consideration, they’re all perfectly valid ways of dealing with it, but none of them are actually optimal ways of dealing with risk in a transaction. By contrast, optimal approaches can include solving them through more insight into those issues, so you get more comfort with them. We can provide that in a range of ways across people, risk and cyber risk and intellectual property risk, et cetera, et cetera. But secondly, by introducing an insurance instrument, which can take that risk away in a far more attractive way and deal with those potential risks in a far more attractive way, potentially than price chipping or deferring, or getting contractual recourse against the counterparty.
Ross Butler:
And all of this kind of moves you further towards, I suppose, insurance being a purely defensive product. You’ve got a clear line of sight to enhancing returns through all of this.
Alistair Lester:
You’ve teed it up beautifully. So, we talk about what we do is securing investments and enhancing returns. That is our little strapline. We think with our advisory capabilities, we can give you much more insight into what you’re getting into. We think with some of the core traditional insurance solutions that are out there, very plain vanilla, traditional insurance solutions, you can secure that investment. But actually going to your point on enhancing returns, we think that we are able to deliver these structured insurance instruments across a wide range of areas, including structured credit and tax and litigation, et cetera, whereby spending a pound, a dollar or a Euro on that instrument you are realizing or recognizing multiples of that either in the enterprise value or somewhere in the capital structure of the transaction.
Alistair Lester:
That is a very different way to think about insurance, where for most of us, including people who live and breathe it, you know, renewing our car insurance or home insurance, or even our business insurance every year, what you’re really looking for is a way of reducing the cost of insurance, because you see it as a sunk cost. You don’t see it as a return generating instrument, whereas with a lot of what we’re doing, it’s spend a dollar or Euro pound on that instrument, and you will see a multiple of that somewhere in your enterprise value or capital structure.
Ross Butler:
It seems to me that risks over the, say, that 25 year period, have gone from being relatively tangible, relatively geographically, constrained to being much more intangible, much more distributed across the world, less physical and therefore just much more complex. And I suppose, as a result of that, harder to quantify and I guess where there’s complexity there is opportunity, which is why it’s logical for insurance providers to have expanded in this way. Is that a reasonable reading?
Alistair Lester:
I think that’s, that’s a very astute reading Ross. I think this is why Aon has diversified its capability set, for exactly those reasons, And if you double-click on intellectual property, as an example, and intangible assets, as an example, you only have to look at the huge rotation of the S&P500 over the last 40 years, which has gone from being, completely dominated by hard assets, tangible asset values, and companies who operated in those areas to companies, which are absolutely intangible asset rich and intellectual property based. And as a result, by the way, the insurance industry, some argue, has struggled to stay relevant as it could have done growth of global insurance premiums has lagged global GDP growth for that reason, because the insurance products are not as relevant as they need to be to what’s going on in the world traditionally. So, Aon made a move into intellectual property – and this is what Aon has done brilliantly – we have purchased capability and talent in adjacent areas to us. So, we bought a business, which was one of the leading intellectual property consulting businesses. And then what we’ve done is we have worked with that business to deploy that capability into a private equity context. We’ve worked with that business to build insurance instruments that can deal with intangible risk and intangible assets in a way that wasn’t previously being addressed. And we’ve gone one step further by helping to use both of those things, the insights and the capability we have on the advisory side, the risk modeling, the quants capability we have on the valuation side to then build product, which is enabling and opening the door to IP, rich companies, to access financing, using insurance as a collateral around their intellectual property in a way that’s never been possible before.
Alistair Lester:
So that’s an absolutely spot on. What Aon has done over the last five to ten years is it’s added inorganically areas of talent and capability, whether it’s in cyber, whether it’s in intellectual property, the talent world, we’ve added businesses and people who have bought different skill sets to our firm. Many of whom have had zero exposure to the insurance industry before. But actually by bringing these people into our industry, they are giving us perspectives on different emerging risks, which we’re able to support clients from an advisory point of view with, but also match those risks into the huge pool of insurance capital and start to build some new and evolved and developing insurance solutions that, that provide answers.
