Interview - Take the lead.

(From Post Magazine)

England versus Australia at cricket, Eastenders versus Coronation Street on television and Cheryl Tweedy versus Charlotte Church in the pages of the tabloid press - there are many rivalries, of which Aon and Marsh is one of the most prominent in the insurance sphere.

With this in mind, it is interesting to hear Aon's UK corporate boss of seven months admit that his firm may be underperforming in the big ticket commercial sector.

Shane Warne is unlikely to admit the 2005 England Ashes triumph was anything more than a one-off but Ken McDonald, chief executive officer of Aon UK's largest corporate account retail insurance division, Risk Management Solutions, is refreshingly honest about the broker's current position.

"Given our size globally," he says, "we are not punching our weight as much as we should be in this market - my role is to strengthen that. In the past we have been more or less stronger in the middle market than the larger end."

He notes that having grown Aon Captive Services, the last operation he managed, to number one in its market, he is keen to repeat this success: "We don't want to be having this debate (about who is larger out of Aon and its main rivals), we want to be number one."

Having been cherry-picked by Aon's UK chairman and chief executive, Dennis Mahoney, to take on the role last August, Mr McDonald's first task was to set out the division's objectives: "We looked at it late last year in terms of our value proposition and asked ourselves whether we were an insurance broker that provides risk management solutions or a risk management solutions provider with broking at our core?