Are going to move ahead so that we stay on schedule. Also, I imagine that this session is going to be incredibly informative. I want to welcome Greg Case, CEO at Aon. To kick off, I guess, the most obvious and immediate question, I just say USI. Obviously, this was big news, and I was hoping you could talk through the thinking and the expectations of the deal.
Terrific. Happy to do it, Meyer. First, I want to say to you and to KBW, thank you very much for hosting Aon. We very much appreciate it and very much look forward to the discussion today. USI. When you think about USI, you have to start first and foremost with Aon and the foundation of Aon over the last number of years, in particular, what we've done over the last three years. So you start with a foundational approach and understand this thing we call the 3x3 P lan, which were some massive big bets on structural change at our firm, Risk Capital and Human Capital. If you don't understand what that means and Aon matters to you, dig in and understand it. That is a structural change, the organizational change, which means commercial risk and reinsurance are in the same conversation, not combined, but in the same conversation.
Talent, health, and wealth are also part of the same conversation. This sounds trivial. It's not trivial. When you show up with a client and you understand integrated risk, you have different solutions and you get different outcomes, and clients know it. So it's something we looked at in 2002 and 2003 and felt like we had to do to structurally strengthen and align our firm so we could deliver one of the other pillars of the 3x3, three initiatives over three years, and that's data analytics and what we do on Aon Business Services. The engine around the analytics, our analyzers, our capabilities, all around Aon Business Services, connected data in ways no one in our industry has ever connected it before through our team, Risk Capital and Human Capital to our clients.
That's enabled us to win and be very fortunate across a number of different fronts. Data centers as being one of the great examples and what we've been able to do there. When you show up with a client and you actually have that integrated view, they get different answers. Trillion-dollar market cap companies get different answers on how they build them, how they manage risk, and the stakes are massive. We'll come back and hopefully talk about that a little bit. That's the strength of Aon. That's the foundation. In our view, if you think about the last four quarters, two of the last four quarters, we've applied this mostly in commercial risk, U.S. commercial risk. Two of the last four quarters, U.S. commercial risk at Aon was greater than 10% organic. Greater than 10% organic in a market that was challenged, supposedly.
So from our standpoint, we are making massive progress. That is the strength of our firm. That is a number that we believe is multiples of our current share price, in terms of what the possibilities might be. There were two opportunities for us that mattered, two big opportunities that mattered, and one is U.S. middle market, and the second was the E&S marketplace. Our view was, if we can continue to make progress on the platform and address those two areas of potential opportunity, this is even a stronger platform. So this is about strength on strength, and that was the goal. U.S. middle market. We spent 20 years watching U.S. middle market, Meyer, as you know, and others accumulated EBITDA. They had EBITDA multiple arbitrage at zero cost debt. That is a good gig if you can get it. In the end, that persisted for a while.
We did not enter this space with a vengeance because our view was we couldn't create better. All we could do is get bigger. Better came along with Aon Business Services. Aon Business Services, again, 16,000 of the 16,000 Aon colleagues, we can now invest into the middle market and create better, not just bigger. NFP. NFP was the first major step to do that. With our current Aon middle market assets, we made great progress. That has been two years, Meyer, and four months, give or take. It has been phenomenal. What does that mean? Top 400 producers are up 22% new business. So literally, top 400 producers up 22% new business. Client retention, we think there is a 500 basis point opportunity. We have captured 200 basis points in the first two years. Producer retention. Producer retention is higher now than it was pre-deal. Why?
Not because we are a bunch of nice guys, but necessarily they are getting more content and capability to do with clients more than they ever have before. That was the thesis. If we can bring the enterprise insight, large commercial insight into the middle market, that is better. Then we could be bigger. That platform with NFP has worked exceptionally well, but we still weren't as relevant as we needed to be. My counterparts would tell me time and time again, "Great work, Greg. That is fantastic, but it is not really relevant for us in the U.S. middle market." That is why we took the step with USI. USI gets us to a place where we have a platform. Do not think about this as USI. That is not the bet we are making. The bet is USI plus NFP plus the Aon assets.
