Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the 2019 Willis Towers Watson Analyst Day. We're delighted to be here and to have a chance to host all of you. Let's see, before we get started, I've just got to say, we're going to be making some forward-looking statements today that have associated risks disclosed in our SEC filings. We do not undertake to update any such information. Our actual measures may be different than expected. In this presentation, we'll refer to non-GAAP measures, which we believe are relevant for our operating results. This is the agenda today. I'll do a brief introduction, we'll be followed by our segment leaders from each of our four segments, then Mike Burwell, our CFO, will give a financial overview, then we'll close with some questions and answers. This is going to be a long presentation, I can see.
We went over the SEC disclosure stuff, too. Good. We're now at the end of the third year after our merger, and as you can see on this slide here, we're really pleased with the progress that we've made. Oh, jeez. Really pleased with the progress that we've made. Our revenue, $8.6 billion, a 5% growth. For 2017 and for 2018, our growth was really as fast or faster than our competitors. We like the positioning for that. We think that's something that we see continuing for the next several years anyway. Our adjusted diluted EPS came in at $10.33. That was above what we had been targeting in the year and a 21% increase over the prior year. Feel pretty good about hitting those.
I think some of these numbers here in the bottom are the ones we've been focusing on the most, the EBITDA margin coming in at 25.1%, 190 basis points improvement over the prior year. Perhaps most significant when you look at this versus our pro forma 2015 results, we have a 300 basis point improvement from 2015 to 2018. One of the things we said we thought we could do during the merger was to improve our operating results, and we feel pretty good about what we've done there. A number that we've been focusing on a lot in the last year and a half in particular is our free cash flow.
Mike is going to talk some more about that later on, but a 90% increase in our free cash flow this year, getting it up to $1.1 billion, and again, we feel pretty good about that. I think the most important thing I'd say, though, about these is that these are results that we feel really good about, but we don't regard this as the end of the merger. It's the beginning of now that we're really ready for the competition and ready to see even more improvement in future years. Let me turn to the different segment results. This is just a snapshot of our segments. As I said, our segment leaders will be going into more detail on each of the segments and drilling down there. You'll get a chance to hear from them.
Just looking across the board here, every segment had growth, every segment had margin improvement. I think that's something that we look at as just fundamentally important for a well-run business. Every different part of it should be operating and improving, and we don't want anything subtracting from the whole. We feel pretty good about that. Human Capital and Benefits, 3% organic growth. That is a good number, consistent with our market. Julie will talk a little bit about this, but we're not necessarily in all parts of the Talent & Rewards space, for example. We are looking for places that are relatively high margin or at least have a prospect of getting to relatively high margin. If there's things that we see, even if they're fast-growing, that we don't see any prospect that they'll ever be profitable, we stay away from those.
We have a very disciplined strategy, I think, about that. The other interesting thing, Julie will talk more about this, 120 basis points improvement in our operating margin there. We already have the industry-leading operating margins in the Human Capital and Benefits space, seeing them grow like that is quite impressive. CRB, our Corporate Risk and Broking, continued its solid top-line growth with many new business wins and also a very high rate of retention. Our rate of retention is we target somewhere in the low 90s, and we're sort of at the top of the range that we're targeting for retention. That's a key measure for us because it really tells us how do clients feel about the work we're doing.
As we talk a little later about strategically what we want to accomplish in the future, this notion of client service and high retention is going to be fundamental to that. As you can see, we had a 70 basis points operating margin expansion in CRB. That was due to the top-line growth coupled with some continued cost management efforts. Todd will talk more about this. This is going to be a continuing focus in CRB. Investment, Risk and Reinsurance, 6% growth, exceptionally strong performance driven by revenue growth in reinsurance, ICT, our Insurance Consulting and Technology group, our investment in our wholesale business. Each one of those delivered mid-single digit growth or better, and that revenue flow through is what drove some of the enhanced margins plus 140 basis points.
Finally, our BDA, our Benefits Delivery and Administration, continue to experience robust growth, 9% revenue growth, 300 basis point improvement in margins. That was really a result of the strong revenue growth as well as, I think, an ability to continue to scale these businesses. Again, we'll hear more about that. As I said, we look at this though as, this is great, and this gives us the platform now from which we want to attack the future. Looking ahead, we've moved past the initial adoption year for the new revenue standard. On the quarterly earnings calls, you won't hear me complaining about ASC 606 anymore and the difficulty of dealing with that. Everything will be on that, and I'll have to reconcile myself. For revenue growth, we're projecting about 4% revenue growth.
This was the same number we projected last year. Some of our competitors come out with different revenue projections, and sometimes I get asked, "Oh, well, your revenue projection is lower than theirs. Does that mean you think you're going to grow slower?" No, it doesn't mean that. It just means we projected things a little bit differently than anybody else. I mentioned earlier, for the last several years, we've been growing as fast or faster than any of our competitors. We expect that to continue. I do believe, though, that for us, we want to make sure we're budgeting prudently, and if growth is faster than we expected, it's a little bit easier to deal with that than if growth is slower than expected. That's the basis. That's sort of the color I'd give around that. Adjusted operating margin.
We've changed our margin guidance to focus on adjusted operating income margin, and we think this gives investors a better sense of our core margin performance. We expect the full year 2019 adjusted operating margin to be about 20%. For comparison, that was 18.1% in 2018. We're projecting a significant improvement there. Adjusted diluted EPS, $10.60-$10.85 is what we're projecting. There are three significant headwinds that we're facing in the coming year. One is currency, that's about a $0.10 r eduction to EPS. The other is that we'll have a lower pension income. This is non-cash, but lower pension income, that's about a $0.36 reduction. Then we have a higher adjusted effective tax rate in 2019, and that's about a $0.35 reduction. About $0.81 in total of headwind for us.
Excluding these items, you can see our adjusted EPS growth would be the double-digit that we've been projecting. Turning to taxes, just a quick comment on that. We say the adjusted tax rate should be around 22%. This is from some of the impact of tax reform on our effective tax rate, different taxes coming in at different times. It also includes guidance continues to come out almost daily on some of the ways to implement the new tax law, and that affects our assessment of what it is. This is a bit of a fluid situation. I think what I would say, though, is the 22% we have here assumes that we can do some modest improvements over what the tax rate would be if we did nothing. I think we'd probably come out maybe closer to 23% if we did absolutely nothing.
We think we can probably get it down to 22%. We certainly want to make sure we pay all the taxes we owe, but we don't want to pay any more than we owe either. We will continue to make sure that we do the best tax planning we can, and we'll look to improve that number. Free cash flow, we expect another strong year of free cash flow growth. We've really sort of shifted the way we're giving our guidance there. We're just saying, look, we think we can grow free cash flow at least 15% a year for the foreseeable future. What we're really trying to communicate is we expect to get steady improvements in free cash flow, say, over the next three to five years.
It'll be faster than our adjusted earnings growth, that's something that we think folks should be able to count on. There are some caveats. If we get a 90% increase next year, again, maybe we won't be able to get 15% on that the year after. We actually think the more likely one is we'll just continue to see good, solid, steady improvement year after year. Let me turn briefly to something we're calling Our Story. Three years into the merger, we've really created a Willis Towers Watson, and perhaps more important, the Willis Towers Watson culture. One of the things we wanted to do was to make sure we understood that and codified that and communicated it to our colleagues around the world and to our clients.
We wanted to develop a sense of what we do, why we do it, and what that means for our clients and our colleagues and our shareholders. When we do things like this, we don't sit in a room somewhere and have the operating committee or something figure out what our culture is and then communicate it to everybody. What we do is we go out and we ask our clients what it's like to work with us. We get a sense of that. Perhaps most important, we ask our colleagues, "Why are you here? What do you see as the advantages of it?" What we do is we take that information back, and we come back and get a sense of, does this accord with who we are as a company?
We, the operating committee and everything, we love the insights we got from talking to our folks about this, and this, Our Story, is really a result of that. I think it reaffirms what we've been doing, and we think this is something that'll help us continue to communicate what it means to be part of Willis Towers Watson, and I think it'll reinforce our focus and our discipline in the company moving forward, a good understanding of who we are, what people get from it, et cetera. A key part of this is what I've called our strategy here, which is how are we going to deliver a sustainable competitive advantage? How are we going to make sure we continue to have industry-leading growth?
This provides our leaders and our colleagues throughout the company a common goal to work towards, as well as a framework to make decisions when we're deciding. Do we get into this business or not? Do we invest in this or not? We want something that gives us a framework to think about that. There are really three elements that we're going to talk about for that. The first is driving profitable organic growth in all of our current core businesses. One of the things we've done over the last three years is take a look at all the different businesses we had. You can see we've made some small acquisitions of different things. We had some smaller operations that we'd inherited from Gras Savoye that we disposed of. We sold to some of the folks who'd had those businesses.
We got out of the Willis Securities business previously. Having looked at everything else, and particularly all of our sizable businesses and everything, the conclusion was we like the businesses we're in. We have no intention or desire to dispose of any of the businesses we have. We think not only do we like the prospects for them in terms of being able to drive revenue growth and being able to drive margins, we think they fit together well. A key part of what we have to do now is make sure we drive growth across all of these different core businesses. We want to make sure we're investing in all of them in the appropriate way. That means finding the right balance between technology and product and consulting solutions.
We need to make sure that we're optimizing our operations, and again, we want to make sure that we're increasing our market share there. Where we have favorable markets for revenue growth and market expansion, we intended to focus on key developed and selected emerging markets. We're also going to focus a lot around the company on differentiation between large and middle market client segments. What we've found increasingly is that these segments have different needs, and they're looking for different solutions and different ways of delivering them from the company. You're going to see the large and middle market as an increasingly important. We're going to have distinct folks going there and distinct solutions that we'll offer to them.
Of course, we're going to make sure that we continue to focus on the bottom line, and I think you've heard already of driving margin improvement and bottom-line growth is a key part of what we want to continue to do. Delivering, and this really gets to while our clients appreciate and need our core capabilities, what they really place significant value on is impeccable service, deeply relevant expertise, and also the right level of relationship management. What we want to focus on doing 100% of the time as a company is consistently going beyond the basics, not just meeting our clients' needs, but just over-delivering on everything we do. We think we give very good client service right now.
Our intention is to take it up even a notch more and ensure that when our clients think of us, they think of people who are always delivering at the highest possible levels. That's the kind of thing that will drive the client retention I was talking about earlier and that we think will deepen our relationships and lead to more profitable growth. This is going to be a key part of what we want to be rolling out over the next few years. Finally, investing. We're investing both organically and inorganically. We're going to allocate capital for strategic investments with a focus on the most attractive markets for growth, or where we think we can achieve the sustainable competitive advantage. That means when I look around the world, we don't have what I would call holes in our geographies.
If you look at any significant geography in the world, we pretty much are at scale everywhere around the world there. If you look at the businesses we're already in, we're at scale in all of those around the world. While it might be attractive to do tuck-in acquisitions or things here, I think the more likely thing for any larger scale acquisition would be something which is an adjacent market. I hope a near adjacency, we don't want to get too far apart, but our real growth is going to lie in looking at those adjacencies. We're going to continue to identify and evaluate attractive areas which are adjacent to the core businesses, particularly those that have the potential to disrupt or transform some existing value chains.
We are going to be focusing on innovation that'll help us deliver tangible value to clients, in fact, one of the things we're focused on as a company is how do we get the right level of innovation? It's not just the innovation that would normally come through a business, but how do we take the ideas that people on the front lines develop and bring those, and make sure we nurture those. Then, of course, we want to use all of this to make sure that we're the destination employer. While we've made great strides here, we want to do more in this area. We want to make sure we get the best and brightest, but as we recruit, we want to make sure that we've lined our values and vision with our new hires.
In fact, I actually believe that one of the ways that you improve your retention rate and everything starts before the new employee starts with you, when you're selecting people who believe in the company, believe in the vision and values, and want to be here. That's why this development of our story is so important to us because it lets us communicate to the prospective employee what the give and the get is, and make sure we get people that are going to be good fits. With that, five takeaways that I'd like to leave you with today. We reached some significant financial milestones in 2018, and if you look at the financial milestones we set out when we were first announcing the Willis Towers Watson merger, we said we would save between $100 million and $125 million in our central costs.
We actually got to $180 million that we saved there. We said that we would get a tax rate of 25% or lower, and we got to 21%, 22%, something like that. Then we said we would get some revenue synergies. We didn't hit every last piece of the revenue synergies. We were way ahead on the global health solutions. We hit the bottom end of the middle market exchange number, and we probably got about 75% of the number we had for the large company CRB work. In aggregate with them and with some additional synergies we got between Insurance Consulting and Technology and some of our reinsurance and brokerage work, we hit all the synergies we had there.
When we look at it and you think about most mergers and the way that they founder and don't meet any of the goals they've set out, we feel very good about what we've achieved. As I said, while we're pleased with where we are, we're not satisfied. We look at this as we've done that, and now we're ready to really begin the race and move ahead of everybody. That's the message I want to leave you with, is that we love our momentum and we feel very good about our prospects going forward. Fundamental focus in 2019, again, organic revenue growth, margin improvement, earnings growth, and free cash flow growth. I know some of you have heard me say before, I think profitable growth is one word.
I don't separate growth from profit, that's a message we carry out to the whole organization. Again, we are very focused on our free cash flow as an important part of our growth platform. You'll hear more about my colleagues from this, but we're building a powerful platform of solutions and services, and we're going to combine that with our winning client experience to capture more market growth. Fourth, innovation investments are going to continue to drive enhancements to our business portfolio and improve the integrated value proposition we deliver to clients. Finally, we are very much focused on executing our strategy to create a more sustainable, lasting future. That's for all of the people that we look at as our stakeholders. That's our clients, that's our colleagues, and that's our shareholders. Thanks very much.
I look forward to engaging with you, let me introduce now the Global Head of our Human Capital and Benefits, Julie Gebauer. Julie?
Thank you, John. Good morning, everyone. I'm pleased to share with you an update on our HCB business today. Like last year, I'll provide a brief reminder of our global businesses that comprise this segment and how they've performed over the last three years. I'll spend most of my time describing recent trends and drivers and how we're expecting to respond to those, I'll wrap up with a focus on the future. As you know, we have four distinct global businesses in HCB. In our retirement business, we help organizations manage their defined benefit pension arrangements, as well as offer defined contribution solutions. In our Health and Benefits business, we provide advisory and brokerage services and solutions to organizations that provide company-provided benefit plans. In T&R, we address a broad range of HR issues, from executive pay and benchmarking to employee opinion surveys and talent assessments.
