Willis grows airline share by in 2009
CONTRACT wins - including one European and three North American airlines - have helped Willis boost its share of the airline aviation broking market by four percentage points.
The company now appears to have the single largest share of the global airline broking market.
And Joe Trotti chief executive of Willis Global Specialties said the broker had also increased the size of its international team.
Trotti told Insurance Day: “We’ve taken our market share from 33% to 37%. We’ve also added one European and three North American airlines recently and one of the world’s leading aircraft lessors [and] I’m very confident that when you look at our airline portfolio we have probably one of the best.”
Aon’s 30% share in the airline market is not thought to have changed over the past 12 months despite losing a number of high profile accounts such as Ryanair and NACIL to Marsh. Earlier in the year Willis won the Cathay Pacific account and market sources have indicated it also recently won the account for Nigerian airline Arik Air.
Trotti said: “We are adding more and we have some very big names in the [airline] industry which is a sign of our stability and the strength of our people and products.”
In terms of its staff, Steve Ogden, Neil Getter, Larry Mills, Roger Bathurst and Steve Kisor all joined the broker earlier in the year.
And having left Aon, Al Galinato recently joined up with Kisor at Willis’ office in Los Angeles, and further additions to the company’s aviation and division team in North America have also been made. Gail Morris, Elizabeth O’Raidy, Arbi Vartanians and Eileen Abeyta have all come from Aon, while the broker has also brought in new faces to its offices in Vancouver and Montreal.
Trotti said: “We’ve been spending a lot of time looking at opportunities on both sides of the Atlantic, and our most recent activity has been in North America.”
Trotti said although there have been plenty of additions, they have been done with a lot of forethought: “Some of our competitors have been busy shuffling deck chairs or making wholesale team acquisitions because they don’t have the in-house strength. We’ve been very active in bringing in new people, but it’s been in a very strategic and balanced manner as we already have a strong existing team who have been together at Willis for a long time. We are adding talent and bench strength to complement them as well as provide more resources to our clients and prospects.”
Willis remains keen to expand its aviation team, and to that end Trotti explained head hunters have been employed to research who is available in a bid to help grow its global aviation and aerospace business under the leadership of Andre Clerc, the chairman of Willis’ aerospace team.
He added: “One of the things we’ve been very encouraged by is there’s a lot of people interested in coming to Willis and some have coyly implied they are available if we want them.”
However, Trotti rejected speculation a head hunter has been employed to find a replacement for Clerc. There have been rumours in the market suggesting Clerc would retire at the end of this year or in 2010, but Trotti stated: “There are no plans for [Andre] to retire.”
