Charlie Garrood is Global Head of Infrastructure for Aon’s M&A and Transaction Solutions team, where he leads the firm’s specialist capabilities across Transaction Advisory, Transaction Solutions and Portfolio Value Creation. Since mid-2024, he has been responsible for scaling these capabilities globally, building on earlier growth across EMEA to support investors and asset owners navigating increasingly complex infrastructure transactions.

Charlie brings 20 years of experience advising on infrastructure M&A, with a career focused on transactions where capital structure, risk allocation and long-term asset performance are inseparable. Prior to join Aon, Charlie worked at PWC across valuation & strategy, debt advisory and corporate finance, giving him a rigorous understanding of how both greenfield and brownfield infrastructure assets are structured and financed.

Throughout his career, Charlie has worked closely with a wide range of infrastructure funds, supporting acquisitions, divestments and portfolio strategies across multiple subsectors. Digital infrastructure is a core focus area for Charlie’s work at Aon, reflecting the scale, capital intensity and risk concentration now defining data centers. In this context, his focus is on supporting investors in M&A transactions understand and evaluate key risks across both the construction and operational phases plus the use of insurance capital to address both operational and transactional risks to support deal certainty and long-term value creation.

Charlie is an ICAEW-qualified Chartered Accountant and is known for combining financial discipline with a practical understanding of how infrastructure assets perform under real-world conditions.

In the Reliable by Design fireside conversation, Charlie brings the investor and transaction perspective to the boardroom questions shaping today’s data center market — offering insight into how capital providers assess bankability, insurability at scale and performance under stress, and what decision-makers increasingly expect before committing capital.