In our technology and administration solutions, or TAS business, we provide outsourcing and administration solutions in selected markets outside of North America. Together, these businesses delivered sound performance over the past 3 years since we became Willis Towers Watson. During that period, we tapped into market opportunities and generated low single-digit growth to end the period at $3.2 billion in revenue. We also maintained our disciplined focus on cost management and enhanced our operating model to enable margin expansion and solidify our industry-leading margin levels. Each business contributed to the revenue growth and margin expansion over the period. While the specifics are somewhat different, I wanted to pull out some commonalities for you. We built market share in all of our core businesses, irrespective of the starting point. Where we were already in the lead, we edged forward, like in retirement.
Where we had opportunity for more growth, we took some pretty big steps, like in our Health and Benefits business outside North America. We also improved efficiency across all of our businesses by using offshore centers for appropriate activities, by pooling resources to minimize any trapped capacity, and by working across the segment on things like application development. Finally, we focused our sales resources on products where we saw demand increasing and where we saw there was an opportunity for sufficient profit dollars. One of the other reasons for our success is the value proposition that we bring to our clients, which I shared with you last year. It's one of the ways that we'll make sure we deliver that winning client experience that John mentioned.
As a quick reminder, the first part of our value proposition is about what we bring to our clients, advice and solutions for sustainable impact, advice based on deep expertise, sophisticated analytics, and a lot of data on pay benefits and human capital, and solutions that include insurance placement, outsourcing, and software applications. The second part of our value proposition is about how we work with clients. We bring them the power of and, the best of different, often competing worlds, so that they aren't forced to make trade-offs they don't want to make. For example, we run global businesses with common approaches so we can deliver consistency and quality across the world, and we have teams in key markets so they can make it relevant locally.
We have the right complement of specialists who can go deep on any HCB topic, and we have broader generalists who can effectively connect our solutions and address strategic issues. In a world where virtually every solution has a digital component, we deploy the latest technology and we continue to provide personalized high-touch service that's still important to most of our clients. This value proposition gives us the edge in the market so we can compete effectively across a broad range of competitors, and again, will allow us to deliver that winning client experience. Also important in delivering that client experience is the leading position we hold in each of our businesses. I'm going to highlight this next with updates on trends and opportunities to demonstrate how we will drive growth across our core businesses. I'm going to start with retirement.
This page provides data on the left to illustrate our leading market position. It lists the major business drivers and trends in the middle column and how we expect to respond and take advantage of the opportunities in the right-hand column. We have a similarly formatted page for each of the businesses. I'm not going to go through each point on the page, but really pull out key elements to give you a story of what we see the business profile looking like. Our retirement team has gone from strength to strength in this past year. We've maintained our client retention at near 99%. We've brought on dozens of administration clients in collaboration with BDA and Gene' s team, and we've added a number of actuarial clients while we've led the pack in conducting transactions like annuity purchases and bulk lump sums.
We don't actually expect any major changes in the environment for retirement services over the next few years, we're positioned to be successful in that environment. The pattern of long-term actuarial relationships will continue. We expect fewer than 5% of large plan sponsors to test the market each year. For those that do, the competition's going to be intense, and we're prepared to win in that environment because we have become the place for talent for the retirement business. That's happened as some of our competitors have downplayed the importance of this business, top consultants seem to think that our proposition is a better fit for them.
With the added talent, we can not only deliver great service for our clients, but we can proactively develop relationships with other companies in our target markets so that when they do take their work out to bid, we won't go in cold and we'll be well-positioned to win. While you would expect the pension administration business to be just as sticky as the actuarial business, we do think there will be a higher frequency of market testing, probably closer to 10%. Few reasons for this. There have been some disruptions in the competitive landscape. More sponsors are looking for fuller outsourcing solutions than they've had, finally, sponsors want to take advantage of technology. We've long been approaching the administration business differently from our competitors with our teams led by pension experts with actuarial backgrounds and a focus on what I'll call extreme quality.
It's hard to provide evidence of extreme quality, but I'm going to try with a few quotes from feedback that exemplify the thousands of pieces that we get. From a plan sponsor, "Your administration team is incredible. They take a thorough approach and continuously meet our expectations. They know our organization, they know our plans, and the quality of their work is excellent." From a pension plan member, "I'd like to say that this is the most amazing experience I've had with any company, much less a retirement or pension plan. I'd like to give commendation to the young man who helped me out today. Quick, precise, informative, knowledgeable.
I'm just very impressed." With so much feedback like this in an environment where it's more typical to hear from clients when things are not going well, we're confident that we'll maintain our retention rates and win more than our fair share. Now, as I mentioned, one of the reasons that we're seeing more pension administration market activity in the U.S. is that sponsors are looking for fuller outsourcing. A consequence of that is that there's a global trend where companies are buying bundled solutions, actuarial, administration, investment, and compliance. For example, in G.B., there's been a significant increase in the number of defined contribution plans that are utilizing master trusts rather than individual trusts. The number of DC assets in master trusts nearly doubled in 2018 alone.
In the U.S., there's been a trend for mid-size organizations to bundle a delegated investment solution with actuarial services, so we're in HCB partnering with Carl's team in investment to respond to that. We have solutions to respond here. We've got our LifeSight Master Trust, which is the second-largest master trust in G.B., and we've also introduced a one DB product in G.B. that combines actuarial, administration, delegated investment management, and advisory services. Another important point I wanted to mention in the retirement environment is de-risking pension plans. That's been an important part of our success over the past number of years. I just want to highlight there's still plenty of work to do in this area for quite a while.
Even though you've been hearing a lot about this over the past years, the U.S. market has only settled probably 7%-8% of its pension liabilities through bulk lump sums and annuity purchases. We don't see a run-on-the-bank scenario where there would be a massive wind-down of plans in a short timeframe in the foreseeable future. A final point I want to make about retirement is a newer area where we're seeing growth, that's pension brokerage. That's in selected markets outside North America and Western Europe in particular, and in Asia, where we're placing defined contribution pension business. Our base is small, but we're seeing opportunity for high double-digit growth in this area. With this picture, I hope you understand that we believe retirement will continue to be an important part of our success in the future. Now, health and benefits. This story is slightly different.
There's much more change in the environment here. The market's growing quickly because we see price increases, healthcare inflation is higher than GDP. We see volume upticks, more people in employee benefit plans, and new products. We are very well positioned to take advantage of the market growth because our brand is very strong in a reasonably concentrated market. Plus, outside the U.S., our size doesn't reflect our brand strength, so we have meaningful opportunity to grow share. Now, given the magnitude of the U.S. healthcare issue and the relevance of health to productivity around the world, we're dealing with a first-order business issue in health and benefits, and one that doesn't have a ready solution for better health outcomes, more quality, better service, lower cost.
The right answer for any company depends on specifics for them, their population, their business strategy, and many other factors that interact in a complex way. That and the range of options available make it difficult for any employer to easily find the optimal answer for them. Even when they do, it's challenging for individual employees and their companies to make the right choices for themselves. Sorting through the available options has become even more burdensome, particularly in the U.S., with the rise of specialty solutions. These are solutions that organizations introduce to address very specific disease states. If you take type 2 diabetes, for example, the options don't end with United, Aetna, Cigna, and the Blues. It's a list of companies that include Glucose Buddy, Diabetes Tracker, Omada Health, Glooko, Livongo Health, Biometrics, Welltok, and dozens and dozens of more.
There are long lists like this for a lot of different diseases. There have been 1,000 startups Introducing new specialty solutions in the last four years alone, in the U.S. Corporations simply don't have the resources, tools, and data to sort through this. Even in other parts of the world where it's not as burdensome to look at all of the options, the cost-benefit analysis of doing that analysis and synthesis inside an organization just doesn't make sense. There's a clear need for an intermediary to help organizations navigate the environment, and we fill that role perfectly. We have an approach that meets clients where they are, whether they are a tailored solution through a consulting line of business or a more standard approach. Another important opportunity we have is outside the U.S.
More multinational organizations are considering global benefits mandates because they bring global consistency and quality. Given that we've delivered on the value proposition that we brought to market when we became Willis Towers Watson, we have a really good foundation on which to build. As local and regional companies outside the U.S. want this solution, we're poised to respond by applying our global approach. A last area I want to highlight in health and benefits is our voluntary benefits inside and outside the U.S. This is increasing demand here as companies continue to introduce choice into their benefit programs. We've grown our voluntary benefit business over the last three years, triple digits. That's easy to do when you have a low base.
We're still small relative to the size of the market, but we're ready to expand these services to a greater percentage of our clients and to increase the supporting services around this in exchange for more commissions. Putting it all together, we are very excited about the opportunities in this area. Looking at talent and rewards, we are one of the few global brands in the human capital space, even though, as John said, we focus only on those areas where we believe it's possible to generate good profits. That means we focus on market segments that value quality analytics and advice, and we focus on products. There's some stability and some change in the T&R environment as we look forward. We see no letup in the demand for executive pay consulting.
This is driven by some of the say on pay results with slight upticks in a few more negative results, technology advances, and the evolving role of the comp committee. To that last point, boards and management are also focused on addressing diversity and inclusion. They've been talking about this for a number of years. A few things have jump-started that with the U.K. gender pay gap disclosure requirements, as well as research that's completed by the likes of the World Economic Forum, reinforcing that D&I drives positive business impact. We're viewed as a ready partner in these areas because of the data, research, and access to boards and executives that we have. We expect demand for our talent-specific services to increase with ongoing challenges related to attraction and retention in a reasonably healthy job market, and opportunities for improving efficiency and leveraging technology.
Notably, the largest of our client base doesn't tend to get help outside because they have very sophisticated HR functions. We see great opportunity, though, in parts of the world where the HR function is still maturing and in mid-cap organizations. Overall, we're positive about the outlook for T&R. Finally, let's look at TAS. We were able to maintain our leading position in our TAS business this past year, even as the industry was challenged in GB, in particular, with capacity constraints. There was greater volume generated by the Pension Freedoms over the past two years. That's abating, but there's a new legal ruling that was issued for Lloyds Bank related to the equalization of minimum pension guarantees, and that's expected to generate a new swell of volume later this year and beyond.
We expect minimal market movement in TAS for standalone opportunities, but TAS is an important part of those bundles that I already mentioned. Beyond these drivers for each of our businesses, clients are facing issues that don't neatly fit into one business or another. A few of these I'll highlight. Wellbeing. Companies see an interconnection between physical, emotional, social, and financial wellbeing. We've done some research that shows a compelling link between financial worries and both poor health and emotional stress. At a conference that I attended earlier this week with 600 companies, the message was very clear. They want a holistic solution in this area. At the same conference, they asked how benefits could help them support their I&D efforts along with pay and talent programs.
Another broader need is related to something companies are calling the employee experience, and as part of this, employees expect a personalized, supported, efficient, and engaging digital experience, and they don't want a different approach or a different application for pensions versus health benefits versus career. Our research teams have prepared us for these trends, so we're ready to respond with integrated resources and tools that incorporate capabilities from all of our businesses. These integrated solutions are one of the ways that we've been investing and innovating to respond to emerging client needs. We know that innovation is necessary for us to achieve our vision. I want to highlight a few other ways that we're innovating. Our health and benefits technology is one of the ways.
As part of our global benefit solution we've introduced, we have a suite of applications that delivers a supported and engaging experience. One module offers a wide range of functionality for employees of our clients, and another provides great management information for our clients to use in governing their benefit plans. After implementing this solution around the world, one large client said, "Finally, somebody's built the delivery capabilities that companies like ours need." Another example of innovation is the work we're doing with benefits to help organizations improve the health status of their workforce. Since I already described that when I talked about the H&B business, I'm going to move right on to another example, this time with our bundled retirement solutions.
As part of our One DB offering, we built a software platform that gives trustees and plan sponsors access to the status of their pension scheme in real time. The dashboard that's shown on the left here sets out progress on plan objectives around financials, around data and demographics, investment performance, and administration performance. It really allows trustees and management to identify the areas where they should be focusing. As part of LifeSight, which I mentioned, there are screenshots on the right here, we've built in some modeling tools to help members plan for their retirement and improve their financial well-being. We established a simple concept of a member's LifeSight age, and that's where they can forecast when they're going to have enough money to retire based on how much they're saving and how much money they need during retirement.
Our team brought this to life for clients and potential clients with a really creative video that I thought would help you see the impact that we expect to have on members. I wanted to share that video with you now.
Okay, I just answer what I see.
Okay. I'm ready.
Nissan Micra.
Ford Anglia.
Volkswagen Polo.
I bought it from a friend.
It only had one wing mirror.
Never buy a car from a friend.
Do I have to admit the Spice Girls?
Oh, I'll take that.
Like everyone, Oasis.
How much over the course of my life do I think I spend? I think I spend about a third of my life asleep.
Not enough, I'd say.
Hours, days. Oh, my goodness. Years?
Years.
Queuing. My God.
Queuing to go into shops or queuing to go into the tube.
We're British, I guess. Almost half of your life.
How old were you or will you be when you?
First kiss. Diddly-doo.
Whoa.
Oh.
Bought our first house when I was 27.
Hopefully next year. Probably 10 years from now.
28.
I'm going to say in the next couple of years. I just need to meet her and propose. That's basically it.
When I'll die? Probably 99.
I reckon I can hit three digits. I reckon I can make it to 100.
When do I want to retire?
My dad's just retired at 55, and I think that's a good age.
I don't plan on retiring.
I'd like to say 65. Obviously like to retire before that.
Tomorrow, if possible, I'm going to have to win the lottery.
Started saving for a pension three months ago.
When I was 24.
I was 18.
I was 28.
I hope, at least by the time I'm 60, that I'll be able to afford to retire.
I don't think I'll ever be able to afford to retire.
I was hoping 65 to stick to my plan.
I actually don't know.
Wow.
91.
Well, I'll probably be dead before then.
I've got some work to do. I don't want to be 73 years old and still working.
72. Okay.
If I put in 6% of my salary, 68?
I've got it down by changing the way I invest to medium risk rather than lower risk and increasing my contributions.
I increased to 10%. It's gone down to 68. That ain't bad.
That is like an extra GBP 42 from my salary. I could retire at 65. That's nice.