Ross Butler:
Tell me a little bit more about the, the IP services, in the specific context of venture capital and private equity. What type of business is it most useful for?
Alistair Lester:
So we think that one of the things we’re most excited about is we’ve always had a relatively limited story for the VC end of the private equity and financial sponsor community that is truly value added. We have an ability to identify, map and value the unique intellectual property, particularly the patents, but not just the patents, it can be data. It can be trade secrets, et cetera of individual companies. By doing so, we place a value on that, on that intellectual property, through a proprietary valuation methodology. We have the former head of intellectual property at Phillips in the Netherlands, global head of IP at Phillips. We have the former general accountants of general counsel for patents from Microsoft, right. People who honestly, if you ask them, ‘Would you ever, five years ago, can you ever see yourself working at Aon?’ They would have said, ‘absolutely not. Why would I?’ So we have some unbelievably deep talent in the IP space. I think we have more of the top 300 recognized global IP strategists working for Aon than there are at any other company in the world. And no one would know that right.
Alistair Lester:
We then spent a long time persuading the insurance industry of the efficacy of that valuation methodology, and there are many other parts of the capital market’s ecosystem, which rely on the underlying security of insurance to enable financing. We look in the aircraft, leasing space, residual value insurance on aircraft hall is, is a critical requirement for aircraft leasing. You know, finance use of aircraft leasing require certainty over what the, the aircraft may be worth at the end of the 10 year lease. And the way they’ve got that in the past is through residual value insurance that provides the underlying security, really what we’re doing and intellectual property is a similar thesis. We are valuing the intellectual property for a proprietary methodology. We then were demonstrating the efficacy of that valuation to the insurance market who are then wrapping an insurance policy around that value, not at a hundred cents on the dollar at a discount to the value, maybe 50 cents on the dollar by wrapping insurance security around what were previously intangible assets.
Alistair Lester:
You are turning them into tangible collateral. And what can you do with tangible collateral is you could raise finance against it. So, now we think we’re inventing or pioneering at least a new potential way for firms who are in the maybe series B series C stage to raise working capital and runway capital. Because up until today, the primary way for those firms to raise money has been to raise equity founders that owners don’t like raising equity, it’s diluted, it’s expensive, it’s painful all of those things and actually being able to, or they go and raise venture debt. And venture debt performs an essential service, but also it’s not, it’s got a lot of complexity to it. We think we have an instrument now, which can enable you to access pretty straightforward, not cheap, but pretty straightforward debt secured against an insurance wrapper, which is wrapping your intangible assets. And we think by doing that, we are potentially reinventing how you finance early stage companies. The British Business Bank wrote a paper probably two years ago saying why can’t banks recognize intangible assets more as collateral for financing? We think we are leading the answer to that question, which is- what can you do if you do it in this particular way?
Ross Butler:
I assume that larger businesses with large IP people folio, they’ve got other financing options.
Alistair Lester:
A hundred percent. That’s a great question. But, and yet, we also have clients who are approaching us and asking whether we can collateralize their IP portfolio for the purposes of satisfying pension trustees. Right. For example. So, you know, we need to provide collateral to our pension trustees. Maybe this is a product that we could use to satisfy our pension trustees over pension liabilities and future pension contributions. We’ve got financial institutions who are approaching us and asking whether this is a product that they could use to satisfy some regulatory capital requirements, right. So, you know, is this a product that could satisfy the banking regulators to a certain level that intellectual previously unrecognized intellectual property that they held in their business is now something they can collateralize and use to enhance their financing of, of whatever obligations they have. So it isn’t just the venture answer, but we’re seeing particular appetite and interest in the venture backed community in the early stage businesses area at the moment.
Ross Butler:
That’s a great example of allowing people to focus on the upside and enhance their returns. I don’t want to spend the whole time talking about COVID, but obviously it’s completely changed the nature of, and scale of risk. That touches on so many parts of business, so I’m thinking particularly like cyber, for example. I was speaking to a CEO the other day, he’s based in London, 90% of his employees are in India. Geographically remote. Can’t get out to them very easily. All of these risks seem to be not really thought of, just a couple of years ago.