That is a $6.5 billion platform revenue. That is relevant. Relevant and also better, because we are going to bring the content in that we prove with NFP into USI. Our view is that is a great, strong platform. Again, not the integrated strategy of Aon. That is what I described at the beginning. But it is a pillar that we think has real vibrancy. USI was picked for a very specific reason. Because USI spent the last 15 years like we did, trying to connect their firm. They are going to run to that mission, not run away from it. They believe in content following relationship. Relationship first with content. That is exactly where we are. Complementary to what we have done with NFP. Mike Sicard is going to run the integrated program, the platform. Mike Sicard, if you know him, has done a phenomenal job at USI.
He is excited about taking that mission to now a bigger platform and bringing better to the middle market. Better to the middle market than what we have now. That is why we loved USI and the opportunity with USI and Mike Sicard. We could stop there and we would be good, Meyer. That would be good. They also invested in the other area, as it turns out, and they have 300 appointments into the E&S world. For us, that was a real unique benefit. If you think about it, pick an example. When we complete a major data center and the opportunity, it is often the top 10%, 15% of that gets done into the wholesale market and then the E&S market, because the admitted market just not enough capacity. We will come to that at some point.
If we actually had direct access to the E&S market, we would finish the placement. That opportunity is very real. There are many other opportunities we can get into on the E&S side. So USI brings an integrated view. They bring the platform to complete the platform. They bring the ability to actually access the E&S market directly. Oh yeah, one other thing. That machine we described, Aon Business Services, 16,000 colleagues, the content behind that is literally our secret sauce. Our AI understanding and drive, which we have been doing for 10 years, is really around first starts with content. The content we now have in the U.S. middle market is substantially greater with the $11 billion of premium flow that comes with USI on top of what we have. So the platform, check. E&S, check. Data content, check.
Mike Sicard can run and is excited to do it. We felt really good about USI overall. Then finally, you get the price. You need to understand, price for us is very different than what we typically have done with the U.S. middle market. That is a thesis we all know well and sorry for the long-winded answer, but just to get it on the table, then you can hit it from that point. It is a tried and true opportunity. You decide you are going to sell a year from now. You work your EBITDA for a year, and you massage it however you are going to massage it in beautiful ways. Then you suggest to the seller that they have 20% or 30% or 40% of add-ons they should make. Everybody agrees to that.
They all think the price to that looks good, and everybody walks away and says it is good. We did not do that. Sorry. Did not do that. USI really was not looking to sell. They are part of KKR. The balance sheet opportunity, fantastic. A lot of time with Scott Nuttall on this. Absolutely. By the way, in the end, there was not a data room. There was no pristine opportunity. We essentially stripped this back and said, "Tell us what you think." They did. You see it in the exhibits. The number, 990 and change therefore, or thereabouts, and we basically accepted nothing on the add backs. Basically 10% maybe, fraction. Then we built up a set of synergies. If you get in the side meetings, our interim CFO, Nadin Virani, who is here, has done a brilliant job.
He has run this for months and months and months, ran the entire architecture on that synergy piece. For us, the $395 million, by the way, it is EBITDA synergy. We are not talking about revenue and cost here. It is straight EBITDA we are tracking. We will talk about the split. We feel very good about. This was a set of operators around the table with Nadin in the budget locking down the synergies.
For us, this is a 14.5x multiple gig, to get the benefits I just described. We love this platform as a value creation opportunity, which is also why we did this on the balance sheet. We wanted our current shareholders to benefit from what we are up to. That is a long-winded answer, Meyer, but it really was an attempt to say what were we thinking about, and we know everybody in this space. We know every opportunity. For us personally, I have been doing this for a little while. I think this may be one of the highest value creation opportunities we have seen at Aon over the next few years than I have seen in maybe in my tenure. That is the background.
Okay. In no way do I want to minimize that.
Oh, hit it. Go for it.
We have another 30 minutes if you want to-
Heard every question. Go for it. Anything you want to go.
Right. Okay. Let us talk about integration. Integration was highlighted as one of the focal points, obviously. What does that actually mean? What are the challenges and opportunities? I want to jump off maybe a point you made about juicing up new business production at NFP by 22%. Can you talk about how the integration plan will replicate that?