Find a LifeSight age that works for you. Take control of your future. Just one example of how our teams are getting creative to help organizations and their employees manage well-being. Now looking out beyond 2019, HCB will be a source of profitable revenue growth and a key part of the Willis Towers Watson story. We'll continue to focus on client retention, market share growth, and growth through adjacencies. We'll deliver on the winning client experience with our & value proposition, as well as solutions tailored for specific market segments. We'll invest in our talent who bring our value proposition to life, our digital tools, particularly related to the employee experience, and our operating models so we can maintain our industry-leading margins. We remain highly confident about the future prospects for this segment and for all of the businesses within it.
Thank you for listening, and I am now going to introduce Todd Jones, who is going to talk about Corporate Risk and Broking.
Thank you, Julie. Good morning, everybody. As I was sitting there, I had sort of my deja vu moment. I recall last year sitting in the audience and then getting up here and commenting how difficult it is to follow Julie in any presentation. I can confirm it is still really difficult to follow Julie in any presentation. I do not have a video, which I now know is a really bad idea. I should have created a video. Nonetheless, I am thrilled to be able to give you a bit of an update on where we are with Corporate Risk and Broking. I will use the word journey, and you will hear that frequently today about the business. I think we have been on a journey, and we still have much more to accomplish and look forward to sharing that today.
I want to talk just very briefly about an overview of the business. I am going to touch on our strategic priorities. I then want to pivot to the operating environment and what we see out of that and really how it is hitting our clients. I am going to spend some time talking about the revenue opportunities that we see both near and longer term. I want to talk about technology and how we are seeing that both in serving clients and in winning new client engagements. Then finally, I will bring to life a little bit more on the strategy in detail and really connecting on some of the things John said earlier about the broader story for Willis Towers Watson. CRB overview, I think most of you know this business did not exist in its current form prior to January of 2016, so we were not organized or structured this way.
It is a relatively new business, not only within Willis Towers Watson, but how we are organized. Simply, we focus on risk advisory and transactional insurance brokerage work to clients of all sizes, global multinationals down to mid-market and small and medium-sized enterprises. Really focused on reducing organizations' overall cost of risk. In addition to that, we provide a variety of pre-loss and post-loss services. At the end of the day, we desire to deliver innovative and tailored solutions to our clients, which are really delivered with an underlying foundation of data analytics and insight. This is a global business, as you will see in terms of our spread of revenue.
As we talked about last year, I think one of the key opportunities we have as a business is connecting the resources that we have within Corporate Risk and Broking through the global line of business construct to really unleash and enable our capabilities more distinctly to our clients and in the markets we operate. A bit on our priorities, I'll start on the left side of this slide. When I first had an opportunity to address this group in January 2017, we talked at that time about some of the challenges we had in setting up CRB, and I mentioned January 2016 was its formation date. I think what we saw was we probably overcomplicated the model a bit and we needed to simplify the business that required making some structural changes.
It required making some changes in terms of people and leadership. We did that in 2017. What we saw then was we kind of had line of sight towards the end of 2017 on growth, and we felt like we were on a path to momentum, which we did see at the end of 2017 and going into 2018. 2018 was around maintaining that momentum, but it was also around making sure we delivered that to the bottom line, and we spoke about that last year at this time. We were pleased with the performance of 2018. Obviously, we still have a lot of work to go and opportunity, but we're happy and sort of considered that more of a period of stabilization. However, that did give us time to really focus on the strategies and the long-term positioning of the business.
The team spent time thinking about where do we want to take this business, validating some of the things that we were doing in the course of 2018 to drive performance, but really create a path for what we see both in 2019 and beyond. Our priorities for this year, John touched on one of them really around segmentation. We want to be very distinct in terms of how we're serving the client segments, and we operate, and we see a real opportunity to drive growth by applying that. This client experience and colleague experience and how we connect with talent and drive talent both in terms of retaining and growing, but attracting talent to the organization is fundamental to the strategy. Ultimately, at the end of the day, it has to translate to profit and operating income improvement, which we will continue to deliver.
This issue around culture, John talked about the story and the strategy, we spend a lot of time talking to clients. We spend a lot of time talking to clients and listening and getting their input as well as our colleagues. The culture that we want to create and really embrace within Corporate Risk and Broking is really around these three tenets. I'll start with excellence, it was really good that Julie talked about our retirement business and actually shared with you some of the feedback from our clients there because it really is. There are lots of businesses within Willis Towers Watson that I think model this idea of quality and excellence, and we look to them to really set the standard and help us really define what good looks like or what great looks like.
You want to talk about motivating and energizing for a business, it's this idea of excellence and quality that gets people very excited about what we're doing and what we're trying to build. The other two around consistency and collaboration, I think our clients have been very clear that they want consistent delivery of our services everywhere by everyone. In the collaboration category, I think we've long believed that if you get one of us, you get all of us, and that's a fundamental part about how we operate not only as a segment, but how we operate as Willis Towers Watson. That is a big part of how we plan on building our culture. Switching to the external or the operating environment, and I'll start with some industry trends and then talk a little bit about just the pricing environment.
From an industry perspective, I don't think if you reflect on the conversation we had a year ago that a lot has changed. I think consolidation has clearly continued, and we anticipate that the consolidation will continue to take place. We think actually that presents a lot of great opportunities for us in terms of talent. It creates a lot of opportunities for us in terms of clients want choice, and with fewer choice, that creates opportunities for us, but it also creates some challenges. As markets consolidate and underwriting appetites change and approaches to specific risk profiles change, that creates some tension. I anticipate that is not going to change in 2019 or certainly in the medium term. We operate in a highly regulated environment.
I don't imagine that the regulated environment is going to get easier, and so we need to pay attention to that. Brexit, as I sit today, your guess is as good as mine. The one thing I will tell you is we have spent, and the team has done a remarkable job preparing for any and all outcomes as it relates to Brexit so that we can continue to deliver the service to our clients. It will have, I think, a longer-term impact to the business. My crystal ball's a little fuzzy on that one, but I certainly believe that longer-term, there are going to be some fundamental changes in how the market operates. Again, I think that creates some opportunity for us. Insurtech is alive as well. It's an important part of the ecosystem that is CRB.
We don't see that changing, and frankly, as you'll see a little bit later, we embrace that and want to make that a fundamental part of how we think about running the business. From a pricing perspective, I'll point you to our Insurance Marketplace Realities report, which we do annually. I think that gives a lot of detail at a product line level where we see pricing going. I don't think it's new news that profitability has become a key focus area for the insurance carrier community, and that has led to some pricing changes. It's been focused in certainly some specific areas around cat-exposed risk. However, clean risks or not cat risk, there is still a lot of competition out there, and abundant capital chasing those opportunities. Let's talk a moment about how is that environment hitting our clients.
The reality is when we're in a changing, even if a moderately changing environment, that creates a level of stress with our clients. They demand better insight. They demand options. They want to understand and how to anticipate changes. That creates a real opportunity for us to deliver a lot of the analytics and a lot of the modeling that we've created to help serve our clients and give them just better insight and better options and prepare them to be much more strategic as they think about a changing marketplace. I mentioned we talk a lot to clients. I will tell you, surprise is not one thing that clients really like in their service delivery model. They like us to manage that on their behalf.
We need to have a higher sense of urgency and a greater level of transparency on what we see in terms of market changes. It just gives us an opportunity, as John talked about earlier, to really build and nurture those client relationships, which lend to better client retention long term. At the end of the day, clients large and small, they want compelling deals. They want a good deal in the marketplace, and they want to know and be able to go to their management team and present to them that despite the challenges in the marketplace, where they landed in terms of program structure, cost, and design was right for their business. That lends itself, again, to our solid analytic tools. Opportunity, this was a very difficult slide to put together.
Well, I actually didn't put the slide together, it was a very difficult slide to put together because the fact is in terms of opportunities that we see as a business, they're almost limitless. That we don't operate in a market or in a product sector where we don't see an opportunity to grow, whether that's growing market share. Even in those areas, and I'll use airlines as an example, where we have a really significant share in the global airline space. We see an opportunity to grow in adjacent businesses connected to the airline space. Even in areas where we have a lot of market share, we still think there's opportunity for us to grow the franchise. I'm not going to talk about all of these. I want to highlight three of them. Cyber.
Cyber is a business that continues to grow double digits for us. It is a global business for us, so we have capability that is connected around the world that is focused on helping us grow this space. I think this is going to be an area of growth in 2019 and well beyond and something that I think we're very well positioned to take advantage of that sort of dynamic and changing marketplace. The other area is cross-sell. I was joking with somebody earlier that a good friend of mine once said that cross-sell is like Bigfoot. It's frequently talked about but rarely seen. The reality is that this is a fundamental part of how we're going to plan on growing in CRB, and it's a fundamental part of creation of Willis Towers Watson. You've heard from Julie today in terms of the capabilities that exist within HCB.
You'll hear from Carl and Gene as well later. This organization is rich in client relationships, and our ability to effectively mine those relationships for the benefit of all of the segments exists. We have to be very focused. We have to be very disciplined about how we go about doing that, but this will be an opportunity that exists long after I'm gone from Willis Towers Watson and we think can really drive profitable revenue growth. The final one really isn't around revenue, but it's around disciplined expense management. John talked about profitable growth being one word. When I reflect upon 2018, the real message there was to maintain revenue momentum but do it with cost momentum that was in line to allow for margin expansion and profit growth. That is going to be a key driver on how we run the business.
We certainly see, as I said, massive opportunity on the revenue side in all of our geographies and all of the areas we play, but we have to do that with a disciplined expense thought in mind. Technology. As you heard we are big into the technology and innovation space, I think you'll hear that in the other two segments as well. This has been a journey, again, going back to many years ago, where we aspired to be the analytical broker. You may recall that, and I'm pleased to report that we believe we've delivered on that and continue to deliver on being the analytical broker. I wouldn't describe analytics as a barrier to entry, but I would describe them as a barrier to compete.
I think in this day and age that if you are going to be relevant and compete in many of the market segments that we operate in, this is table stakes. You have to show up with compelling and interesting analytics that support insight and decision-making, and without it, you will be irrelevant. This is going to continue to be an area of focus of ours. We think of analytics in a couple of different ways. We build Core, which is essentially as a client of Willis Towers Watson CRB, you have access to 23 Core models that are built in as part of the servicing proposition. All of these models cut across array of products that we place on our client's behalf, and it's all about creating better insight and better decision-making for those tools.
We built a digital client ecosystem, Risk Intelligence Central, and think of that really as the portal in which we deliver all of our services as well as the content for our clients, whether it be some of the analytical tools, policies, et cetera. We've got a screenshot of that on the right. This is something that we continue to iterate and refine and create additional capabilities for, which is a core part of how we serve not only our global multinationals, but our mid-market clients as well. Then finally, we've got a strong pipeline of innovation and technology as well. We'll be rolling out Connected Risk Intelligence at RIMS, which is really integrating across a number of risk profiles outside of CRB, including into HCB.
We think this is really cutting-edge, and we're onto something to give our clients even greater and greater insight on their portfolios of risk and how they can better manage that. Very excited about the pipeline of technology and innovation that we have in the future and think this is going to be a big part of how we compete and win going forward. I wanted to, as I said, just maybe give a little more color and content on our overall strategy. We aspire to deliver sustainable, profitable revenue growth. I mentioned earlier around excellence being the wrapper on how we serve our clients and operate as teams around the world, and that culture we want to really permeate. The elements of the strategy, as you'll see highlighted below, it's really around client segmentation.
We see an opportunity to serve in a much more distinct way and deliberate way than we do today, both our large and complex clients and our mid-market, and deliver products and solutions that are tailored to those specific client segments and allow us to sort of gain market share in a very focused and disciplined way in both of those areas. As I said, we see almost unlimited opportunity for market growth in both of those client segments, regardless of the geography that we happen to operate in. The second global lines of business, this is really nothing more than taking what we think is really industry-leading capability in some of the specialties that we operate in and connecting it in a way globally to serve our clients more efficiently, but also more effectively in terms of winning new business and expanding client relationships.
This has been a journey that we've been on for several years now, but feel like we're making a lot of progress, and there's a lot of energy and excitement within CRB for what we're doing here, because I think people get excited about connecting with other parts of the organization, client management and distribution, and how we're delivering for clients all around the world. A key part of how we're going to grow. Then focus on the bottom line. As I said, 2017 was around transformation, 2018 was around making sure that we delivered as a segment in terms of both revenue and operating income improvement. We will continue to focus on the bottom line to make sure that we're managing expense growth in line with our revenue growth.
John talked about the story of Willis Towers Watson and both from a client and a colleague value proposition. I want to just highlight a couple of things. First on the colleague value proposition. This talent, we are basically in a talent business within CRB and many of the businesses across Willis Towers Watson, and our ability to sort of attract and retain talent is going to be fundamental to how we compete and win in the future. We think we actually have a really compelling value proposition for talent in the industry. Both how we work, the opportunity to do very interesting work connected globally and infused around sort of this culture that we're building make us a very attractive destination for the right talent in the industry, emphasis on the word right.
We're very excited about the opportunity that we see for the talent that's both here, but externally. In fact, they're getting a lot of interest from folks externally that see what we're up to. They're listening to our story, and it's resonating, and it's compelling, and that'll be obviously a continued focus of our colleague value proposition. The other is inclusion and diversity. One of the things I think I'm most proud of at Willis Towers Watson is our desire to be a leader as it relates to inclusion and diversity. I think if you know the insurance segment or have some exposure to the insurance segment, we got a lot of work to do, I think, and we have a lot of opportunity for improvement in the area of inclusion and diversity.
I think this is something that it's a very clear tone from the top that John sets, and that infuses and works its way through the organization from the operating committee on down. These things are linked in terms of our talent strategy and our inclusion and diversity strategy. The fact is that, not only is it the right thing to do, but it's really good for business as well. We think those two things go hand in hand, and we're going to continue to make progress on that. Moving to the client experience, I think excellence is something that you've heard from John, you've heard from Julie, I know you'll hear from both Carl and Julie. It is really in terms of when we hear from clients, what they tell you is the difference at the end of the day.
If we do the fundamentals and do them flawlessly and right, that in itself is a differentiation in the market. We have an opportunity if we really embrace excellence and raising the bar on expected performance in how we're serving clients. This is an opportunity to differentiate and support our growth efforts. It resonates. It resonates with our clients, and it resonates with our colleagues. The second one I'll call out is client management. We believe we have a very distinct sales and client management model that'll help sort of unleash the capabilities and enable the strategies that we see around client segmentation, and global lines of business. I want to just sort of spend a second talking about how that sales and client management strategy sort of comes to life.