Alistair Lester:
We launched our cyber- M&A private equity focused business, getting on for two years ago now. We did it for a couple of reasons. Outside of private equity and M&A, Aon had made an inorganic acquisition in a company called Strauss Frieberg, which was one of the leading global cyber risk consultancies that grew up in the US and again, I I’d imagine if you spoke to many of the people inside the original business, they had not had anything to do with the cyber insurance worlds. They were deep cyber risk consulting people. Then we built a client facing delivery of some of the capabilities within that business, and we did that by, we actually bought across people from the big four who were providing private equity, cyber due diligence, which was just emerging two or three years ago. We bought some of those people across. And the exciting thing is, we were able to persuade them of a couple of things, which I think we’ve proven out, which is one. We have the in-house technical cyber capability that we just bought this business with deep technical cyber risk capability. But two, we also have in our industry, a huge amount of data insight from cyber insurance. So we know what is happening in the cyber risk world, because cyber insurers are paying claims for our clients. So we know what’s, what’s creating those claims and we know how much is being paid for those claims and how those claims are being managed and how the risk of being mitigated to avoid them happening.
Alistair Lester:
Again, you put together deep cyber technical expertise with quant data, true deep, rich data over what is actually going on in the cyber world, which is causing financial loss. And you’ve got a unique skillset. So, our cyber team, actually very specific to private equity, have built something called Portfolio Scanner, a piece of proprietary tech, which blends in automated threat analysis with a quant model. We’ve done this for a number of PE firms. You can run it at relatively low cost, to come and run a six month cyber review across your portfolio. You can run it in very quick time, automatically across your entire portfolio, and it gives you a traffic light outfits of which firms in your portfolio need a closer, deeper dive from a cyber risk point of view.
Alistair Lester:
It’s no guarantee that there’s no problems in the ones that are green or amber, but it will tell you from an outside-in point of view, an unobtrusive outside-in points of view, where we think based on outside threat and industry sector knowledge and claims statistics from cyber insurance, you should be going to look Mr. GP to double-check that firm is doing what it should be around cyber risk. We actually ran that for a GP last year. And one of the firms that came out on the red of the traffic lights, we literally just reported to the sponsor. And just 10 days later, as we were going through the action plan, they had a ransomware attack. And that led into a huge recovery exercise. Again, no guarantee that if we ran that exercise six months earlier, the ransomware attack wouldn’t have happened, but certainly there would have been more awareness within that firm of the risks and, and hopefully some, some mitigating actions would have been taken.
New Speaker:
What’s really powerful areas that is all consulting work, but we’re delivering technical and rich data insight in an, in an automated manner, in a highly efficient manner, real time. We are launching and delivering within three to four weeks, not let’s run a long cyber risk consulting project, which takes many months because by the time the speed of the world’s changing so much that, you know, six, nine months’ time, it’s a different threat. It’s a different group of people. It’s a different type of ransomware, whatever it is, you know, you need to be keeping on top of this on a regular basis.
Alistair Lester:
So a lot of our PE funds now are actually running Portfolio Scanner on a regular basis, but at six months or 12 monthly, and they run it, it’s just a, it’s a health check across their portfolio. And it just helps them stay in touch with, with exactly what’s going on. And, you know, we were quite excited. We ran it for Cinven, which reported that in their ESG report.
Ross Butler:
That makes perfect sense to me, marrying the qualitative in the quantitative. I’ve long felt that you have the cyber professionals who are focused on best practice and process, but you’ve also got the kind of the unknown quantitative part, which is the elephant in the room. And you know, companies that pay ransoms, they don’t publicize it, of course. And one suspects that it is a much, much bigger problem than most people realize had they had to send a press release out and it was in the media. And so there’s something of a disconnect between the scale of the problem and what to do about it. And it sounds like you’re able to contextualize the problem and then find the solution, which feels to me like where I’d want to be.
