Global insurance and reinsurance broker Aon has expanded its Digital Infrastructure Lifecycle Solutions Advisory with two senior appointments, naming Stephen Fox as managing director and Brian Hearst as global digital infrastructure builders’ risk leader.
The hires come as demand keeps rising for data centres, cloud capacity, and AI infrastructure, pushing organisations into more complex financing and insurance decisions. Bigger projects, tighter timelines, more pressure on risk structure.
Aon said the appointments are designed to bring underwriting appetite, technical risk insight, and access to diversified capital into the process earlier in the project lifecycle.
Fox will work within Aon’s Digital Infrastructure Lifecycle Solutions Practice, led by Joe Peiser, chief executive officer of Risk Capital at Aon.
His role sits at the point where underwriting appetite, risk capital strategy, and technical design meet, as the team helps clients structure large-scale digital infrastructure investments and secure better capacity, terms, and broader sources of risk capital.
He brings more than three decades of experience across property risk engineering, resilience, business continuity, and risk advisory, with a background spanning digital infrastructure, technology manufacturing, energy, and other mission-critical assets.
Fox previously held senior leadership positions at Marsh and JLT Specialty. He also worked in risk engineering and advisory roles at GlobalFoundries, Intel, Samsung, and FM.
He said he is joining Aon at a point when digital infrastructure risk and capital considerations are converging in new ways. He added that aligning design intent, resilience, and risk mitigation with underwriting and capital expectations earlier in the process materially improves outcomes for clients, from access to capacity through to long-term capital efficiency.
Hearst, meanwhile, will lead Aon’s global builders’ risk strategy, supporting clients delivering large and complex construction projects across digital infrastructure, life sciences, and other capital-heavy sectors.
He joined Aon in 2018 and has worked with major developers and investors on large projects across North America, Europe, and Asia. His work has focused on helping clients structure and place builders’ risk programmes built to support execution certainty and long-term resilience.
Hearst brings nearly four decades of experience across claims, underwriting, broking, and risk management.
That mix gives him a broad view of construction risk and programme design, which matters when projects get technical and expensive, fast.
He said builders’ risk remains a critical enabler for clients bringing complex projects to market. He added that he looks forward to working with colleagues globally to deliver strong execution, technical depth, and consistent results for clients operating in increasingly complex construction environments.
Joe Peiser said the appointments reflect Aon’s push to provide integrated risk capital strategies as digital infrastructure becomes more capital-intensive and systemically important.
In his view, clients now need advisers who can connect technical risk, underwriting appetite, and access to diversified capital, especially across their most complex assets.
