By James Thaler

March 11 - (The Insurer) - Aon has hired Marsh McLennan Agency’s Denise Perlman as its new middle market CEO, marking another major hire by the Greg Case-led company from its broking rival, after recruiting a Rob McDonough-led construction team from Marsh.

Perlman spent the last six-plus years with Marsh, joining in September 2018 from Markel, where she had worked for nearly a dozen years, most recently as senior director for corporate business development.

A spokesperson for Aon confirmed Perlman’s appointment and said the executive will lead a team focused on addressing the complex needs of middle market businesses.

Aon also said that Perlman will be responsible for developing innovative and effective solutions for middle market clients across Risk Capital and Human Capital.

She is also expected to apply industry relevance and work alongside Aon Business Services to deliver middle market service capabilities.

Perlman will report to Lori Goltermann, CEO of Regions and North America for Aon, and will be based in New York.

“We are thrilled to welcome Denise to Aon's middle market segment practice in North America. Her experience and proven track record make her the perfect fit to drive our efforts in this critical market,” Goltermann said in a statement.

“Midsize businesses are under increasing pressure as they balance more limited resources with the need to remain competitive and resilient,” she continued.

“With Denise’s leadership, supported by our industry-leading team, we are well positioned to help our clients make informed decisions and mitigate risk and people issues,” Goltermann concluded.

Aon said that Perlman brings a depth of cross-industry expertise to the company in addition to a passion for innovation and capability-building.

It also said that she has experience harnessing data and analytics to support client decision-making, a skill set that is aligned with Aon’s commitment to delivering new tools and technology for clients and to the company’s 3x3 Plan.

Perlman is expected to collaborate with NFP under Aon’s independent and connected strategy.

At Aon, the executive is joining a company that has made the middle market a major growth priority, following the intermediary’s acquisition last year of NFP, which has historically thrived in the segment.

Aon leadership has been emphatic that the company has no plans to fully integrate NFP, using the tagline “independent and connected” to describe its go-forward relationship with its corporate parent.

Senior Aon executives have hailed the strength of NFP’s client relationships and scope distribution, while touting Aon’s plans to support the business through an expansion of its product offering as well as analytics and other capabilities.

“The way they built the company, the way they work the culture – we want to connect on content where they (might) need cyber, or they need industry help, they need energy help – or whatever they need,” Aon president Eric Andersen commented in an interview last April.

“We wanted to leave the front end of the business alone because it's been working for them,” Andersen explained.

Andersen said that Aon hadn’t looked to invest in the middle market up until recently, because it did not think it could operate in that segment profitably.

“We were kind of watching what was going on in the space and if you can't get some leverage on a shared platform, ultimately, you can't get the value out of it,” he suggested.

“You might buy growth, but you're not going to buy profitable growth. And so it wasn't until we got Aon Business Services (ABS) to a spot where we actually thought we could capture value for the revenue dollar (that) we decided to make the move,” Andersen explained.

The executive added that ABS now enables the firm to efficiently handle smaller accounts at scale.

“Which has always been the hard part, because the volumes are lower, but the cost of people is the same. So how do you actually serve those clients in a way where you can give them quality service and quality product? You ultimately need some efficiency to be able to do that,” he commented.

Andersen added that Aon then canvassed the sector for potential mid-market deals that could be scaled through “programmatic M&A” while adding a management team that understood how that segment operates, including with recruiting and working with shared capabilities.

“We wanted a management team that we could grow with [and] I think we got that with this group,” he said, adding that the NFP deal fits Aon’s strategy of “get[ting] more specific around risk capital, human capital and segments” and deploying capital in that business.

Aon’s deepening push into the middle market segment comes after Marsh launched Marsh McLennan Agency in 2008, and has scaled that division through the acquisition of sizable regional and national agencies in the last 15-plus years.

A spokesperson for Marsh declined to comment.