If you recall a year ago when we talked about our client engagement, we talked about a number of different job families that exist within CRB, and within the organization. We talked about client relationship directors, CRDs, we talked about producers, we talked about global client advocates, client advocates. These are all really important job families within the organization in how we serve and grow our client relationships. It's very important that we have a flexible model and one that can work for the various segments and the clients that reside in those segments. It requires a high level of collaboration both across geography, and segment, and we think we have that. The other piece underlying this is really around discipline and focused effort. I talked earlier, one of the challenges for CRB is the enormity of the opportunity we have in the markets we operate in.
With all that opportunity, a challenge is, well, where do we focus our effort? We can do so many different things, and we have to be very disciplined about where we're focusing our time and energy. We've built an apparatus that we think gives us that and actually gets people focused on the areas in which we have both the right to win and we believe we have the ability to win. I think the byproduct of this, which should translate as well, is greater visibility on revenue and more predictability about the forecasting of the business. If you think about better visibility and better forecasting, that clearly translates to our ability to manage cost momentum more effectively.
All of this links very nicely in terms of supporting our revenue aspirations and where we want to take the segment, but more importantly, how we want to support the operating income expansion, and growth of our profits for CRB and Willis Towers Watson. The final point, which I've emphasized, I think enough, which is we see a lot of opportunity for growth across all client segments and all geographies. I won't go into detail other than, we spent a lot of time thinking about how technology supports and enables that. I talked earlier about some of the tools that we build to serve clients. We also think about how technology can help us, both in more efficiently transacting business as well as the service centers that we operate, and how we serve specific client segments as well.
Technology will continue to be an area where we think we can leverage improvements both in terms of productivity, driving top-line growth, but as well as efficiency driving expense savings and ultimately margin expansion. In closing, we think we have a strategy that is going to help support our aspirations around long-term profitable revenue growth. We talk about enabling our capabilities and our expertise globally. I like to use the word unleashing because I think it's ready to go and attack, and if we do it right, it's going to result in the right financial outcomes. Excellence will be something that we continue to aspire to in terms of the culture of the business. Ultimately, I would love to be able to share client stories like the ones Julie shared with you about our CRB clients.
Client segmentation, as John talked about and as I referenced earlier, is fundamental on how we're going to compete and win. We feel like we have great line of sight both in the large and the mid-market, and where we can really differentiate and win. Ultimately at the end of the day, we want to deliver profitable growth for the organization and continue sustainable margin enhancement for CRB and ultimately Willis Towers Watson. Thank you for your time. I am now going to take us into a short break, and we will convene here, I think in around 15 minutes, where Carl will kick us off to talk about investment risk and reinsurance. Thank you.
There you go.
As you move it moves.
There we go. Welcome back, everybody. Hope you enjoyed your break. As I think many of you remember from prior years, IRR is quite the collection of businesses. Six is the current count. For some reason, John refused to give me a two-hour session to go through this, it's going to be a bit of a whirlwind tour through our businesses. Fortunately, when it comes to our insurance-facing businesses, many of the market conditions that Todd described also affect us, I'll just point out the differences there. Within IRR are four businesses that have the insurance industry or insurance intermediaries as their primary clients. We have two investment businesses, and we're also responsible for the supervision care and feeding of something we're incubating called the Asset Management Exchange that I'll talk about as well. Three points I'd like to emphasize with respect to this presentation.
One is that we continue to enjoy strong positive momentum through all the IR businesses, we're very encouraged with their prospects going forward. Second, that there has been and there will continue to be possibilities for collaboration between these groups and the rest of the firm that we think can add considerable value. Third, we devote a substantial amount of resource toward innovation product development, and that is playing itself out in terms of improving and continue our leading position in the areas in which we operate. On this chart, I show you sort of revenue momentum in our largest businesses. As you can see, 2016 was a bit of a hiccup year across the portfolio, whether that was merger distraction or the continued headwinds from reinsurance rates.
The businesses have picked up very nicely in 2017 and 2018, that is actually reflecting leadership changes through four of the six businesses. It's a little scary to me to think that Chris Ford, who took over from me in investments four years ago, and David Thomas, who leads up UCM/Innovisk, are the veterans of the crew, both having assumed their roles in 2014. I've really got to commend James Kent in reinsurance, Alice Underwood in ICT, Greg Collins, who assumed the head of Miller from Graham Clarke, and Bo Ågren at Max Matthiessen, our newest leader, done a tremendous job of managing change in their organizations while assuming the reins here. The growth rates here, we think are indicative of what we were able to achieve and the possibility of growing, as John said earlier, with our, if not more, remains unabated.
There's very good potential here. That revenue growth at the top line is translated into even better income growth on the bottom line through disciplined cost control in all the organizations. We continue to look for opportunities to add talent to our businesses, but not at the expense of the bottom line. That's the balance that John has been able to inculcate throughout the entire Willis Towers Watson organization. Some of us have the scars to prove it. Let's kind of begin a roundup of the businesses with the biggest Willis Re. Just to remind you, a facultative reinsurance sits largely in Todd's world, although Willis Re does a small amount of it, and Miller does some as well. If you're trying to do apples to apples comparison for the relatively concentrated reinsurance broking world, that's an important differential to recognize.
We are very happy with our Willis Re business. Our global footprint brings us significant competitive advantage. We are a significant player in the marketplace, placing over $12 billion of ceded premium. Much like Julie's business, we have a very high client retention ratio. This is a comparable number to sort of low to mid-'90s that Todd was also talking about. The re-business is really driven by a few drivers, right? One is client retention, second is new business awarded, and third is rates. We have not much control over the third, but we can do our darndest to make sure we control the first and second, and I'm very proud of the way that we have focused intensely on our clients and on new business opportunities over the last three years.
While the global property casualty business is very well penetrated by reinsurance broking, we think there are opportunities for us to grow this business in other areas. Mortgage, crop, life, health are all areas where we see the potential here. We have a very organized and global approach to how we do business. Although we do break out Willis Re into three business units, North America, International, and Specialty, these units all cooperate together and have the same processes, whether it comes to things like how we manage clients, our sales model, our approach to learning development is very much a one firm approach. In terms of market effects during the past few years, Todd did note sort of that capital remains plentiful, specifically the ILS world despite some hiccups for various fund managers over the last 18 months. We do see new capital continue to enter this space.
We did a survey last year, between our Willis Re client base and our investment client base on ILS appetite, and there continues to remain good depth in the market. We continue to be a player on issuing ILS. John alluded to prior to the clo sing of our Willis Towers Watson Securities business. That business had two components. It had an M&A advisory business, and it had an ILS issuance business. That ILS issuance business has been moved into Willis Re. We're very much still in the marketplace there. One of the synergies that we Watson merger created was the combination of what we can provide the insurance market. The combination of ICT and Willis Re is one of the things we've been really seizing on over the last number of years.
I'm going to illustrate with that some examples doing that, we actually think that's a very hard combination for our competitors to match, and we've now begun to roll that out through a vehicle we call Insurer Solutions, that I'll talk about in a minute. ICT is an area where we're developing increasing resource for the firm for very good reason. One thing I think we can call ourselves the original Insurtech, right? Maybe not since 1828, the founding of the firm, but if you look at the software suite we now offer the insurance industry, whether it comes to pricing, rate making, underwriting, actuarial services, distribution. We are very much a player in the insurance technology space.
In fact, one that we just had our first sale on this week, not even listed here because it's that off the shelf, is our Structure Insurance Score. So this is an offering we've paired up with a data firm called e2Value that does a lot of value assessment for the U.S. home market. We can now offer small to mid-size property casualty insurers the ability to better differentiate between home types and the effect on what the proper price of home insurance should be. Two homes may be a block or two away, but may have radically different characteristics that would lead you to price them differently, and we now can actually offer that in a very efficient form.
If you look at the way Willis Re does its distribution, which in the U.S. is largely, not wholly, but we have a very good penetration in the small bid insurance market. The ability to distribute this ICT product via our Willis Re colleagues, we think has real potential here. ICT does two things, principally. It does consulting, it does technology. You can see in the top right-hand corner, the balance of what we do continues to shift toward technology. We are investing both areas. Those two components very much do work together. We have built our consulting proposition around the technology we offer, and we think that ability to provide a joined-up solution is, again, something that is very hard for others to match. Priorities for ICT are quite similar to that Willis Re look at the combined proposition.
continue to work around technology and help our clients indeed build their efficiency going forward. We have a new addition to the fold, but I will say this is not a P&L item. Our capital science and policy practice, which, before 2019, was part of corporate marketing led by Rowan Douglas, focuses on intellectual capital creation and engagement with the world outside Willis Towers Watson. They will work with governments and nonprofits and insurance industry players to further the mission of society and the role of insurance therein. To give you an example of a couple of projects that they have been involved with, working with colleagues in CRB and Willis Re and ICT. We work with the Asian Development Bank to help Philippine cities with their risk capital plans and establish a reciprocal insurance program so that when weather-related events strike, they are better prepared for tomorrow.
We have helped a major bank and some pension funds with their assessment of climate risk and climate change risk on their loan portfolio or their investment portfolio, respectively. While CSP doesn't have a direct revenue generation model, they are looking to assist the rest of their business with revenue generation, and we think this is quite important for our intellectual capital footprint going forward across the entire business because insurance cuts across so many of the things we do. There is about a 10-person team here, so we are not talking about a major cost increase by any means. This is about doing better with the existing resources we have in the organization and making the whole more than the sum of the parts. Speaking of which, I alluded to Insurer Solutions before a few times in this conversation.
This is a sales and marketing initiative we have been developing over the last 12 months to really express the totality of what Willis Towers Watson can do to the insurance industry. If you look at the overall client base of the firm, the number one sector we sell things to is the insurance industry. Of course, that is because of the outsized weight of Willis Re and ICT, where basically 100% of their services are sold to the insurance industry. There is no question this is a very important sector for Julie and Todd's and Gene's business as well.
by expressing things to the insurance industry in terms of their issues, what are their needs and what are our joined-up capability to solve those needs, we think that we have a proposition that will be very difficult for anyone to match, namely, that we can offer solutions when it comes to consulting, software tools, advice, transactions in the financial marketplace that are really about what is best for the client, not necessarily what we are coming to offer. It is about essentially offering solutions to client issues rather than offering individual point solutions that we might be starting off with. If you think about it, we can help them with their risk needs, with their people needs. You have seen Julie's Talent & Rewards business and the span of solutions they can offer clients for their organizational structure.
By coming together and going to market as one, we think we can actually increase our wallet share in the biggest sector we're operating in, and I think that's a very powerful message to the marketplace. Our third insurance business, I got to get my counting better, is Miller. Paul, we own 85% of Miller. The remaining 15% is owned by an entity called The Dawson Partnership, which is owned by Miller employees. That transaction, our acquisition of Miller was in 2015. Miller remains a preeminent player on the London wholesale market. That presents all the opportunities and the challenges that Todd spoke about earlier. We think that Miller has a role as a consolidator of talent in the London marketplace. We've backed that by their acquisition of Alston Gayler earlier this year.
Alston Gayler is the industry leader in industry loss warranty coverage. The opportunity to join up with the distribution of Miller and ultimately WTW, we think is a powerful synergy play for them. We continue to look for opportunities to attract talent and people and tools into the Miller platform, which remains a top-tier London broker, and therefore an attractive alternative destination for talent in an area that's churning rather rapidly. Miller is divided really into two basic lines of business. Program support, generally managing general agencies with a large North America distribution, and a specialty business. The split there has remained about 55/45 for the last number of years. We're seeing growth on both sides of that particular area. Innovisk is an area where we've substantially transformed this business over the past number of years.
When I came and spoke with you last year, we were in the process of selling off a large chunk of what had been Willis Programs, and we completed that with the sale of Loan Protector in early 2018. What we are left with is Freberg Environmental and a number of relatively small London businesses, and we are now building up a suite of managing general agencies that kind of fall into the following tactical issues. One is that they're technology based rather than relationship based. Second, that we can find talented underwriters from the industry and bring them into a supportive environment that will let them succeed. Third, that we can provide them access to capital, wherever that capital may be, to be able to back those ideas.
Fourth, we should be in a niche enough area so that we can control, through distribution, the pricing relationship rather than be a hostage of an individual carrier. Innovisk has been able to prosper. We've launched three new cells during 2018. You could see those in the lower right-hand corner. Celerity, which concentrates on professional indemnity and management liability, Sage, based in Sacramento, California, very timely, with a proprietary algorithmic model on wildfire risk, and Vertus, based in Jacksonville, Florida, which sells a hurricane deductible-based product. We're still trying to get John to sign up as a customer, but we'll work on that. The key here again is we're looking to opportunities where we can have competitive advantage through our distribution and through the ICT technology that underlies these, as well as the ability to bring capital to bear where individual underwriter operating their own might not be.
We think there's a good amount of opportunity here. Looking forward, this is a business that is very much in transformation. We think there's good growth potential here, but it will be a bit lumpy because each of the individual cells is in a bit of startup form. Moving to our investments business. What I've done here for you is break out the two components of that business. You can see a bit into where things are moving. We do things in two basic forms in our investments business. One is we provide advice to clients who want advice.
For clients who don't want to make the decisions themselves, but will want someone to make the decisions for them, we offer a delegated model where they can hire us to do either set the asset allocation, to hire individual managers to build portfolios for them. That could be done in a bespoke form or through our Willis Towers Watson funds offerings. You could see the relative growth rates of those two areas of the business are quite different. Before you start thinking the advisory business is just going to die, recognize that the trend has been for pension funds to convert to a delegated offering. The 21% compound growth you're seeing on the right side, some of that is conversion that was that negative 5% growth on the consulting side. The cooperation and partnership with Julie's business here has been really helpful.
If you look at the bottom right-hand corner where you see what's happening with the number of clients in our AUM, in our delegated offerings, we've now taken our assets under management and funds under management over $120 billion over the last few years. At the same time, the number of clients we've got in this offering is, while that's a 67% increase in the AUM, the number of clients has almost tripled. What we've been able to do is bring smaller clients into the offerings in a more prepackaged form that's efficient for them and efficient for us at the same time.
Areas for growth here include a further conversion of our advisory base, winning new clients because while Julie's market share in retirement is a lot bigger than our market share in investment around the world, we're investing in various areas such as the Integra business, which was our partner for implementation in Canada. We've now acquired them fully. We are a joined up offering in one of the world's top 10 pension markets. Improving on our offering for defined contribution, where simply put, the buyer is a bit different, right? You have to drill down to the individual level. Julie was showing you that video earlier that really does occur, making sure we can build out, and LifeSight is one example, how we can build out investment offerings that will appeal to the defined contribution marketplace.
