Willis Group Holdings Limited - Aggregation Risk - Conference Call - Part 2.

(From Fair Disclosure Wire)

That may translate supporting legislation designed to improve and expand government insurance programs. It could be assessing the viability of mutualization of risk as Sandy talked about, building purchasing power to develop capital solutions. We at Willis will continue to meet with clients and with insurance and financial industry leaders to eliminate these issues and opportunities. To gain a complete and balanced view of priorities and options and to help affect change for the better. We look forward to hearing your thoughts on aggregation risk and what it means to you. Meanwhile, Willis client advocates, brokers and other technical specialists - we're working 24/7 to obtain quality capacity and reasonable terms for client programs that are renewing in today's challenging market place environment. And with that we would now like to invite questions from our audience. Deb, could you please do the honors. OPERATOR: Thank you, sir. [OPERATOR INSTRUCTIONS] GORDON PRAGER: Thank you, Deb and as we await any questions, I would like to remind listeners that copies of this and other webcast PowerPoint presentations are available via Willis.com. In April we will be publishing the on-line [pre-rms] addition of market place realities 2006, updating our November report with white papers on a variety of major risk management and insurance program components. And we'd like to give special mention to the March 2006 addition of our captives actuarial and pooling services newsletter, in which senior actuary [Greg Alph] provides perspectives on major elements of the broad market place through the lead article the affect of hurricanes on commercialized pricing. You'll find it on the publications page of Willis.com. Deb, do we have any questions?

OPERATOR: Yes sir, we have a question from Mr. [Al Fine]. GORDON PRAGER: Yes, Deb. AL FINE, ANALYST: Hi Gordon, it's Al Fine, I had a question on the impact of catastrophic risk on the debt rating or the equities of companies against their peer groups that may not necessarily have the same exposure. Has any sort of analysis been done as to whether or not its affected companies from the perspective of investors and financial institutions?

SANDY VIETOR: I'll take that Gordon. I think Al, it's interesting you bring that up. I was in a discussion with a number of bankers last week and they were talking about funding a new facility offshore and they just recently figured out that the insurance costs were going to run about 25% of the value of the project. And they were shocked by this. So I think in talking with others in the financial world, on direct side with clients versus maybe the reinsurance side it hasn't sunk in yet that the cost and the lack of coverage for the hurricane season upcoming versus what they had last year, I don't think it's really raised itself in the public eye as much as I think it should and will in the next few months. There was an article today about the Texas windstorm pool and then the fact that they put out something like $26 billion of coverage in Texas and only have about -- I'm not sure what the assets were -- about $3 billion in assets and looking to do some bond placement as well. So clearly it is an area that we think as the lenders get involved, as equity players get involved, as bond holders get involved, again, looking at companies who begin to report that they may or may not have the kind of insurance coverage that they would normally have, there may well be a reaction. Rod, I don't know if you have anything to add to that or Gordon?

ROD THALER: No, I think definitely. I mean, if you look at the increased level of transparency that rating ...