Integration for us is paramount. You will eventually see an already integrated integration plan fully developed, ready to go. Again, the synergies were done in a very unique way. We have never seen them done the way we did them, very operationally. We probably have, of the $395 million we have described, 23 specific revenue initiatives, 10 specific cost initiatives, all of which are sort of tracked. The revenue initiatives are on traditional, but we also have those associated with the E&S and all the opportunities around wholesale.
For us, it is very much around that integrated view. Again, with our overall team kind of at the helm as a steering committee, Sicard day to day, all the content going up through Nadin to our board, so we actually are all tracking exactly what we are doing. And mostly understand this is an integrated team. This is an Aon United team.
Sicard, but also, you watch. The CEO, Doug Hammond, I think talks about this very positively. This is something Doug and I have had a great deal of conversation around how do you complete the platform? One other thing I should probably say. When we brought NFP and Aon, we were asked a couple of times, maybe a couple of times a day, "Are you buying another platform?" We never answered that. We just said we want to have relevance, and we want to have meaning for our clients. Make no mistake about it, if you miss everything else, don't miss that mission. We are flat out going to have better content for our clients. The analyzers, better content, cyber analyzer, better content, service, better content. We've proven we can do it with NFP. Now we're going to scale it with this platform.
It's a platform. I just want to be clear. The platform's done. So I want to say now, no new platform acquisitions in the middle market in the U.S. We're done. So $6.5 billion, good platform. We don't need to be the biggest. We need to be the best, and we have a good platform. We're relevant, and we are going to run that play. So I just want to be clear from that standpoint. But the integration is going to be USI, NFP, colleagues from NFP. Mike Schneider, Ethan Foxman, these guys have really been part of NFP and now been elevated.
They'll be part of Mike's team. Doug Hammond still playing a role as executive chairman. All this is good, very focused, and if you know one thing about Sicard, this is an operator. We've got the best operator in the world on a mission that he's incredibly excited about with an integrated team, with a set of synergies we know, and we're going to actually begin enacting the day after we close.
Fantastic. I'm going to jump on the point you made in terms of synergies. A couple of points. You had a lot of precision in terms of the revenue, expense, and EBITDA synergies that you're expecting. What are the key challenges? Where do you see the opportunity for upside?
All the challenges are real. We accept them. We know what they are. We have been through the movie multiple times before. Watch the history. Every time we bring someone in, there is always a concern and a reaction, then there is our reaction. Our view is, Meyer, we have got to work the expense opportunities, and we are doing that. 10 initiatives laid out very specifically. This is Mindy Simon, our COO, and our teams, then soon to be our efforts across USI, NFP, and Aon Assets as well. The ones we are most excited about are the revenue opportunities.
They are meaningful. Again, I would just tell you, we are committed to the 395. Those who know Aon know what that means in our world. That also means the opportunity is great. It is great. Just a few examples. USI, essentially $11 billion, it is sort of a premium into the market. Like many, many middle market companies, they utilize wholesalers on 30%, 35% to do those placements. By the way, just for reference, we put $26 billion in, and we maybe do a billion, a little over a billion, and ours are maybe some of the most complex placements. The capability we have now, even before the wholesale comes on board, might be able to address the $3 billion that go to wholesale. If one could think about that is a real opportunity to serve clients better.
That is the mission, but also that comes with a lot of other pieces, too. There are multiple angles here that, from our view, are very clear and very apparent when you get a bunch of operators around the table. Risk Capital, Human Capital, and you talk about what they are. There is a tremendous amount that goes into London. Our capability in London is second to none. Aon Client Treaty, very unique, non-duplicated, in most fronts. For us, Meyer, those are very specific synergies that are not two years away or one year away. They are one week away after close. For us, a whole series of synergies from that standpoint. The other place you are going to see us spending a huge amount of time is with our producers.
No doubt, as you have all heard, everyone will hear, "Oh my God, everybody is going to do this and that and the other." Look, all I can tell you is this: We will do our level best on retention, just like we did with NFP. Again, remind you, higher retention now than pre-deal. That is unheard of. It is not because we are a bunch of nice guys. It is because they get more stuff. Sorry, and we are not changing comp grid, therefore they might accidentally More stuff, same comp grid, they might get paid more. They get to wow their clients.