This is a research-based offering. The parallel to the CSP business is our Thinking Ahead Institute, which works with asset owners around the world representing trillions of dollars to look at what may be ahead. Sort of the unknown unknowns part of the business. That complements very naturally our capital advisory and investment manager research efforts, which will help our clients figure out what the right strategic asset allocation, the right tactical asset allocation, and the right investment manager lineup to suit their portfolios could be. This research-based effort is one of the largest in the world and we think represents significant competitive advantage and has helped provide the risk-adjusted investment returns to our clients that they need.
I alluded earlier to the Asset Management Exchange, which is a startup business that we are monitoring, or overseeing, I think is probably a better word, on behalf of the company. I talked about this a year ago, where we had just launched it, and we've taken these three quarters of a billion dollars up to about $7 billion in AUM. We've expanded this business from just the U.K. to Ireland and South Africa as well. We have moved from just hedge funds to equities and fixed income as well. The idea here remains the same. We're offering a set of pooled funds or individual funds that a client can sign up to once and be able to invest in any fund on the platform. A manager can sign up to once and be able to have assets from any client on the platform.
Simply put, it can drive down the cost of doing business for both sides, and we'll keep some of that. Our third investment business is Max Matthiessen, which is one of the premier providers of retirement financial counseling services and investment management in Sweden. Max makes its money principally in two ways, from premiums that go into the insurance contracts that back each client's retirement plans, and through investment management fees for clients that choose to invest with our Navigera fund of funds. I've shown you on the slide here the trends on the components of Max's income. I wouldn't be too worried about the decline in single premium commissions, because we've actually been actively working with the insurance companies where we invest the money with to go to level premiums rather than single premium. It's actually a better revenue model for us.
Asset-based fees, which comprise about 45% of Max's revenue, are, of course, subject to market levels. If you tell me where the equity markets will go, and these are largely equity funds, I'll give you a better insight into where Max's revenues will go. One particular challenge I will highlight for Max Matthiessen is the fact that the Insurance Distribution Directive in Sweden, which was issued last year, had some very specific requirements on how you can pay people. We will have to take a look at how Max Matthiessen is structured, and probably do a little bit of reshuffling around from a corporate perspective, to maintain this business going forward. Nothing that we don't have plans for, but it will occupy a decent amount of Bo Ågren's attention over the year to come.
Nonetheless, we remain very happy with the progress Max Matthiessen has made over the last three years, and their integration into Willis Towers Watson continues. I'm going to spend the last couple minutes just talking about a few things, some of the wins we've been able to achieve as IRR as part of Willis Towers Watson. I highlighted our staying in the ILS market. We've actually issued more than $2 billion of ILS securities over the last two years, not just in property casualty, but in terms of weather exposure. We're looking to branch out, and the insurance industry is looking to branch out what it can do with alternative capital, and we're very much a part of that. We work with Julie's business, that's the top right one, to help establish insurer integrate a technology-based startup that it acquired.
Shockingly, the cultures clashed a bit, and our T&R colleagues were invaluable in making sure that the acquisition was a success, all the while being underpinned by ICT software. Our actual outsourcing business in ICT continues to grow, and we've now expanded that from Europe into the Americas and won several new assignments over the last month. These are multi-year, multi-million dollar assignments where we take over essentially being the actuarial department for an insurance company. We're very excited about the prospects of this business in a very balkanized American market, and we think that the fact that we do this in scale offers a huge value proposition for our client base. Lastly, talk about the last one on the bottom. Our Willis Re clients had a relationship with a Latin American insurer.
The insurer went out to bid on pricing software and didn't even know we were in the business. All right? We got them to reopen the RFP, after we were aware of the RFP, and won the RFP. There is the power, again, I'll steal from you again, Julie, the power of and right there present. How will we win going forward? That combination is hard to beat, right? Others may have reinsurance, they may have some technology, we got it all, and that is a very exciting place to be. It's an increasingly complex world in insurance. It's an increasingly complex world in investment. That intellectual capital proposition we bring in the investment world, all that research combined with our retirement capabilities, is very hard for others to keep up with and we think provides us, again, significant competitive advantage.
We continue to innovate, whether it's through Innovisk or AMX, whether it's through the business as a whole, to help clients achieve their goals, and that client-first attitude will get us to win. What we have to do is, of course, do our basic knitting, keep those client retention rates high, keep offering services they want, invest to grow, and that should give us a very solid potential for the future. Thank you very much, and I'll turn it over to Gene.
Thank you, Carl. It's a real pleasure to be here. Last night we had a dinner. I was talking to John, and I almost got the impression that I wasn't going to be invited to come today because what you don't know is the day before we do this, we get together as friends and we have dry runs, and we make sure we practice and we have everything covered. I actually hate that session. I had a very important client meeting yesterday. I couldn't be in town, and John told me that my three colleagues each took their turn taking my place. He says, "You know, Gene, they actually did a pretty good job." It's interesting. You can tell there are New York personalities coming through with my colleagues. I'm from the West. I live in the West. I've always lived in the West.
They're betting that I say, "Aw, shucks" sometime in my presentation. I just said it, Carl, you won the bet. It is a great privilege for me to be here. When John asked me to be responsible for this segment, I guess it was three years ago, I felt really good about it. I've been in this organization a long time, I thought I was progressing. He said, "Gene, I'd like you to take the BDA." This is where the growth has been, tremendous growth, the new segment. He had given us $800 million to invest in this segment. I thought John looked at my business acumen. He says, "Gene, you know how to manage these things.
You're really going to take this to the next place." It's high technology. I thought he looked at my technological skills and really thought I was going. I told him, "Thank you. I really appreciate your faith in me." He says, "Gene, let's make sure you understand. The majority of this business is dealing with retirees." He said, "You're going to be empathetic to them. You actually are eligible for Medicare." "You'll know what they're going through. This has nothing to do with your business acumen. It has to do with whether or not you can be empathetic." Technology. The other thing you don't know is our technology group last year shut off BlackBerrys. I was the last one of 45,000 employees that had a BlackBerry, and they took my flip phone away from me and told me I had to use an iPhone.
If you look at my iPhone, I drop it like every other day, and the whole screen is shattered. I just quit taking it back to get it repaired because it wasn't worth it. John says, "Gene, it isn't your technology skills either." It is a pleasure to be here, and I thank John for this opportunity. I want to talk about in the BDA businesses, we're broken into four different components. Our individual marketplace, which is dealing with our Medicare participants, our group marketplace, our benefits accounts, and our benefits outsourcing. I'm going to highlight each of these as we go through.
One of the things I thought would be helpful is maybe step back for a moment because we were in a meeting two or three weeks ago where I was making a presentation to some very senior people who I have given presentations before, and I started talking, and one of them said, "Would you stop for a minute and tell us what exactly it is you guys do?" So I wanted to talk a little bit about what we do in each of these. So the individual marketplace, what we do in that individual marketplace is we talk to individuals who are eligible for Medicare, and we sell on an individual by individual by individual Medicare Supplement and Medicare Advantage policies. If you want to know where that really fits, my wife just loves over the holidays Hallmark movies. I hate them more than anything.
She loves them. They're always on. She's always doing her work. There's always one on in the background. If you ever watch a Hallmark movie, every 10 minutes, either Joe Namath or somebody else is coming on and pitching Medicare policies. Call the 800 number. You can call. We can give you all these things. That is what we're doing. We're selling Medicare policies, but we're doing it in a very select niche. So we're selling in a select niche to corporations who are giving retiree medical to their retirees or to their employees that are retired. They've moved them out of the group plan. They've given them some money and told them, "Go call." We call it Via Benefits. "Call Via Benefits. You get the $500 a month or whatever number they're getting.
They will help you select a policy." So that's the group that we're talking to. It's a niche in the market. If the market's 50 million participants, it covers about 10 million participants. We keep their accounts, and then we help them select a policy. The way we get paid is by commission. So we sell the policy, we get paid by a commission, and that's where the revenue is coming from individual. It is individual by individual. We have about 1.8 million participants covered under here. They can call us anytime they want. They can tell us about how their children are doing. They tell us about all the different things, and we help them make sure that their policies are correct. Then we do their accounts. Now, on the account side, we did not do the accounts when we first started this business.
We outsourced it and had another organization. That's the main business now in our benefits accounts. We are moving all of those. We have about 800 companies that we're doing the work for. We're moving all the accounts into our account space. So that's actually a huge effort that we're undergoing right now. We bought a company called Acclaris for the benefits accounts, and now we've rewritten the software, and we've put it up so that the platform, we're managing all the pieces. One of the key reasons is one of the breakpoints that we've had in this service is a retiree will call, and they'll call our number, and they'll say, "I did not get my check this week." And we'd say, "Well, we don't actually do that.
Let me transfer you to somebody else." We transfer them to somebody else, and the retirees were really complaining. It caused the problems. We now have it seamless where they call one number. Our agent who gets on the phone can see what the account is, can tell them whether the check was sent. It's actually taken tremendous stress out of the system. Our benefits accounts business key part is managing. We now have over 1 million accounts on there managing that piece. It took a big expense component out, and you would think it would give us a big raise in revenue. This is a discussion I had with Mike is he keeps saying, "Gene, hiring yourself doesn't raise revenue." If I'm paying myself $50 million to do that, it counts as revenue in one place, but it doesn't count twice.
You won't see our revenue raise for it, but you'll see management of expense, and it is a big piece. You saw our margins increasing, a big piece of management of expense, but it's primarily management of the business. The benefits accounts also is a tremendous opportunity for us as we build this because it's in the HSA space, and we're tying with our outsourcing business. When someone goes to bid, the accounts come with it, and we think this is just a terrific business that will continue to grow. If you look at the publicly traded companies in this space, and you look at the multiples they're trading at, it is just mind-boggling, and that is the business we're building there. Our benefits outsourcing business has been a great growth business for us. We do both health and welfare and pension administration.
In this segment, we maintain the systems for the pension, but as Julie said, one of the things that years ago we set up the pension administration business, and it was really John and I having discussions as we had that, is we think the actuary is key to making sure that this business continues to run. One of the reasons we haven't had the problems that some of our competitors have had, we have it sitting in the retirement practice where there are issues around calculation, the actuary or the actuarial analyst is right there, and we have them completely involved. All of the pension administration, the actual administration sits in Julie's function. What sits in BDA is the call center and the technology. Julie and I are great partners in that. The fourth piece is our group marketplace.
Our group marketplace, you all know, three or four years ago, as we got into the individual exchange, exchanges were going to be the greatest thing in the world. They were going to rewrite everything. We were in the exchanges business in a big way. It's a nice growing business that didn't turn out to be where we all thought it was going to be, and we've morphed our group marketplace to where we had it all compacted together. We do the administration for the group marketplace, and the technology, and Julie and her H&B group is taking care of all of the design. We think exchange concepts, we think morphing in the medical in the U.S. is going to continue. It's a nice growth area, but you'll see here the revenue split between the two of us.
I was asked the question, where exactly does this sit? The fact is, we don't have a barrier between it. Wherever the revenue fits, we actually don't care. We're doing administration, we're doing some design, some of the actuaries sit in BDA, some of them sit in Health and Benefits, and it just sits where they were. We think that that will continue to grow and have development as it goes along, but we've changed it so that we can really deal with the clients. If you look at our business, we're the only end-to-end organization in here. We have all the components. That's why I said John's given us over the last five or six years, $800 million to build this thing. Question is, why is it a separate segment? We're the baby segment. Our revenue is a lot less than the others.
We're a lot younger. We haven't been in business that long. Here's one of the things I learned from John a while ago. In 2012, we bought a company Extend Health. We paid about 10 times revenue for Extend Health. When we announced it, our stock immediately dropped 20%. People were saying, who would ever pay that much money for a company without a whole lot of revenue? It was a pretty dangerous thing. John said, "No, I'm going to put it out front and center. I want people to know that we made a big bet.
We made a bet contrary to anybody else thinking this is the bet that should be made, and I want them to see if it turned out." So from 2012 to 2019, a business that we paid almost 10 times revenue is now running at one times what we paid. The revenue has grown to the purchase price. The growth has been explosive. It was a great bet to make, and that's why we sit as a baby segment. We're putting it out front and center so that people can see where we are. But if you look at that segment, so where we play in the Medicare space, I said we play in a niche market. The Fortune 100 who have retiree medical plans, 67% of them have moved their retirees to an exchange. And we've picked up 70% of that business.
We've had a tremendous run on competing in here. Extend had great technology, great insight as we went along. The problem with that is 67% of the companies have moved. Our playing field isn't unlimited. It's interesting, John talked about the great growth. He didn't have that same discussion with me when he said 9% growth. His comment to me is, "9% growth? What did you do? Where's the 40%? Where's the 50%? Where's the 30%? Where's the 20%?" That's the challenge that we now have as a segment is where do we move into spaces because this market we've saturated, where do we move into spaces to build this? The places you're going to see us move into is the 40 million Medicare participants who aren't covered by employer plans who weren't. We want to move into that space, and we run experiments.
About 3% of our book is in that space. You can figure out if we have 1.8 million participants, how many we picked up in there. That's a space we're moving into. The other space we're moving into is the pre-65. The pre-65 retirees we thought was going to be a hot market four or five years ago. What it turned out was we invested a lot of money. We built pipes into all the insurers. United announced that they were out of that market. Aetna announced they were out of that market. Cigna announced they were out of that market. Nobody is in the individual. It's actually stabilized, the big carriers haven't come back in, but there's product now most places, and we see this as an opportunity that's slowly starting to pick up.
We think that that's, again, another space that we'll build into. There's a lot of opportunity. The challenge is that Medicare space that's not an employer-sponsored space is a little bit different space. Let me talk about that for a moment. What's different about that space is, number one, the retirees aren't coming with money. The retirees that come to us are captive. The employer tells them, "I'm going to give you $500, and you can spend it." We manage the accounts, and most employers, as a closed system, tell them, "If you don't buy from Willis Towers Watson or Via Benefits, you don't get your $500." Our leads are essentially free coming in on that basis. We have them captive. We close, I don't know, 90% of them probably. It's been a great market from that standpoint.
