Gregory Clarence Case
Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director at AON
Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our third quarter conference call. I'm joined by Christa Davies, our CFO; and Eric Andersen, our President. As in previous quarters, we posted a detailed financial presentation on our website. We begin by thanking our Aon colleagues for delivering another strong quarter of top and bottom line growth. Our recently concluded all-colleague engagement survey reinforces the resilience and commitment of our team as we continue to receive and benefit from exceptional colleague feedback with overall engagement, ways of working and brand strength all at 80% or greater.
More than ever, colleagues understand the power of our Aon United strategy and have embraced the smart working approach we developed to preserve flexibility in how and where we work, while enabling them to be better connected and more capable of helping clients make better decisions to support their businesses. The importance of the support and the exceptional nature of our response is illustrated by our recently released executive risk survey and the tremendous leadership of our team on Hurricane Ian. Taken together, these two data points reinforce the relevance and return on our Aon United strategy. First, our 2022 executive risk survey, which surveyed 800 C-suite executives from global companies, underscores the volatility facing leading organizations and offers a window into their mindset and needs.
A majority survey, 79%, the increased volatility on the horizon, but only 1/3, just 35% feel fully prepared to manage the impact of that volatility. Most important, those that feel very prepared share three fundamental leadership attributes that reinforce the relevance of our capabilities. First, they see embracing risk as a source of potential competitive advantage. 62% of very prepared leaders agree that their company's appetite for risk has increased in response to the current economic conditions. Second, they're willing to invest in new approaches to address emerging risks.
These leaders focus on long-tail risks and call out concerns around disruptive categories like cyber and supply chain. And third, they value expert insight and are looking for partners to help them make better business decisions. Prepared leaders are nearly twice as likely to look to counsel from an external adviser that can provide a more holistic enterprise perspective on decisions to protect and grow their businesses. And all these survey findings reinforce the relevance of our strategy. Hurricane Ian highlighted an excellent example of that value in action.
To begin, we want to extend our deepest sympathies to those impacted by this event. In these times of challenge, as communities endure the tragic loss of life and tremendous damage, we believe that our actions as a firm can help businesses and communities respond and recover. As always, our team took a holistic Aon United view towards serving our clients before, during and after the event. Pre-event, we used our resource development models to ensure that our 1,800 commercial risk claims colleagues around the world were prepared to respond to a surge in client need. This was a collaborative global effort, possible only because of our mindset and single P&L approach. In addition, we are able to use impact forecasting models from our Reinsurance team to game out potential hurricane paths and share those insights with our commercial risk colleagues, so they could alert the clients to potential exposures, allowing for early activation of business continuity plans.
During the event, we provided real-time insight on actual harm by leveraging satellite and drone imagery provided through technology partnerships, enabled by our Aon Business Services team. This is another example of how our emphasis on technology-driven innovation is reshaping client service at scale. Post event, we obviously focused on accelerating claims resolution. But we're also stepping back with clients and taking an enterprise view of what the hurricane means for the benefit plans, leveraging our Health Solutions team and beginning new conversations around how they think about return to work, exploring how our Human Capital solutions colleagues can apply learnings from our own smart working strategy to their workforce management. This is Aon United in action and only possible because of the decade-plus investment we've made to break down barriers across our business and build Aon Business Services into an engine that provides us the insights and scale necessary to meet client needs.
Turning to performance. In the third quarter, our colleagues delivered excellent results, demonstrating continued momentum and year-to-date progress against our key financial metrics. For Q3, organic revenue growth was 5% on top of 12% in the prior-year quarter. Adjusted operating margin was up 100 basis points, and adjusted EPS was up 16%. These results are consistent with our full year ongoing financial guidance, and we would note that Q3 is our seasonally smallest quarter for revenue. Year-to-date, we delivered 7% organic revenue growth, adjusted operating margin expansion of 80 basis points, adjusted EPS growth of 14% and generated over $2 billion of free cash flow.
Turning to solution lines. Commercial Risk delivered 5% organic revenue growth this quarter on top of 13% in the prior-year quarter, contributed 7% organic revenue growth year-to-date, driven by ongoing strong retention, new business generation and renewals, highlighting the resilience of our core business as we continue to help clients protect and grow their businesses. As we previously mentioned, the significant increase in M&A volume impacted our Transaction Solutions business, especially compared to last year's result, which was particularly strong in Q3 and Q4. Reinsurance delivered 7% organic revenue growth in the quarter, was 7% year-to-date as our team continues to help clients in the current market, while bringing new solutions and capabilities.
For instance, our newly established Strategy and Technology Group provides our clients with strategic advice, data-driven consulting, analytics and modeling tools and has further strengthened the capability we gained through our acquisition of Tyche. This is all this time in driving growth, efficiency and resilience have never been more important. Health Solutions delivered 5% organic revenue growth in Q3 on top of 16% in the prior-year quarter, contributed to 8% year-to-date growth, with particularly strong growth in Human Capital Solutions. Across Health, we see clients assessing their people strategies to optimize for workforce skill and organizational structure while making sure those employees feel valued and engaged. Finally, Wealth Solutions delivered 2% organic growth on top of 4% in Q3 last year and 2% year-to-date as our team continues to help clients address market volatility, talk about regulatory challenges and execute ongoing pension risk transfers. In two exciting milestones, our team has advised over $200 billion of pension risk transfer transactions in the U.S. and U.K. as pension plans continue to derisk and take advantage of market conditions.
And we reached the $1 billion mark in planned assets and commitments for our pooled employer plans, which helps cover and helps lower cost and enhance retirement security for employees at smaller organizations. Overall, our strong performance in Q3 and year-to-date reflects the strength of Aon United strategy and Aon Business Services platform, delivered for clients across regions and solution lines. For the full year, we remain confident in our commitment to mid-single digit or greater organic revenue growth, margin improvement and double-digit free cash flow growth.
As our clients assess the impact of increased economic volatility on their businesses, many are looking to improve their own working capital and liquidity, often by accessing new sources of capital. In one recent example, an Aon United example, our client, based in Asia, was awarded a multibillion-dollar construction contract in Latin America for a manufacturing facility that incorporates innovative carbon reduction technologies. The client had a regulatory and contractual requirement that they provide a financial performance guarantees, essentially drawing on their own credit facility.
To address, our local commercial risk team, who has a deep understanding of our clients' strategy and financial position, collaborated closely with our local credit experts in LatAm to design a bespoke surety bond solution for our client. Rather than using a bank guarantee facility, our client was able to access capital at a lower cost and more attractive terms while maintaining their own balance sheet strength and flexibility. Just as we've done with intellectual property lending, and pension risk transfer solutions, this is another example of how we help clients access new capital to reduce risk and drive their own growth adjustments. In summary, we delivered a strong quarter of top and bottom line results, contributing to our year-to-date progress against key metrics. We continue to be strongly positioned to deliver on our full-year financial commitments of mid-single digit or greater organic revenue growth, margin expansion and double-digit free cash flow growth.
We see increasing opportunity to help our clients. And the steps we've taken to operationalize the Aon United and our Aon Business Services platform gives us confidence in our ability to address our clients' existing and emerging needs that they continue to protect and grow their businesses.
Now I'd like to turn the call over to Christa for her thoughts on our performance in the quarter and year-to-date as well as our long-term outlook for continued shareholder value creation. Christa?