Alistair Lester:
Yeah. Yeah. Look, I think just one thing I’d add is, is I’ve just talked about that in a portfolio context, which is critical. The other thing we’re learning is fascinating is our clients who go through that exercise, looking inside the portfolio, across the portfolio, they almost without fail, ensure they implement pre-investment cyber due diligence as a specific work stream going forward. A lot of firms haven’t been. Or they felt that their IT DD covers cyber. They’re close cousins, but they are distinctly different things. By the way, we’ve also got to make sure we’re okay as we’re going into new deals and this whole workstream of cyber due diligence, which we think where that evolving further into what we call digital and tech DD, where you’re looking at yes, the cyber risks.
We had a client say to us not long ago, every deal is now a tech deal, right. So let’s look at the tech in that business and understand how risk-exposed it is. We just brought a guy in from Turner & Townsend, a well-respected property consultants. Again, not an insurance guy, he’s a risk consulting person, but he’s able now to deliver his risk advice in a much more informed and contextual way because of the data and the insights we can provide from inside the industry. And that’s why we’re bridging the advisory and the risk transfer together.
Ross Butler:
So just so I’ve got the lexicon straight, you’ve got it, diligence, which is like you, your internal systems, and processes, and making sure that they’re efficient and functioning. You’ve got cyber, which is like security and stopping attacks. And you’ve got digital and tech, which is
Alistair Lester:
It’s performance risk. We ran a deal for a PE fund who was buying a, a reasonably well-known real estate platform. Right. And actually what we helped them understand was how many of the hits on the platform were from bots and how many were genuinely from independent consumers, right. And that goes to value. You want to pay for the consumer. So it starts to become not just a risk issue, but also evaluation issue, which is exciting.
Ross Butler:
What about people risk? Do you do anything in that domain? Obviously there’s a link with, with cyber and behavioral behaviors.
Alistair Lester:
We do it very broadly. And I think traditionally again, when people thought, well, what would Aon do in the human capital space to help us? It would be, well, we’ll do some actuarial work on the pension plan, or we’ll do some look at life and medical insurance and make sure that we’re meeting employee benefit risk. But again, Aon bought a business not long ago called QT, now rebranded Aon Assessment Solutions, they are a bunch of psychiatrists and psychologists. We had an infrastructure client who was funds, who was buying a, a bus business. I mean, lots of infrastructure funds by bus businesses. I think EQT had just bought a big one in the US.
New Speaker:
Interesting little story: we were arranging motor insurance for the bus company and they have to have it. And one of the things that drives motor insurance is, is driver’s safety. The price of motor insurance is driven by how safely, how well do you train your drivers. We brought in our Aon assessment colleagues to create a framework for the type of personality that they wanted to hire and to maintain as bus drivers and to put it very crudely, you are looking for people who are less aggressive on the accelerator, on the gas pedal. There are characteristics which are going to lend you to be more heavy or less heavy on the gas pedal. So that had two incredible benefits.
Alistair Lester:
One: By doing that, and by demonstrating to the insurance company that they were hiring that sort of person that puts the risk in a better light, it enables Aon to secure a better price for the core old-fashioned motor insurance for the buses. But here’s the other thing you could also demonstrate: how the fuel consumption of the fleet would reduce and the environmental positive environmental impacts. And of course, the economic positive impact in terms of reduced gas fields and fuel bills for the bus fleet. You’re going to value in way more ways than just one, which is we can help you reduce your insurance premium. We could also help you reduce your operating costs through reduction of fuel consumption, and we can demonstrate that you’re thinking about that through an ESG lens in a world where those things are increasingly important. It’s a really good example of how we’ve gone from being an insurance broker to adding these other elements to a value.
Ross Butler:
And that comes from presumably the psychological profiling of the people
Alistair Lester:
Right. So when you go and hire now bus company, you need to hire people with these characteristics, which we have defined for you, and it’s now built into your, your recruitment processes.
Ross Butler:
There’s a huge change that’s, that’s happening in terms of the work environment. Are you’re doing some thinking on this area.