These other 50 million, they all buy from their brother-in-law. They buy it from the person down the street. I actually always say that. Somebody asks me, "Who has the market on here?" My answer is, it's always the brother-in-law. I thought this was funny. About a month ago, my wife's sister and her husband have been outside the U.S. for the last 18 months. They're both Medicare eligible, and they're coming back. My brother-in-law sent me an email and said, "I think you do something in this Medicare space." "We're signing up for Part B. What do I do?" I said, "Oh, that's easy. Here's an 800 number. Call this individual." I'd prep the individual they called. Two hours later, I get a call back that said, "We're all signed up. It was all taken care of.
This was great." I thought, he's right. The brother-in-laws are where this is all sold. Now, I don't have that many siblings. My wife has six siblings, I got a little market to go after, but it isn't that broad. This is a space we think could really go forward. The question is lead generation. The second question is, our model is built completely on service. When those retirees come to us, we don't sell to them because they're captive. They're going to buy from us, and our agents are completely focused on how do I take care of you? Our number one issue is we don't want that retiree sending an email to their CEO or former CEO complaining about our service, because then they immediately go to John, who immediately comes back to me, and service is our number one focus.
That doesn't work in this other space. We're really nice to these people. They say, "Thank you very much," and they go buy from their brother-in-law. The other thing we need to do is change the model and have a model where we're more sales-focused. You can't really have those two commingle, that's one of the things we have to build and have to get is get into a model that we're more sales-focused, but not in the same facilities as the ones that are focused on service. We're also investing heavily. These next two slides I built for John and for Mike because I go to them with my plea and say, "I need more money." They look and say, "Come on, get your margins up.
We're not giving you more money." We need to continue to invest, number 1, to make the customer journey easier, to make our platforms more efficient, to make our customers smarter shoppers, and to make sure that they're well-informed, or the clients are well-informed. There's a lot of technology spend to continue to upgrade this. One of the things with this technology is what we thought was unbelievable five years ago is way behind the market. We're dealing with a lot of startup companies whose technology just continues to build and build and build. We're working hard to stay up with them and to stay ahead of them. For 2019, you can see where our capabilities are going.
We're continuing to invest into the advanced decision-making capabilities, is what we're trying to build into the software so that it's easier for our clients to come in and build, make things much more automated. Security is also a very big issue. We're maintaining data. When you take the outsourcing and you take the retiree exchange, we're maintaining data on probably 10 million people, and it's confidential data. Security is an area that we continue to focus on and continue to enhance so that we don't have the issues. We're moving things to the cloud so that we're more efficient as we go, and you can kind of see. The number 1 issue as we go is to make sure that our technology is mobile responsive.
It doesn't matter what device you come in on, you can come into the systems, and you can get taken care of what you want. What is our go to market for 2019? We have a huge focus on pension administration. Again, you might say, "Gene, well, your piece of pension administration isn't that big." I get the technology build. Julie gets the ongoing. We're partners. We team together as we go. Pension administration, we still think, is a huge opportunity. We aren't doing the administration for every one of our actuarial clients. When you look at that book of business we have for the actuarial business, there is a lot of opportunity, and Julie talked about that. As clients continue to go, we have trusted relationships with those actuarial clients, and we still think that that's a great opportunity to build our business.
Health administration and group marketplace. It is still a great market as we build and we continue to consult with clients. There is a lot of change in this space. Our book is about full for the end of 2019 annual enrollment. We're actually careful on the administration just how much we take on. It's a lesson we learned, didn't we, John, 20 years ago, about taking on too much. We're careful. We only have so many slots, and when the slots fill, we slow things down so that we don't overload ourselves and overbuild where we're going. The individual marketplace, as I said, the individual marketplace, two areas that we still find a lot of growth is in the public sector. Our biggest client is the State of Ohio.
There are a lot of cities, there are a lot of counties, there are still states. We have, I think, five or six states on the platform. There is still a lot of push. The states haven't had, or the governments haven't had the challenge that public employers have had. The reason why is because FAS 106, when it came in in the late '80s and required employers, companies to start putting these liabilities on their balance sheet, you looked and said, "Holy smokes, look how big this is." The governments have been able to ignore it. The GASB now requires the public entities, the states and counties and cities to start accounting for these liabilities, and we're seeing a change in that too. We think there's really good growth in that space. Pre-65, I talked about. We think that there's potential growth in there.
We haven't proven yet that we can be profitable at it. We're careful how much we move into it and how quickly we do. As I told you earlier, the direct-to-consumer is the space. If I'm not standing here next year, well, partially because John get tired of me, and we haven't figured out how to completely go into that space. That's where our growth is. Our growth really in this segment is in the direct-to-consumer space. Some of you follow some companies that are in that space, and you know where their multiples have gone or what's gone on. This direct-to-consumer in the Medicare space is a very, very hot area. In fact, if you listen to the earnings for most of the big insurance companies, the first thing they talk about is what happened to their Medicare business.
Their Medicare business is a key focus, and that's the area that we think we need to go and need to continue to build. Our benefits accounts is a great concept that we're growing. We're growing steadily, and we'll continue to grow as we go along. The other thing that will help us in the future are regulatory developments. I complain about legislation and what the government's doing, and actually some of the changes are good. HRAs going into individual coverage, there's proposed legislation or proposed rules, the accepted benefit HRAs. This Medicare for All, I think is just crazy. You know what? What a great opportunity we have if we go Medicare for All and everybody gets Medicare if those concepts stay the same.
It's not so good if they come back and say it's Medicare for All and there's nobody else but the government involved. There's pluses and minuses where it goes, but there's still real potential going through. Where are we going? We're going to grow our individual space. We are talking to people one by one by one. This isn't the same consulting thing. Again, as I said, we talk to retirees, we're talking to individuals, and we're doing it one at a time. You can imagine how many licensed agents we have. Here's a fascinating thing. If you look at the technology we have, if a retiree calls in, our technology knows by the zip code where they're calling from. If we don't have the data, they enter their zip code where they live.
Otherwise, from the employer, we have the data. The technology knows to route them to an agent that's licensed and accepted by the insurers in the county they live in. Whether or not they're available or where to route it, and it automatically, instead of saying, "Could you hold on a minute? Let me see if Joe or Susie are available," it knows to route it that we have an agent available who could help them at that point. The technology is driving all of this as it goes along. We're focused on that space, expanding our existing relationships. Julie talked about voluntary benefits. What a tremendous opportunity we have as we move forward to not just selling the Medicare products, but selling a lot of other products on the platform, and then leveraging our scale for efficiency. Who are we in BDA?
We're helping millions of people, one at a time, to optimize today's health and wealth opportunities for a better tomorrow. That's who we are as a segment, that's what we're doing, and that's where we are. The message I have is we are still all in on this segment. We are still going. I'm still asking John for money. I still see opportunities out there and say, "Hey, I just found a great opportunity. Give me some money. Let me go talk to this company." You can tell we haven't done anything, so he usually dismisses me, but we're still looking and we're still trying to build it. We're continuing in this segment to realign our efforts so that we're a consolidated group. We offer a comprehensive package and we have investment opportunities.
We think this is still a space that we can invest heavily in and have great growth opportunities. With that, Mike, I'll turn it over to you.
Thanks, Gene. Appreciate that. It's been, I think almost 18 months, I guess, since when I joined Willis Towers Watson, hopefully you've gotten from my colleagues and opco leaders here, we're a team. That's what it's about in terms of working collectively, and I love being part of this team. When I think about it really falls into, in thinking about the financial guiding principles that we have, and without a team, you can't drive the financial discipline that we have in the organization. It starts with John in talking about not only revenue, but profitable revenue growth, and his support in terms of driving it. Let me just use an example.
If you remember back in the second quarter this past year in 2018, we talked about expenses and said, "Okay, we're going to get those expenses in line." This team, collectively, we all worked together, and we dropped those expenses by 2% between the second quarter and third quarter. Decisions that we made and the agility of this team to operate is what it means to have financial discipline in how we operated. We think about potential capital deployment. We know we only have so much. Maximizing those returns and how we allocate the capital is how we've thought about it as a team going forward. One, we bring together every quarter our investment decisions. There was some joking here a little bit today about decisions that John and I get involved in, but it's not just John and I.
We do it collectively as a group, and we look to maximize those returns within the frameworks that we have in maximizing our overall returns. We think about it in terms of committed to results. We don't take that lightly. We looked at what we put out last year in terms of our earnings targets. We ended up from an adjusted EPS at 10.33. The high end of that range was 10.32 for last year. John talked about in his comments overall and said we're going to be at or above from a revenue growth standpoint. What'd we end the year at? 5% revenue growth was either at or above where our competitors were. We set goals, and we look to meet them. The other thing we're looking to do this year is reduce the gross to net adjustments.
What I like to refer to as adjustments before bad stuff is something that we really try to take out of the system. Equally, with the merger integration costs being behind us for the end of this year, you won't see that kind of stuff going forward into our P&L. We'll absorb it and include it in our P&L going forward. Further, just to expand on that managing with financial discipline, I won't reiterate. I think John went through the synergy goals. Meaningful margin expansion. John referenced 300 basis points improvement that happened from a margin standpoint. We had a stated goal of 25% adjusted EBITDA. We ended the year at 25.1%, which was over 190 basis points improvement from the prior year. We had focused on reducing the tax rate.
We'd achieved what we had put as a target of reducing the overall targeted tax rate below 25%. Obviously driving free cash flow. It's been a very important focus. If you remember at the beginning at this meeting last year, I touched on free cash flow. I think there may have been even skeptics in the room as to whether we could drive that level of free cash flow. Nonetheless, I think we made a good down payment on a continuous effort that we're going to have going forward, which is to look at free cash flow greater than our EBITDA growth. I think you see that in terms of the robust revenue growth that we've had and that we've included in here. You've seen it across all the segments as well as the profitability.
You've seen that drop to the bottom line. Let me just touch on free cash flow. When we think about that, it's really four components as we see it growing into the future. First is EBITDA growth. If we see that EBITDA growth, we're looking to continue to convert that into cash. Second, the integration programs have ended. We're done through the end of last year. You're seeing that come back as we think about FY 2019. Third, we've been more disciplined around our capital spending. As a collective team, in terms of what we spend in CapEx, what we spend in OpEx, we have a framework, and we're thinking very diligently about how we spend that money and making sure we're maximizing shareholder returns. Fourth is working capital improvement.
We've made great strides in terms of working capital improvements in the current year. We still see opportunities. We, as a collective team, will look to continue to drive and improve our working capital management. That's why we're confident in 15% or better, and I emphasize or better, growth from a free cash flow standpoint going forward. The other piece is to think about our balance sheet and where we sit. We have $1 billion of cash at the end of 2018 sitting on our balance sheet. We reduced our overall leverage. If you went back to 2016, when you look at our debt to EBITDA, we were at 2.7%. At the end of 2017, we're at 2.4%, and at the end of 2018, we're at 2.1 times leverage. We've continued to improve and de-leverage ourselves in terms of EBITDA growth.
Equally, we went out this year. We raised $1 billion and really looked at our debt maturities. We moved $400 million into 30-year debt, which really looks and helps our flexibility and portfolio. We have a $1.25 billion RCF, or credit facility, outstanding. We have $1.1 billion availability. It gives us maximum flexibility to think it out from a liquidity standpoint and how we want to think about deploying capital. In thinking about that deploying capital, I look at it in these five areas. We think about it that way. The first two, I think, were highlighted by each of the segment leaders today, and that is reinvesting in our business as well as in innovation. Whether you heard Julie talking about, and you saw the video of some of the investments that we're making from a technology perspective.
Todd had shown a bit of what we're doing from a connected broker standpoint and technology we're bringing to life. Carl talked a bit about, in a simple way, what's happening with home insurance and what we're bringing to life, Gene really talked about the technology that we're bringing to life in our Benefits Delivery and Administration area. We think we're very innovative. We're thinking technology is something we bring to life, in both of those areas are areas that we continue to invest in. Three is mergers and acquisitions. Our culture, I think John touched on this in his opening comments, Todd touched on this a bit from a cultural standpoint, we're seeing more resumes come to Willis Towers Watson because of our culture. It's what drove me here.
The reason it happens is because you're feeling like an actuary, you're kind of kicked to the side of the road versus the opportunities there, Julie highlighted those opportunities. We're seeing that kind of talent attracted to our business model and the culture of Willis Towers Watson. Equally, we're seeing acquisition targets come to us on not an auction basis, saying, "We would like to be part of Willis Towers Watson," we're making sure that we're sifting through to make sure that those meet our criteria in terms of maximizing shareholder returns. I touched on already the liquidity position, but what we've said is we've allocated $800 million to either acquisitions or share repurchases, that's what we've allocated for the current year. Obviously, we're going to sustain our dividend payouts, those payout ratios consistent with where we've been historically.
You'll see this on this next slide here in the bottom, where we've estimated that at roughly $0.65 for the current year per quarter. You see the return that we've delivered in terms of $2.5 billion of shareholder return, both in terms of dividends and share repurchases since the merger date, since 2016. We have repurchased 3.9 million shares last year since 2016, a little over 10 million shares have been repurchased. If we look at our total shareholder return from the merger date, 01/04/2016, it's a little over 44% in terms of total shareholder return. We're going to continue to focus on that earnings growth, that cash generation, share repurchases, those dividends. John had touched on this slide, I guess I'd just like to emphasize it.
I won't go through and repeat what he had said, I would emphasize one particular point, that is that we did have some headwinds coming at us for the current year around FX, around the currency, around pension. We remeasured our pension at the end of January. We wouldn't have that measurement impact to us in the current year, it's non-cash. We measured at December 31st in terms of looking at that valuation. When you aggregate those numbers up, if you were to add that back, it's like $0.80 that you would add back to that $10.60-$10.85 that are headwinds that are hitting us in the current year, which a big piece of that is non-cash.
When I think about our longer-term financial goals for the company, we think about mid to single-digit organic revenue growth, or again, emphasize back, we don't see our competitors growing at a faster pace than ourselves. Hopefully, you got the feeling from each of our segment leaders in our discussion that we've had today about the exciting opportunities we have to continue to grow the business, but you consistently heard the word profitable growth and a focus on margin expansion, which is really the second point. We see margin expansion continuing in this business. We've targeted double-digit revenue growth at the bottom line, and that's what we've put in place, and that's what we've targeted for FY 2019. Again, just to reemphasize that we see cash flow growing greater than EBITDA. What are the takeaways?
