By James Thaler

June 25 - (The Insurer) - Aon’s Business Services division has evolved into having a "two-part mission", moving beyond delivering margin enhancement to becoming a growth driver, the company's chief operating officer Mindy Simon said.

"We started ABS about seven years ago, and the focus initially was really all about margin and generating margin on behalf of the firm," Simon, whose role includes oversight of the unit, told The Insurer at Aon's first investor day in nearly two decades.

"Now it's evolved into what we call the 'two-part mission', which is enabling growth through providing capabilities and content to our colleagues as well as our clients, and then margin as a derivative outcome of that," she added.

Simon said the growth stems from designing client experiences that "go across the journey" and offer "differentiation" in how brokers and account executives serve clients.

She described ABS as a combination of operations and technology which enables colleagues to work end-to-end and optimise processes.

"Our AI strategy is what we call 'AI embedded at scale', and that builds AI directly into our core capabilities, across really the three things that we deliver to clients; analytics, broking and advisory and service," she commented.

"And we are embedding AI across all three of those," Simon added.

She said that ABS helps "power" the Aon United strategy, which is supported by risk capital, human capital and what she called "Aon client leadership".

"And then ABS really underpins it by providing the capabilities across both operations and technology, really honing in on both the colleague and client experience," she said.

Simon said her work is in part informed by having been a former client before joining Aon in 2022.

"By focusing on removing significant points of friction, things like certificates of insurance, (it) enables us to both give time to our colleagues, but also time back to our clients. And that's a service capability," she noted.

Simon said technology is central to how Aon helps clients make better decisions through leveraging data, making it easier to work with and providing operational efficiencies. "Technology is at the core of that, in terms of how our colleagues, whether they be brokers or account executives, can bring those insights and capabilities," she explained.

She expects technology to "change everything" over the next five years, with plans to inject it into colleagues' workflows to an even greater degree, in a way that allows them to spend more time with clients, come up with better answers and "drive business results in a very different way".

"By not having data in silos across our organisation, we can really see great insights to help our clients with their business," she added.

Beyond developing better analytics and outcomes, Simon also emphasised the importance of better data, which she said ABS had differentiated in two ways.

"One, is we have boundaryless scale, and what I mean by that is we have risk capital (and) human capital powering Aon client leadership, all within ABS," she said. "That enables us not to have boundaries internally, in terms of what P&Ls are willing to share data or get credit for it, because we're all one firm.

"The second is really on bespoke data assets, and we have, over decades of partnerships developed with various institutions, as well as developing our own catastrophe model, Impact Forecasting, that enables us to have data in ways that others can't," Simon concluded.