For us, we are going to do our level best to sort of make sure that is right, and that is also a big part of the synergies, too. Our view is the new business impact we had at NFP, why can't we have that at a minimum at USI? And by the way, even with Aon, because remember at Aon, the assets inside of Aon were kind of embedded inside of Aon. They weren't called out as a platform, and they were phenomenal, but they can be better. Better is part of an integrated platform in terms of what we're trying to accomplish. So for us, the idea of the retention synergies, all that go with it, revenue, cost side, we think there's lots of upside. But what we are clear is the absolute primacy of delivering 395.
Okay, fantastic. I will be surveying the room to see if there are questions there. I want to make sure that everyone is getting their questions answered. One important topic that I want to focus on, though, is on the E&S marketplace or reentering E&S, reentering wholesale. For those of us that were around in 2004 and 2005, this is not a small issue. Clearly not a legal problem, but it was a big deal once upon a time. I was hoping you could talk through how you're viewing that marketplace and maybe a little bit more color on the opportunities.
Well, listen, we've been so fortunate at Aon. Our team has been really wonderful and all the effort I described at the beginning. We have the platform, and that platform's been curated and worked damn hard. Risk Capital, Human Capital, Aon Business Services, this is a fundamental machine, and it actually should get better and better and better on behalf of clients. Huge, right? It's served us reasonably well, and by the way, we see massive opportunity ahead. The AI piece, I know you had the session on yesterday, we've been doing machine learning and AI for a number of years. I have said on a few calls, we put an early generation NVIDIA chip into an Aon solution called Pathwise in 2009. 2009 was before it was cool to be doing this stuff, okay? For us, we love it.
AI is not a strategy, but it is an accelerant to a strategy, and it's helped us accelerate massively sort of around that. You watch the middle market, and now what we're doing in the middle market. You watch E&S. E&S is now 26% of the flow in the U.S. 26%. By the way, we have great access, but it's indirect access, and it's through a great group of wholesalers, and this is not about going after our wholesale partners at all. I've had conversations with CEOs of all of them. This is a massive area, and now we have direct access to it. We also have direct access through our MGUs and MGAs. You saw us also announce the Tuesday before USI, Totalis Specialty. That is not Aon brand, but Totalis. This is where all this is going to come from and drive. Awesome.
A guy named Kip Kelly, who ran our Affinity business, and Tom Gillingham, who ran the business at NFP, have come together to sort of form Totalis Specialty. Beautiful. E&S for us is a real opportunity to access market. Again, think about it. You finish what is a $5 billion, $10 billion, $15 billion opportunity in data centers. Again, I hope we get a chance to talk a little bit about those. In doing so, you have to top it off because the admitted market is tapped out and you hand it to the E&S market. You hand it to a wholesaler. There is no more content than Aon has. You do not have that right now. We need the capacity, and we need to sort of get it filled. That is all going to go away, Meyer, at the high end. Then think about the opportunities.
Totalis Specialty, by the way, now serves, and this is an $800 million or $900 million revenue business, just for reference. This is not a startup. We have 21,000 independent agents that access through Totalis Specialty our programs and MGUs and MGAs. 21,000. We probably have 40% of their submissions each year. 40% that do not apply to those programs directly. We dump them. How do you guys feel about that? Feeling good about the fact that literally we got 40%, this is circa call it 16,000 applications of which we say, "Nah, I do not want you today."
That is what we do. That is stopped. That is now going to be addressed. For us, this is not a one-off thing. It is a very, very specific, and by the way, we have it all laid out in the first year, in the first 24 months in what we are doing. Our view is there are very specific things we can do right now, and then there are a whole series of things over time. Again, benefit to client. They get a better solution, better coverage, better analytics, and we are going to be able to do it, and we could not have done it before. We literally took the 16,000 and gave them back to the market. We gave them to wholesalers. We are not going to do that.
These are, again, very explicit pieces and places that we know we can apply, and then we will see what happens. Again, it is a massive market, so please do not walk out the room and think this is not about Amwins or Ryan or CRC Group. It is not at all. These are great partners, and they will be great partners for a long time, hopefully. Even better. We are going to access the E&S market. It is 26% of the flow. Our clients need it, and we are doing it. The fact that we had 300 appointments as part of USI was a big wow. Mike has worked that for three years, and they were just beginning to think about how they were going to apply them.