I think we've got a strong foundation to continue to capture growth in the marketplace. We definitely see operational enhancements and improvements. I think each of the segment leaders have highlighted the things that they see. We've got a portfolio of business. When you think about our portfolio, I said this last year, and I just reemphasize it back. We start the year, we know 85% of what our revenue's going to be. Now, we have to take care of our clients. Nothing's taken for granted. It's a very competitive marketplace. If you think about Julie's business, she's got multi-year arrangements in place for her clients. If you go to Todd, he's talked about 93% retention rates, and the same exists in our reinsurance business that Carl touched on.
He's equally in the investment business, got multi-year arrangements to be in place, and equally, Gene has the same thing. Across our business portfolio, we know at the beginning of the year that we have 85% revenue kind of locked in, if you will, but that obviously assumes with a big asterisk, taking care of those clients. We're continuing to invest in innovative solutions. I think you heard that about AMX, you heard it about Innovisk, as well as across all four of the segments. Innovation at Willis Towers Watson is an important element of what it is that we bring to life. I touched on the discipline capital management. I won't repeat that. Also, I think it puts us in to have maximum financial flexibility and allows us to continue to grow with that discipline that we put in place. We're very excited about the future.
With that, John, I think that turn it back to you.
Thanks very much, Mike. Terrific stuff. Thank you. Thanks, Mike. Now we'll take some questions. I'll just say, I hope you all got a sense of why I'm so excited about the future, though, when you see this team, and I think what they're capable of delivering. Greg?
Yeah. Two questions. Gregory Peters, Raymond James.
Sure.
First of all, I just would hope you could bridge the gap or reconcile some comments you made in your presentation about M&A. Specifically you started talking about some larger M&A in adjacencies, then Mike's comments around the amount of free cash flow and the dedication to share repurchases here.
Oh, okay. Yeah, sure. I think, look, first of all, if you think about both Willis and Towers Watson before the merger, both of us were ones that pursued inorganic growth strategies. That was a big part of what we've done. Certainly for the first two and a half years of the merger or something like that, we really couldn't consider it. We're bringing together three quite large, complex firms. We couldn't consider any M&A that was any kind of sizable thing. I think at the point we are now, we can go back to thinking about we like the position we're in. We've talked about how we think we have this very stable platform to grow from here going forward, we can think about inorganic opportunities.
When we look at any inorganic opportunities, one of the things we're going to think about is we always have the option to purchase our own shares. We still think our shares are relatively undervalued, so when we compare any potential opportunities, there's a relatively high bar they have to do, but it's at least possible for us to think about them. Frankly, we're looking at probably six or eight different opportunities now. We probably only do one out of every eight or 10 that we look at anyway, so that doesn't mean you should expect something to necessarily come down the pike immediately. We're out there looking, and we'll consider them that way. Does that-
Yes
bridge that gap?
Yes. Thanks for the clarification. Turning attention to CRB, it seems like for the next couple of years, the most margin opportunity for improvement is in CRB, and I know Todd gave his presentation. I was wondering, can you talk about the margin opportunity for improvement in Gras Savoye? Can you talk about, I think you have something like 82 broking systems worldwide, the opportunity to harmonize that, et cetera?
Yeah. Well, let me ask Todd to comment on that. Todd?
Greg, I think you highlighted a couple of areas, Gras Savoye, and I think some of the technology opportunities we have in the segment. I'd said during the break, I was talking to a couple of people, that I think what we don't necessarily see are these big levers that we're going to be able to pull within the business to create incredible lift in margin. What we do see is a lot of opportunity through the chain, both front office through to back office for opportunities to drive both productivity and efficiency. Some of that's going to be around technology and process, and some of that's going to be around, as I've described, within the client management model, just greater productivity and the ROI that we're getting out of our individual client function.
We feel pretty good if you look at the landscape in terms of the runway that we have to improve the margin sustainably, I think that's our big focus is to not take a big leap and then lay flat for a while. We want to continue to drive and grow. We really do see that not necessarily in one geographic location. I think we see how we operate around the world.
Maybe just to elaborate a little bit on that, because I think one of the points Todd was making there is there's not just some big bang that you go and you do this, and all of a sudden the margins are incredible, right? We have a whole list of things that we're attacking, that's why the words that we talk about when we talk about margin improvement are focus and discipline. We have a lot of little things to attack. Let me elaborate on the broking systems. We have, I think, 81 broking systems around the world, we have two in North America. It's not like we're going to do something and all of a sudden in our biggest market, we're going to change things immediately. It's changing little things here and there.
The broking systems are an improvement opportunity, they're not an improvement opportunity across the whole part of the business, it's actually a lot of the smaller parts. That's why it works like that.
Thank you.
Yeah, Mark?
Oh, Elyse.
Oh, sorry, Elyse?
Yeah, sorry. Thanks. Elyse Greenspan with Wells Fargo. I have a couple questions. My first one, you guys have shifted the conversation this year to around operating margin. There's a 20% margin target for 2019. When we look at that versus some of your peers, there is a delta. Is there a long-term target that you guys have for your operating margin? Could you just tell us, three, five years out, when you think about the margin improvement initiatives throughout all the different segments, what should we be thinking about, like how high that margin could get to?
Yeah. We don't actually set those longer-term targets like that. I think what we're going to be doing is telling you what we think we can do for the next year and then saying where there's differences, we recognize it. We're going to be looking for continuous improvement. We don't think we're in a position now to tell you what our operating margin is going to be three to five years from now. We're just going to say we're going to look to get better every year.
Okay, thanks. My second question, on the 4% organic growth, you guys made the point several times today that you would expect your growth levels to be at or better than your peers. Obviously, there's some different ranges out there. Some peers say they want to get to high single-digit organic. Some have a wider range than just one point for the current year. If the industry turns out it's a 5% organic growth year, would you expect Willis to be at that target? Is it just that you're setting a more conservative base in how you see things today, things could be a little bit better than that 4%?
Yeah. I suspect that it's probably I don't know exactly how others do their forecasting or things. It could be that they are looking at an environment that they think is going to be more favorable than we do. It could be that they're just more optimistic about the way they forecast than we do. I will say, I like to have forecasts that we feel pretty certain that we will achieve. This feels like one. I like to have ones where there's probably a little more upside than there is downside. Again, this feels like one like that. I wouldn't want to leave people with the message that we think we're going to be lagging the others, because we will not be.
Hi, Mark Marcon from Baird. Got a couple of questions. One, just on the follow-on on the acquisitions. As you continue to pay down the debt and the free cash flow continues to increase, you mentioned, John, that you're looking at near adjacencies.
Yeah.
Historically, you've also made some fairly transformational acquisitions. I'm wondering, as you think about the benefits of scale in some of the businesses that you're currently in, where you already have a presence, you also, in some of your businesses, have near-term adjacencies to some of the businesses that you have scale, but that scale could be magnified. How should we think about transformational acquisitions relative to incremental near-term adjacencies? How do you think about that? That's one question.
Yeah. Okay. Some of the ones that have been more transformational for us-- Well, look, probably Extend Health is one of the ones that was the most transformational about that. That's actually one that I would have described, and I think I did at the time, actually, as a very near adjacency. The reason it was a near adjacency was this: It was a business that we had worked with clients to decide whether or not to go to Extend Health. We had helped advise clients on that. Then once they had gone to Extend Health and gone to the exchange, we had helped them implement doing that and everything. It was a business that we were familiar with what you needed to do to be successful and everything, even though we hadn't done it ourselves.
That's the kind of business that I would prefer. I'm very leery of us taking anything that is too far a step that we don't know that much about. I think we like to have a healthy dose of humility. We don't think we're some brilliant strategist here that can just take a lot of leaps. We like to get things that are close to what we already do and what we already know well.
Yeah. I was thinking more like Towers Perrin. It was a merger.
Oh, I get you.
That was transformational in terms of you knew the business extremely well.
That's absolutely right. Look, I'm not sure that there are any opportunities like that out there, but certainly if there were, we'd be open to doing that, too.
Okay. I've got a question that's more for the operating managers. You mentioned culture, and I'm wondering, there's an emphasis with regards to excellence. I'm just wondering, how far is the legacy Willis from the legacy Towers Perrin side in terms of just the culture and how unified is that, and what inning are we in with regards to getting a fairly unified picture where you really feel like we really are all operating as a team, and cross-selling isn't a Bigfoot type of experience?
Yeah. I'll let the others weigh in on this a little bit, but I guess I would say from my point of view, we're in the middle of the eighth inning. I think we have a Willis Towers Watson culture, and that the point about this communication we're doing with the rest of the firm and everything about our story and who we are and this notion of our everyday effect and everything, the reason we're able to do that is because we have a Willis Towers Watson culture. We don't have a Towers Watson culture and a Willis culture. We have a Willis Towers Watson culture. We feel like we're pretty much, we're not 100% complete, but we're pretty close. We've brought in the relief pitchers. Comments?
To the extent there are differences, I'm not sure it's Willis versus Towers Watson. I suspect it's a bit more about sort of large market versus SME, where in the large market, it's a team sport. As you move down toward smaller organizations, it tends to be more of an individual sport. That leads to some cultural differences. That tends to permeate each organization rather than being a legacy company divide. Right? I agree with John. I'd say we're getting toward extra time maybe because I'm more of a football fan than baseball. It's remarkable how the L word is disappearing from the lexicon.
I might just add that we, in our Health and Benefits business, are one of the few places that we had complete overlap in our health across Willis and Towers Watson in North America. We had equally sized businesses coming together. While we operate in separate market segments, as Carl said. We were just at a meeting last week, John and I, with part of this team, and I'll tell you, we felt like the Willis Towers Watson tribe, not any legacy organization.
Great. We have some questions back here.
Yeah. You were next.
Thanks. Mike Zaremski from Credit Suisse. First question's on CapEx. I don't know if it's for John or for Mike.
It's for Mike.
Okay, great. Do you feel the CapEx, maybe as a % of revenues, that's the way I think a lot of people look at it. Do you feel that your CapEx levels are currently higher than what they will be down the road? Or is it just structurally your CapEx as a % of revenues might be a little higher than some of the larger peers?
Yeah. If you benchmark us, we're higher. Part of it is the innovation spend that we're doing and to continue to grow that revenue stream. I'm not sure how long-term sustained it is, but at least over the commitments that we have and certainly the innovation that we have right now, we'll be there. Over time, we brought it down a bit this year, and we'll continue to make sure that we spend and look for the greatest return in terms of shareholders.
As a follow-up to that, in terms of free cash flow conversion over the long run, would that be the biggest lever to kind of improve it up to?
No, I think working capital improvement is one of the bigger levers still.
Okay. Great. My next question I think is might be for Todd. In the investment segment, you talked about a lot of the growth coming from delegated. This is due to a trend of outsourcing more functions from the pension plan companies. Everyone's talking about double-digit growth in that segment. Maybe you can size up the opportunity there. Where are we in baseball or football analogies in terms of that growth profile?
Yeah. I would let Todd take it.
Oh, yeah. Sorry.
Not that evil this week. It does vary a bit by country. The U.K. is probably about five to 10 years actually ahead of the U.S. on this. Even there, we're talking about a third of the market is converted. In the U.S., it's very early days, and the U.S. market is a lot larger than the U.K. market. There is, I think, rather sizable potential here.
There's financial benefits to convert?
While generally the fees you're paying to the delegated advisor will be more than you're paying for consulting, that gets squeezed out of the investment managers rather than necessarily coming out of the net return to the fund. The other thing you'll get to is sort of just much better and much quicker decision-making, which has been estimated at having multi-basis point cost. Those two factors outweigh the fee increase by it.
Thanks. Just a quick follow-up on the adjusted margin, operating margin guidance of 20%. Seems like a big jump, around two points or so. Can you help me bridge the gap between last year's and your guidance for 20%?
Sure. Mike, you want to
I think you heard each of the segment leaders, James, talk about operating improvement across each of the four segments. Honestly, it's all dropping in terms of our collective improvement that we're seeing, all continued improvement across the board. We're not getting into each of the details and the pieces of the equation, we'll see improvement across all four segments.
Just a follow-up for Julie. You talked about healthcare cost inflation being multiples of regular inflation. What's the solution here? We went for the exchange thing. The uptake hasn't been that big, or as big as expected. Is the solution national healthcare or what do you think? How do you get that healthcare cost inflation rate down?
Well, that's a big question. Gene suggested Medicare for All was a good idea, I think. We would have an answer there. Our consultants are in a position to help organizations look at the best networks in the U.S., define new innovative solutions, whether it's introducing specialty solutions. I gave you the diabetes example. There are many of those. It's about analyzing the healthcare costs of an organization for their population, identifying the areas where there's opportunity to manage it, and curating the hundreds, thousands of possibilities in the market to introduce to an organization. As I said, it's really difficult for any organization to do that on their own because of the complexity of the market. We're positioned well. We have a great research team, great resources to monitor and evaluate the alternatives out there.
Our consultants can bring those to bear, that curation and the navigation to our clients.
Thanks. Mike Phillips from Morgan Stanley. I wanted to get some comments from Todd. You mentioned in your comments about industry consolidation that you've seen by product line. Maybe you can expand upon that, what you've seen there by product line and what you expect going forward.
Yeah. A couple of things. I think we've obviously seen consolidation in the distribution space. There's folks that are aggregating small agencies
lots of geographic dispersion. I think that will continue. That isn't necessarily a space that we play a lot in or that we necessarily want to engage in an aggregation strategy like that. Then there's obviously bigger acquisitions that are taking place or bigger consolidations both in distribution and on the carrier side. What I referred to earlier is when there's consolidation distribution, that creates potential talent dislocation. It's not what they signed up for. That gives us an opportunity from a talent perspective. Likewise with clients. I think clients like choice. Where there's choices more limited in their given sector or space, it gives us an opportunity to compete a little bit differently. On the carrier side, obviously, we're seeing consolidation happening there as well.
I mentioned underwriting profitability as part of the environment in terms of the pricing world. That's creating some opportunities and challenges, really, for us in how we're serving clients, both in terms of the pricing but capital that's being committed to products and capacity, et cetera. I think in it, as I said, we don't see the environment changing. We didn't in 2018, as we talked about it. I think it's going to be this way as capital is very plentiful in chasing return. It does create some near-term opportunities as well as some challenges.
Good morning. Meyer Shields, KBW. Two questions. First, broadly, I guess the news this morning was all doom and gloom about Europe, and I was hoping you could talk a little bit about what you're seeing and whether your expectations have changed. Second, I was hoping to actually get Todd to amplify your thoughts on small commercial P&C brokerage.
Yeah. Are you asking about Brexit?
Not specifically Brexit. It just sounded like the overall economic picture in Europe is slowing maybe faster than I would've thought a little while ago.
