Oliver Wyman helps push Marsh McLennan past $20 billion
Global professional services firm Marsh McLennan has for the first time in its 150+ history broken the $20 billion barrier in global revenues – with a $2.8 billion contribution from star performer Oliver Wyman.
Founded in 1871 in New York, Marsh & McLennan is the parent company of four globally operating professional services groups: Marsh and Guy Carpenter (both focus on insurance and reinsurance services), Mercer (human capital consulting) and Oliver Wyman (strategy and management consulting, with subsidiaries Nera Economic Consulting and Lippincott focusing on economics consultancy and brand and design services).
Continuing a long streak of growth, “2022 was an outstanding year for Marsh McLennan,” said CEO John Doyle. “We generated revenue growth of 5% (underlying growth of 9%) while continuing to invest in our talent and capabilities, both organically and through acquisitions.”
Marsh McLennan’s consulting division accounted for more than $8 billion of its overall $20.7 billion total, with Mercer and Oliver Wyman adding $4 billion to its take over the past three years.
Oliver Wyman was the group’s star performer, continuing its double-digit march to book 2022 revenues of $2.8 billion – on the back of 10% growth, 13% in underlying terms.
While perhaps down on the 21 percent growth boom in 2021 as businesses looked for support to rebound from the worst of Covid-19, Olive Wyman’s 10% rise in revenue over the past twelve months still represents a sizable jump on pre-pandemic figures, when the consultancy was averaging around 7 percent in annual growth.
Now, the firm is truly ensconced among the top handful of traditional strategic consultancies by revenue, behind the MBB (McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group and Bain & Company) alone, and ahead of Kearney, Strategy&, Roland Berger, L.E.K. Consulting, and Arthur D. Little, among others.
In a list of the world’s best management consulting firms compiled by market researchers Statista and published last year by Forbes, which took into account the opinions of both industry professionals and consulting clients from around the world, Oliver Wyman received a four-star rating or was “frequently recommended” across six of its lines, including among other areas strategy, operations management, organisation & change, and finance, risk & compliance.
Not just in a financial sense, but 2022 was also a bumper year on the news front, with Oliver Wyman’s purchase of Booz Allen Hamilton’s management consulting business in the Middle East and North Africa one major highlight. The firm also increased its Australian presence via the acquisition of Perth-based advisory Azure Consulting, and launched new offices in Abu Dhabi, Austria, and Belgium – taking the firm’s count above 70 offices in 30 countries worldwide.
And the start to this year has been no less busy, particularly in terms of personnel. In addition to a record round of 78 new-year partnership promotions, Oliver Wyman last month appointed new global cyber risk and CMT leads Laurent Bensoussan and Souheil Moukaddem, and has also recently welcomed a number of new country leads: Cornelia Neumann in Holland, Grigoris Zarifopoulos as a co-lead for Greece, and Lisa Quest as the head of UK and Ireland.
Looking ahead, Doyle said that Marsh McLennan’s services will continue to be in high demand in 2023, despite the economic uncertainty casting a shadow on the global economy. “Our expertise across the important areas of risk, strategy and people is more relevant than ever as we help clients navigate an uncertain world.”