By the way, the revenue is de minimis, so do not go look for the revenue of E&S at USI Insurance Services because it is just starting. The 300 appointments is what we heard. That is what got us excited. That gave us the access. Because if you think about it, for us to get that kind of access and buying somebody, the breakage is high because we have a whole series of competitors who are placing into those groups, too. You really cannot buy one. You have to do it organically. This was the most elegant opportunity around organic we've ever seen.
Okay. I'm going to follow up on the organic side because I think this is a question I've gotten a lot, and that is, with all of the tools you've provided Aon producers, you've had really, really strong organic growth that's outpaced what USI has been doing. What's the pathway and timeline, not for generating organic growth through the wholesale side that benefits Aon, but for individual producers at USI to match Aon?
One excellent question. Thank you. You should do all the analysis you need to do in any way you want to do it. The analysis focused on USI and USI growth, I would say is an interesting one that has modest relevance. Why? It isn't USI. It's USI and NFP and Aon together as that platform. By the way, if Nadin were up here, he would commit to mid-single digit or greater organic growth over time, just as we have been forever. By the way, we believe this platform is going to reinforce the time for or greater. Mid-single digit's nice or greater is better. Our view is we know the formula now. The CEO of Aon's really slow. It's taken a long time. We did unit productivity forever, and by the way, we got pretty good at it.
We didn't actually hire that many people over a long period of time. Better than unit productivity is unit productivity and more units. Someone told us that, and they were right. If we do all those things, that's part of what we have in the context of it. By the way, USI, like NFP, is going to benefit hugely. That's going to be good. Also, Mike Sicard has done fewer and fewer acquisitions over the last three years. He has instead diverted to a pure hiring engine. By the way, one of our paths could have been, let's take the X percent, high percent of producers who you brought in over the last year, produced nothing. Have zero revenue. We have that in the till. We'd say, "We won't accept that." By the way, does that have opportunity? Yes.
In fact, the hiring engine that USI has, we love. I can see us putting that across the platform in terms of where we are. Point being, literally in the end, you should expect from us mid-single digit or greater, period. Soft market, whatever that means. Hard market, whatever that means. It doesn't really matter. We're going to literally have to deliver that. That is our focal point. Our view is, over time, this helps us do that more effectively. So be clear. We're not going backward in mid-single digit or greater, period. By the way, did we with NFP? NFP was supposedly lower, too. We got the exact same questions. We just went to work. In the end, during the time we owned NFP, the last 24 months, greater than 10% organic in two of the four quarters in U.S. commercial risk.
I know you guys are thinking about it, going, you're probably asking what I asked, which is why not four quarters out of the four quarters? But two out of the four quarters is unique. That's part of why this formula, in our view, is a good add to what that chassis was that I started with.
I was going to ask why not 15%, but different question.
I might have asked that, too, but anyway. Greater than 10.
Okay. This will be my last question on USI, but again, I welcome questions from the audience. Talk a little bit about funding. You mentioned a little bit about how you wanted your current investor base to reap the benefits of this. It is a large dollar amount. What was the decision-making process to do it on the basis of all cash, no equity?
It was simple. First of all, we can, and we want to make sure you are comfortable we can. Heard a lot of different stir around why and how, and what do you think? In the end, we feel highly confident in our 395. Start there. Second, watch what we did with NFP. We went up and then we came down faster than everybody thought. Started buying back stock faster than everybody thought. By the way, remember, we did something unheard of in NFP. We sold a piece of the business in the 24 months we were integrating them. Who does that? Did you guys hear about that?
Not really, because you never heard about it. We just did it. It was multiple billions. We sold the wealth business. I know you knew about it, but I mean it wasn't a big deal from the standpoint of, there was some consternation. Who does that? You're sitting in an office of 10 people and two of them are leaving, and everybody's good with it. Seriously, we sold a business. That's not CEO 101 stuff. We're not supposed to do that. We've done 150, give or take, sales in the last decade. Circa $8 billion in cash. If one wants to understand how important return on invested capital to us is, understand the pain of selling business.