Alistair Lester:
So again, we have an enormous human capital practice who stretch right across, you know, governance, board consulting, compensation, talent, et cetera. And, and we have, we’re one of the firms we sponsored in various countries, something called the Work Travel convene. So we brought together in Australia, in the US and the UK in different countries, large employers. And we’ve done that over the last 12 months. And this isn’t, you know, the private equity and M&A world, but this is more broadly as Aon. And what we tried to do in the private equity community is then bring the conclusions and the insights that, that are being created from those sort of exercises into P funds into their portfolio. But the work travel convene is really trying to look in that crystal ball about where this is going, what are the implications for the workforce?
Alistair Lester:
One of our big areas of course, is terms and conditions of employment and benefit packages, and how do you construct compensation packages to reflect different working environments and all of those sorts of things. So a huge amount of work in progress on that. And I think a lot of clients are increasingly looking for help in that area, because as you say, there’s so much uncertainty.
Ross Butler:
Yeah. I think also private equity firms are increasingly focusing on people and talent and talent retention is their core asset. And you’ve got private equity firms hiring HR, internal HR people to just think about that within the portfolio.
Alistair Lester:
Again, one thing that people won’t know probably is Aon has two businesses, one called Radford, and one called McLagan. They are two leading compensation consulting and compensation data businesses. In fact, McLagan is probably recognized in the general partner and the, in the PE community as being the leading private equity compensation consultant in the world. We know we build many of the, many of the maps, many of the GP carry plans, they come through McLagan insight, but again, Aon in the past culturally McLagan would have been run as a very independent business, delivering his value to its clients in a, in a slightly isolated way.
Alistair Lester:
The way that the firm has been reorganized in the last few years is, is around what we call Aon United which is really about bringing the whole of the firms and the clients, and the fact that we have people who are delivering compensation and talent advice to a large number of PE funds, you then think about how can you maximize compensation particularly through carry of your general partner practitioners through the ever-increasing adoption of innovative solutions and innovative financing structures, right? So those things are linked as well. We can help you maximize returns in your portfolio companies, which then drive your compensation structure that we’ve helped you put in place by the way, through these ideas over here. So, these things are not all individually separate from each other. They are all intertwined.
Ross Butler:
I’ve got a couple of other COVID things on my list. Supply chains, which I assume is bread and butter for insurance services, but global supply chains, given international relations and protectionism, is, it’s not in a good place.
Alistair Lester:
That’s a critical factor. One of the most important parts of the insurance world, which is probably overlooked is two areas, but one is business interruption insurance. That’s come under the real spotlight as a result of COVID. I mean, let’s be honest and, and not necessarily the most positive spotlights, and we’ll see how that all plays out, hopefully positively for policy holders who have valid claims. People in our industry have been talking about supply chain risk for a long time. I think what COVID has done is accelerate that and now there really are needs for firms to really, truly understand their supply chain, but not just because of the, the revenue and the, and the financial risks, but also increasingly through an ESG lens as well, you know, modern slavery background checking, all of these sorts of things are really important in the supply chain.
Ross Butler:
I’ve written a couple of things down from your preamble, but I can’t quite read my writing. Judgment preservation insurance. Is that right? Yeah.
Alistair Lester:
So that’s a, that’s a new area we’ve developed over the last year or so. So we’ve invested heavily in, in our litigation risk group. So there again, there is a theory, a thesis that we would like clients to see litigation as a potential asset, rather than just something they unfortunately have to go through. If you’re bringing a claim against somebody and you believe you’re going to win. And more than that, perhaps you’ve won at the first quarter or the second court. We developed a product which will enable you to ensure as much of that judgment as you can. And in the event that it progresses to the next layer and you lose, then the insurance, it provides you that, that capital. And here’s the thing that that’s really exciting. So we just closed the deal for a client who had won a significant judgment against the large US firm. And we were able to secure several hundred million dollars of insurance, which by the way, it was not the total amount of the judgment award. It was a substantial tranche of it, but by no means a majority, we were able to secure some, several hundred million dollars in judgment preservation insurance, which very simply said in the event that this is overturned, you are going to be indemnified by the insurance company, and that’s nice to have, right. But here’s the really positive and interesting thing: that firm was then able to use the judgment preservation insurance to access third party financing. So the insurance became collateral to access financing. Litigation funding has become a big thing, right? Litigation financing has been around a long time. It’s absolutely got a place. It provides a very essential service. But we are introducing new ideas, which potentially are alternatives to that, arguably again at a lower cost of capital. And that’s super exciting. We’ve hired people in our firm from litigation, funders and litigators who understand that world. And what we’re really doing is using their knowledge and insight with our capability of building insurance, structured insurance instruments and structured products to, to redefine how, how clients can, can see, find value in those sort of situations and see them as assets.