Yeah. Look, I think we certainly see the U.S. as having a lot more growth than Europe there. We got asked a question earlier about our projections and our 4% growth rate and everything. I think we took things like that into consideration when we were doing that. We're not seeing anything that I think is particularly surprising us.
I'm sorry. Can you repeat your question?
I guess my question was when you talk about segmentation, you talk about middle market versus large client.
Yeah.
I would've thought that the small commercial space also maybe warrants its own segment, but I don't know if I'm thinking about that the way you are.
Okay. I'm sorry. We play in all segments, right? Large and mid and small. I think our approach to small, which is defined a little bit differently, I think, by organizations. When we think of small, we think of organizations that are paying in revenue to CRB less than $10,000. That is the revenue dynamic. For that, we think a better solution is a solution we have in Asurion, where we basically outsource the service of those clients, and we maintain a revenue stream through that relationship. That is how we're going to continue to focus on that part of the segment. If you think about that, what I defined 10 and below, basically everything 10 and above, all the way to the large and complex. That is a very large market segment.
We play in that mid-market. We've got a big franchise in North America as we do in other parts of the world. Our efforts are really focused around that mid-market as well as the large and complex, not only in North America, but globally.
I just wanted to ask about the Mark Hughes, SunTrust, the growth backdrop in HCB. You talk about kind of an early transition to the delegated authority. You talk about instead of 5% coming to market, maybe it's 10%. People are looking for more a comprehensive solution. Does that mean, I know you're not to promise or say you'll do better, but is this a better growth backdrop for you at the start of this year? Do you like these conditions better than you did a year ago?
Is that for Carl?
Yeah. When you said delegating, you're talking about?
The investment management and that I'm really kind of looking at Julie here.
We're not providing specific guidance for growth segment by segment, but we like the situation we're in, that we face. We think that the opportunities look pretty similar to last year in retirement. I said we didn't see the external environment that different from what it had been. We were experiencing very many of these things last year as well. The trends are just accelerating a bit, not so different.
Accelerating a bit, though? Little bit?
Yeah.
Okay. Thank you. One other question on the individual Medicare business. You described it's different in terms of how you get leads and how you service that client. Do you have the model in place yet with those things sort of worked out the way you want to approach it, and therefore it's just turning it on and ramping it up? Or do you still have to work out some of those pieces, and when should we see more of an impact from growth in that operation?
That's a very good question. We've run a number of pilots, so we know what needs to be done, but some of the infrastructure, the basic infrastructure is in place. We need more work on the lead generation and on building the centers with more sales capabilities. We're working on that. Again, if I had more siblings, I'm a pretty good salesperson it turns out on selling this. When should you start seeing it? I told John in two years, and you should look for it next year.
Gene, I guess what, it's about 5% of our business now?
Yeah. It's already.
It's not like we don't do anything.
If you look at, we have approximately 2 million participants, and if it's 3%-5%, we've sold 60,000, 70,000 of those policies. If we do this right, you should see it have impact starting next year. We're getting closer. The annual enrollment for these policies start in the fall, so it's hard for us to get too ramped up for this next annual enrollment. 2020, you should see it ramping.
Thank you.
Thank you. Yaron Kinar with Goldman Sachs. First question probably for Todd. On the cross-sell opportunity, I'm guessing that most of your peers are also talking about retention rates in the low 90s. How much of an opportunity is it in your mind, and who would it come from? Would it be the large brokers smaller than you?
I'll answer the last part of that question. I wouldn't look at it that it's going to come from one specific either competitor or part of the market. I think it can come across the market, and that's really just a function of the market segments that we operate in and who we compete with, which isn't just the bigger players. We compete with regionals and local players as well. We think those cross-sell opportunities exist across that portfolio. The opportunity is there, clearly, if you think about the client portfolios and franchise that exists across WTW. Again, I was talking to somebody at the break, I think the bigger issue really is around where are we going to focus our efforts in terms of what are we going to attack.
We could get lost in attacking a lot of different opportunities and spend our time, versus we really want to focus on those places where we think we have a right to compete and win based on our capabilities and where we can leverage the relationship. To your point, at retention rates that operate, whether they're in the high 80s or low 90s, across the P&C space, that doesn't give us a lot of windows in terms of where we're going to spend our time. That is why the client management model and how we're connecting the geography and the segment is so critical in where we're spending our time and effort. At the end of the day, I made the statement, this will be an opportunity that exists within the company long after I'm gone.
We will have a client portfolio across the segments that we can continue to mine. It's just how do we do that in an efficient and effective way which drives the profitable revenue growth.
Great. Thank you. My second question, I'm surprised it hasn't been asked yet, probably directed to you, John. The news that we saw earlier this month around conversations that you had with another broker. Can you maybe comment on those or how you were thinking about potential merger or acquisition?
No.
Okay.
I'd like to follow up with two areas. First of all, Gene, in your presentation in the benefits accounts, I think you mentioned that you have 1 million accounts. If I recall from the league tables, like in HSAs, I don't see Willis Towers Watson or Acclaris appear in any of these league tables, and 1 million accounts would clearly put you on the table. Maybe you could help us understand where those 1 million accounts are spread out and why I don't see your name or the company's name in any of the league tables.
You won't see them because they're HRA accounts, Greg. They're not HSA accounts. Most of the accounts are coming now from our individual business, and in that individual business, employers are giving the retirees HRA accounts, which are nominal accounts. There isn't money sitting in them. That's where our key difference is. On the HSA accounts, I'd have to go back and tell you. We probably have 100,000, 150,000 HSA accounts, but I'd have to get you the actual numbers on that. That's why you don't see us. It's a nascent business for us, and we're just moving the HRA accounts. We're converting the employers now.
Okay. That explains it. Julie, in your presentation, and maybe I misread what you said, but it seemed to imply that you still thought there was a lot of opportunity in bulk lump sum, and maybe I misread it. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I was under the impression that we're sort of in, I don't know if we're talking quarters or we're talking innings, but I thought we were in the later innings or in the fourth quarter of that business. Maybe you can help me better understand what I thought you said.
I'm not sure exactly what I said. I'd have to listen to the recording. What I intended to say is there's a lot of de-risking activity, whether it's annuity purchase or lump sum payments. We've only settled 7%-8% by our estimate of the U.S. pension liabilities as an industry. As companies think about continuing to de-risk their plans, they're going to have to do it somehow, tapping insurance capacity through annuities or lump sums. Heretofore, most of the lump sums have been with terminated vested participants and smaller benefits. Driven partly by favorable economic environments related to interest rates, but also driven by organizations' interest in no longer paying PBGC premiums, which feel like an extra tax on the plan.
There's just been some legislative and regulatory activity that could open up bulk lump sums for others, could give us the opportunity to settle via lump sum bigger benefits as well.
There's been some new legislative initiatives?
There's just been discussions. Initial activity around that.
All right.
Also, annuity purchase is a big part of what we do, too, and so we're involved in all the big annuity purchases, too.
I just wanted to go back, sorry, to the leverage and M&A, and I guess capital discussion. You guys did make a point of saying the leverage ratio has come down. Can you just give us a sense, where could that sit at? John, you mentioned, I think there was an earlier question, you said that you're considering deals, also share repurchase. I guess I'm assuming on the last call, you said at least $400 million of repurchase this year. I'm assuming that still sits. Adjacencies versus transformational deals. Can you give us a sense of the deals that you're looking at? You said eight deals. Any size range that you could give us a sense of how much you might be spending?
Yeah. Maybe I'll go ahead quick, and then Mike, we'll turn to you for the leverage issue. I think what I wanted to give a sense of with those deals is just to say we're back in the normal way of operating, of having deals on the table that we look at. Actually, they're of all different sizes, from some relatively smaller ones to some that are bigger ones. Nothing enormous, but bigger ones. They're all over the lot, and they're all across our different segments, too. Nothing focused from all the deals are of a certain type or something like that. All that really just says is we're back to where we used to be. We're back to where we were three or four years ago, where we're evaluating different things. We said at least $400 million of share repurchase.
I think what we really intend to give in main was with normal events, we would expect to buy about $800 million of shares back this year. Now, if we found a deal that we loved and it was $800 million, we wouldn't buy any shares back. That could happen. Again, any deal that we have that we would look at, we'd evaluate it against, geez, one opportunity is for us to buy back our shares, and we think they're a pretty good deal right now. We have a relatively high bar for any deal we'd look at.
Yeah, on your leverage point, Elyse, we haven't given any guidance in terms of exactly where we'd be from a leverage standpoint, I wasn't going to do that today. I would tell you that we're in discussions. We wanted to raise our rating up another notch so we could access a commercial paper market, would be something we'd like to do. We'd made the commitment from the acquisition that we would continue to leverage ourselves, and we will continue to move in that direction.
Okay, thanks. My second question. John, the board extended your contract for a couple of years towards the end of last year. Can you just update us on succession planning and if you choose to step down at the end of this contract, what type of transitional period do you think the board envisions per your discussions with them?
Sure. I think about, geez, it's about eight years or so ago, back in the Towers Watson days. I thought at that point we had pretty good succession planning. In sitting and talking with the board, we said, "We really should take this up a notch as to what we're doing." We put in place a system where we did a lot of work with my and evaluation of potential successors, near term and medium term and everything, and working on development plans for them to be better executives, just in general, but also with an eye towards CEO succession. We worked with an outside firm to do evaluations of all of our candidates and a wide range of potential candidates. We worked with the 360-degree feedback to do that.
We've been doing that now for, as I said, about eight years or so. We've certainly continued that during the three years of Willis Towers Watson. I think we have a state-of-the-art succession planning process for our CEO succession now. I think the board has several outstanding candidates, internal candidates to pick from. I think we're extraordinarily well-placed. This is something we've been thinking about and preparing for a long time, and I feel like we'll do that very well.
John, Brian Meredith, UBS. Throughout the presentation, you talked a lot about Willis Towers Watson being an attractive place to work for individuals and getting talent. I'm just curious, how would you differentiate the culture or the place to work at Willis Towers Watson versus your larger competitors, and then why? Secondly, I'm just curious, more focused for Todd, has it changed at Willis under this new merger? Is it a different type of place to work now at Willis?
Yeah. Let me just say, I actually don't focus too much on why we're different than others. I let them focus on why they're different than us. What we focus on is just building the kind of environment that we want for us. What does that involve? It involves an organization where we treat people with respect. We treat one another with respect. We have an organization where we're an inclusive organization. One of the things that is just one of the driving principles behind what we do, in fact, when we go out and sample our colleagues, we get very high marks from them, is our whole notion of inclusion and diversity. It starts with this notion of inclusion, where we want to be a firm that lots of different people feel at home with, and again, working in a collaborative team environment.
We want to be an organization that is driven by pay for performance and driven by people having mutual accountability for results. When you heard the group here today, you get a sense, I think, of how this team works together, and a number of people mentioned it. It's not individuals doing this, it's a team doing it. Well, that permeates all of Willis Towers Watson. That's the kind of thing that we're looking for in our culture. Frankly, we don't care what others do. We build our own culture.
Yeah. Brian, it's an interesting question. When I think about-- I joined Willis in 2003, so sort of at the beginning of the creation of what was Willis. One of the reasons I joined, because it was a really entrepreneurial organization, it operated, we described ourselves as kind of a meritocracy that it was very team-oriented, if you did well, you'd be rewarded. It really focused on performance. It was very true. I think one of the byproducts of an entrepreneurial environment, though, can be a lack of order and structure. In some respects, lack of discipline. One of the many great things that I think have been delivered to the Willis colleagues is we still have the entrepreneurial and meritocracy environment, we have it now within a framework where there is great order, discipline, transparency, and structure.
Those two things coming together to create a really comfortable environment for people, it's something that I think we can definitely differentiate and sell in terms of talent. I think they like that. They like still being able to be themselves, as John talked about, have a fairly wide berth to operate in. We've got this really proper organizational structure and model that we operate that hopefully delivers the financial results that we commit to. It's been a great evolution, I think, for the organization. I talked about the creation of CRB being brand new, Julie, a portion of what was Willis ended up in Julie's business. You heard her talk about we've sort of closed the chapter, as it did as Carl, I'm sorry, with our colleagues at Willis Re.
I think this legacy sort of organization, I think it's very much behind us. I really see us now as just Willis Towers Watson.
I can't emphasize enough that this new culture that we have here is not something that Willis did to Towers Watson or that Towers Watson did to Willis. This is a culture that our colleagues here at Willis Towers Watson have created. It's something that I think it's an evolutionary one for both entities. The people who were at Willis feel like the Willis Towers Watson culture is an evolution of what they had, and the people who had been at Towers Watson feel like the Willis Towers Watson culture is an evolution of what they had, even though it wasn't one or the other that exclusively took over. About 30% of our colleagues today are people who never worked for just Willis or just Towers Watson. We're Willis Towers Watson now.
Great. Thanks. One other more specific question. I think you've got a relatively large exposure to the U.K. in your organization, particularly in the insurance brokerage and the IR areas. I'm just curious, how do you think about the current pricing environments going on there at Lloyd's, obviously with Miller's and Todd with your business, how much of a tailwind is that to potentially organic revenue growth as we look forward the next 12-24 months?
From our perspective in IR, there's a bit of a tailwind and a headwind. It actually affects us both ways. If you're trying to establish new underwriting businesses, contraction capacity, which is the Lloyd's Decile 10 review, is not your friend. We will work our way through that. We have actively been working our way through that, but that's not helped. End of year specialty placements were also impacted by capacity, not necessarily eliminated, but postponed, we saw that a bit in the business. That being said, less capacity will impact rates over time, that is a broker's friend, provided you're got brokers who can deal well with harder markets. That's an area where I know Todd's business and my business have invested time with staff because John's 30%, right? Those are often people who've never been through a hard market.
The only thing I'd add, Brian, is actually if you look at our GB business, about two-thirds of it is clients that are not GB domiciled, we're serving clients that are based around the world. It's not necessarily what's happening in that marketplace, although as Carl said, I think with price firming, actually the specialty markets become much more relevant. We think our London base of operation becomes more relevant in the organization. I come back to what I described, the global line of business construct and connecting. What we really want to do is take the specialty capability that exists, not just in London, but principally in London, and it already serves two-thirds of its revenue base is already serving clients that are not domiciled in GB, and we see that as an opportunity to continue to grow.
Okay. I think we're now at the end here, and I hope you'll be able to join us for lunch. Thank you for being here with us today.