150, $8 billion, including one we did within the construct of the two-year period we were integrating them on the wealth side to both, by the way, drive return on invested capital, protect the balance sheet, do what we're doing. From our standpoint, straight-up cash and all we have is the $17 billion. We pay it down. We're committed to an investment-grade rating. By the way, you've seen it. We did the RES/RAS. There was no change in rating. Done. Moody's, S&P, good. Understand what we're trying to do. On top of it, understand we also have other means. We've got everything stacked and racked, and we understand where our businesses are and what they look like.
Our view is we have a commitment to pay down, and we will do that, and we will very quickly get to our undervalued stock as well as we think about that as a priority. In the meantime, if something doesn't quite work, our ability to actually be quite nimble is high. Even if it does work really well, we still may be nimble in terms of what we're doing. Our view is we can pay down the $17 billion very, very quickly, certainly in the timeframe we've laid out, and we want the benefit to accrue to our current shareholders. Frankly, given our current valuation, it kills us to think about spreading that out. We can, and we did.
Moving along to other news, I guess. Greg and I don't think we ran into each other. We're both in Monte Carlo this week. One of the first pieces of news was Aon Blackstone.
Oh.
I was hoping you could touch on that a little bit.
Did anybody notice that in New York? Probably not, right? Okay. All right. Yeah.
It was a big deal in Monte Carlo.
It was a big deal in Monte Carlo, that is true. It was leaked in Monte Carlo. I guess, just seriously, does anybody know what we are talking about here or not at this point? Probably not. Okay, a couple people do. If you are in Monte Carlo, if you know what Monte Carlo is, that is kind of the good and the great, and unfortunately, that is all they were talking about. The first question and the second question, those were the two questions that were being addressed. What came across was a leaked story that said Aon and Blackstone are doing something, and Blackstone is going to take a piece of the Aon flow. Some version of that. Okay? All right. Let us step back. Remember that platform I described at the beginning? Risk Capital, Human Capital, the machine around analytics? It is real.
If you want proof points of real, you do not listen to somebody like me. Who cares what I say? What you watch is the feed of the capital. If you can draw capital in, you are having impact. You draw capital into a Jamaica cat bond, and cover for a Category 5 hurricane, that is called content, because capital does not pay any attention to people like me. They pay attention to content. If they think they get a return, they will come. Just start with that premise. Understand that. Our analytics are unique.
Here is a proof point. If you believe we need to do more and get more capital in our industry so we can actually address the risks of our clients, if you believe risks are going up, severity going up, all these things are happening, complexity is going up, and you need to bring more capital in. We got a $5 trillion industry, guys. All the balance sheets in our industry, $5 trillion, give or take, and there is more we can do. If you think about even the data centers, greatest example.
If the data centers happen in the way we think they are going to happen, and they are, we are way outstripping the industry. How do you do this? In the end, our view is our ability to be relevant from a content standpoint in a data center, for example, is huge. We just finished a piece with a client in which we did a $20 billion placement. That would have been impossible had they not listened to us, and they did what they were going to do, which is build their $20 billion facility in one spot, get all the lights, camera, greatest thing ever, you are amazing.
It is like, the problem is our industry has a massive allergic reaction to concentration risk. So we convinced them to build it in modules. They did. We did a series of $5 billion placements that got their full coverage. That is real relevance. Then, by the way, if they get coverage, they change their financing structure, and they change their operating volatility. So forget insurance. We are changing the financing structure of this company for their data centers. If you say, "What is short of this over time?" It is the capital in our industry. $5 trillion is not big enough. By the way, the access points are all over the place. Pension, sovereign, PE. That adds up to $250 trillion. We do not need all that, right?
It is not coming anyway, but a tiny fraction of that increases the $5 trillion could even double it. That means if we can actually help clients understand the value and they pay for it, we are not talking about unit price reduction, we are talking about when they pay for it, how cool would that be? Our industry has a lot more relevance, and it is a massive boost for our clients and by the way, everybody gets paid a lot more. Everybody does great, and our clients do great. All right. We have done a number of things. One thing you might have heard about are these things, re-share opportunities. Re-share opportunities are when you work with an insurer and you take all their treaties and you amalgamate them together, you create a bit of a mini index, if you will.