Ross Butler:
In a private equity context, every moment counts, it’s the distraction, I would imagine more than anything, you don’t want it as a standing board item, when you’re trying to grow a business fast.
Alistair Lester:
This is exactly right. And certainly when you come into exit, right, what you do not want is uncertainty over litigation and exit. So we do a significant amount of wrapping up litigation like we do within the tax world. What insurance is very good at Ross is, is rapping, is bridging low probability, but high financial risk situations into certainty, right? And of course that costs money, which is the premium. But that’s what insurance can be very good at. And if you can, you can do that increasingly with tax. Some brilliant advisors around the world will tell clients, this should be fine. What you get from the big four, what you get from the lawyers is we’ve done this before. This should be fine. What you don’t know is whether someone on the other side of the deal table to you has the same view.
Alistair Lester:
Maybe they are a large conservative, strategic, maybe it’s the first time they’ve done a deal in that jurisdiction, whatever their motivations are for feeding the risk, the perception of the risk is different to your perception of a risk. And those are the sorts of things that can derail deals, right? They can get, they can, they, you know, they, they become distractions from actually, this is fundamentally a good business. We want to buy here, but we’re getting distracted by negotiating and arguing over whether we think this one piece of litigation is more or less likely to happen or more or less likely to cost this amount of money, right, and insurance can deal with those situations by giving you a well, we can sell you, it will cost you this to take this issue away. Now, all of that cost makes sense in the context of the data.
Alistair Lester:
It doesn’t, but at least it gives you something, a point of certainty, which you can get a resolution on and that’s becoming much more understood and that’s relevant in tax too. And you can push further by the way, without getting too off piece into further adjacencies around structured credit. So the same broad thesis Ross applies in receivables financing. So one of the things COVID has done is really drive a real increase in the amount of receivables financing that go on in the market. What many don’t appreciate is if you can wrap insurance around those receivables in an appropriate manner, you can de-risk that portfolio receivables. If you’re de-risking that portfolio of receivables, you can arguably lengthen the tenor and reduce the coupon on the financing terms you’ve got. So it’s the same thesis. And just in a slightly different situation.
Ross Butler:
So do you have a classic CEO 3 or 5 year vision for Aon in M&A?
Alistair Lester:
I do. We’re living in the middle of the hottest market we’ve seen in, in a long time. We’ll see how long that lasts. But I think, I still think we’re scratching the surface in terms of the value we can bring to our clients. If I’m really harsh on ourselves, we still are delivering one or two of our core traditional value propositions into a deal. And actually if we just paused and, and delved a little deeper into the deal or had the right conversation in the right way at the right time, there are multiple live opportunities that we have allowed our clients to leave value on the table because we haven’t been either able to identify or able to articulate how we could find a way to help them to, to find that value and bring that value off the table. So that’s really the key thing. I think we’ve grown enormously in the last three to four years. There is still huge white space for us, we think because there’s just, we’re very fortunate. We’ve got an incredible breadth of services and we’re backed up by this incredible ability to bring capital, to bear in a way which hasn’t happened before. And honestly, we’re scratching the surface.
Ross Butler:
Alistair, thanks so much for your thoughts and for coming on to Fund Shack.
Alistair Lester:
Listen, thank you so much for having us Ross. It’s been great.