We have worked with some of the PE firms to do a sliver of that. While that is beneficial for the insurance company, that is beneficial for clients, it brings more capacity, and it is called re-share. We were the pioneers of that. We did the first of those. We did one with the counterparty named, with Blackstone. This is different. Imagine if you wanted to actually participate in our industry. You can buy a company, hire a team, hope they are good, have them develop over the next five years, and create a diversified portfolio. Hopefully, that all works well for you. Or Aon might have the analytic horsepower to take our entire flow on the reinsurance side, the whole thing. This is tens and tens and tens and tens of billions of dollars. It is the most diversified portfolio in the world in reinsurance, period.
If we could actually create the means for you to understand it as capital, and we gave you the opportunity to take a piece of that, what would that be worth to you, and how would you think about it? I can tell you what it would be worth for our clients. It would be very, very powerful, especially if that counterparty was someone of the yoke of Blackstone, and especially if they also created preferred outcomes for clients as they came in.
Think about duration, think about dividend, think about a whole series of other things. Imagine they did that, and imagine what that would mean for clients. The reason this was a big deal at Monte Carlo is every reinsurer in the world is there wondering what that means, and the answer is it does not mean anything for you. You are one of the best in the world. Your underwriting muscle is what produced that massive portfolio we have that is going to be relied on. You are golden.
We, in essence, have Blackstone coming in to actually take a piece of that overall portfolio conceptually, it all comes together in a way in which our clients benefit. The market is bigger. We are going to do it through Lloyd's, so it is on a syndicate. We have someone doing it, not us. We are not going to own the syndicate. Aon does not want to do that. We want to have others get that benefit. All this is clean, tight, new capital. By the way, not just new capital, some of the most substantial capital in the world, and permanent. You can say, "Well, that is the other thing." No, no. Let us have the conversation if you want to. Permanent.
Literally what we are talking about is us with our analytic capability, creating that transparency such that Blackstone would come in and say, "We will take that piece. We will give preferred outcomes for clients for a multi-year period," and it is a great thing all through Lloyd's. Yes, that was not announced that way. You just got more content than anybody got probably in it. What you heard was something going on with Aon and Blackstone. That is what was leaked, and this is what we are talking about.
It could not happen. It is possible, but we are this close to being able to pull that off. That is net new, raw, permanent capital that is going to be, we think, innovative and meaningful, against an index we have created because of the content we have got. In any event, it is kind of a thing. It is kind of a big deal, frankly. It might be bigger than the first topic, to be blunt.
Okay. The first topic was a big deal, too. I want to talk about AI. There was one day in February, we wake up, and apparently, insurance brokers are no longer necessary because we have ChatGPT. Personally, I never bought into that thesis. I thought very few small entities are going to go without insurance and rely on their own skill set. What worried me is if you get to the larger end of things, where you've got very sophisticated insurance buyers that are large corporate risk managers, they might be less dependent on some of the ancillary services, consulting that goes along with their brokerage. Is that a realistic concern? Why or why not?
I have a hard time with this one because every time you try to justify what you're doing, you sound so defensive, right? It's like the only answer is you're just an idiot and don't understand AI, Greg. What are you talking about? Anyway, I'll take that risk today, so forgive me. I'll take the risk. Look, I'm sorry. I see more opportunity now than I've ever seen in my 20 years in my role. I can be myopic, but more. Why? Not because anything special, because demand's going up. We don't always recognize demand, and we can't respond to demand, but it's going up. Quite literally, the data center example, demand going up. Cyber, we have a $15 billion nothing. It's not big enough. It needs to be bigger. By the way, clients have to pay for it.
Understand, clients have to recognize the value of buying down volatility in a way that drives their market-to-book up. If they get that right, they'll pay for it. We need to use our analytics to convince them of that, and that will bring more capital in. We're not talking about capital just coming in to sort of do nice things and be good. All these things to us are opportunity. If we can't respond to it, shame on us. But if we do, we're not worried about how we get compensated for it and recognized for it. But remember, this is what I think is completely missed. This is not a pure linear optimization game. I know all the markets. They're in my ChatGPT.
I know all the programs that have ever been written in the history of the world, and I know everybody I need to talk to. Bam, here's your story. Sorry. They don't understand what we do. This is a set of distributions talking to distributions, and they're all changing all the time. Then somebody's job's dependent on actually that answer. This is a mess. What is your exposure? No, I'm asking you. Tell me what your exposure is on this peril. I want to know what is your exposure? That actually is a distribution. It depends on where the company is, what's going on in the world. That changes. Okay, I know my exposure all of a sudden. Great. Did all this analytics, or I didn't. I got it. What are you going to do about it? How much are you going to keep? How much are you going to try to transact, put in the marketplace?
Notice I haven't said insurance yet. That's a real decision. Again, depends on what your business is. If you're doing great or not doing great, how much risk. I've decided I'm going to keep this much and eat it, and this much I'm going to transact. Who are you going to transact it with? Now we go to the insurers. Now we're into the optimization game, right? Okay. Really, all the insurers act exactly the same? No, no, we have their records. Good. Do they change their mind ever? Do they? I don't know. We have $1 billion of declined claims every year. $1 billion that we get paid. Hear the last part? That we get paid. I'm sure the algorithm would work too, but when you get the declination, it's like, nope, you're declined.
We get them paid. So you basically have, what's my exposure? What do I keep? What do I transact? What's my service? Oh, yeah, I just described the optimization program. Forget that. Blackstone we just talked about is not just market taking. Why am I putting the client in a position where all they do is take the market every day? Forget it. Market making. We just changed the market structure. We just opened up an opportunity and an avenue for financial sponsors. That's 10 times the industry opportunity in terms of what we can do. And it's not about lower cost, it's about more opportunity.
I look at it, Meyer, and go, hey, with that kind of mess out there in the world going on and all this stuff happening, if we can't find a way to help clients understand volatility and do something about it, shame on us. I think I like our chances. By the way, it's not just with big companies. It's with the middle-sized companies, what we found with NFP, if you get it clean and right, you're talking to a CFO and a head of HR who are literally fighting for their company's life. They blow a $50 million claim, they're done, maybe. So for us, again, I come back and go, AI should help accelerate that. By the way, it is. Last thing I'll say on this is the AI applications we have now aren't just cost, they're the analyzers.
The reason we end up talking with Anthropic and Google and Microsoft and others, it's not because we're cool, I can promise you that. It's because we have AI use cases. I'm sorry, revenue use cases out of AI that are working, and that's cool. For us, we think it's both sides of the equation. We see the opportunity, we embrace it, we want to accelerate it. Look, it's definitely got its risks, I guess, but we see more opportunities than risk.
Okay, we have time for one final question, and I apologize, it sounds almost petty duty to ask it, but I have to. How should we think about the next phase of the P&C cycle or the market impact in the context of Aon or Aon USI?
Got it. One last thing I have to add on the last question, and we bet $1.3 billion on it. So we already took the wrath of God from our investors, all you guys, when we said, "Hey, we're going to spend $1 billion." You're like, "By the way, we're going to spend a lot more than that," but in that $1.3 billion. So that was a big gulp. The P&C cycle. So I won't have anything of nourishment for you, I'm sure. At a macro level, you ask the question on demand-supply, and you basically, if you believe the thesis I just described, over time, the unit prices, we're going to see movement up over time. Right now, we're in a moment, we're in a cycle. We haven't had any major events, et cetera. By the way, it's not one piece.
The markets are very, very different. I had the conversations this week in Monte Carlo. This happened 100 times, so I listened to our experts, Joe Peiser, Andy Marcell, and others. They would say it's going to be flat. It's going to flatten by June, probably you're going to start to see it flatten a little bit. Their view, absent anything massive happen in terms of where we are. But over time, again, as it relates to Aon, we can't be about the cycle.
So we're having conversations with our clients around literally how do you double down on specific areas? How do you buy more? What do you do? How do you protect for the future? So for us, our mid-single digit or greater holds no matter what the cycle is. In our view, it is more in pockets and it is more short term, and we will see flattening by June, mid-year of 2027.
Okay. I know people have stuff to do. I would go on for a couple of hours otherwise, but Greg, thank you. This was tremendous. We covered a lot of ground. Thank you.
How was awesome, Meyer? Thank you.