Mandy Hunt: The leader steering Clear Group’s MGA ambitions from ‘outside my comfort zone’

Mandy Hunt, managing director at The Clear Group-owned MGA Shape Underwriting, is a woman who relishes getting her teeth stuck into a project.

From her early career broking at Willis in the 90s, through to working her way up the underwriting ranks over 23 years at insurer RSA – including a three-year stint leading its subsidiary Insurance Corporation of the Channel Islands in Guernsey – and taking on an extracurricular role as the chair of the Chartered Insurance Institute’s underwriting community board in 2022, Hunt has sought to fully embrace the changes, challenges and opportunities that have so far come her way.

This now includes the assumption of her current position from April 2024 – a newly created role to spearhead intermediary The Clear Group’s MGA function and make sense of the myriad acquisitions the broker was totting up in this marketplace over 2023 and 2024 as part of its six-pronged M&A strategy that was introduced in 2023.

Hunt’s latest project, therefore, is to bring five purchased MGAs together into “one, consolidated go forward entity”.

She tells Insurance Times: “Bringing five [MGAs] together, that nuance of trying to understand people, how they think, where they want to go and then how you take them on the journey you’re trying to go on really fascinates me.”

Rolling out rebrand

Upon joining The Clear Group, Hunt was initially presented with three acquired businesses to oversee.

This included non-standard property and casualty MGA Profile Risk Solutions, Scor-backed Irish high hazard liability firm Thomond Underwriting and professional indemnity, London-centric MGA One Commercial Specialty, which were all purchased in July 2023.

Once Hunt was appointed, The Clear Group went on to buy small schemes and eTrading specialist Accelerate Underwriting in September 2024, followed by high net worth MGA Protect Underwriting – this business joined the fold more recently, in May 2025.

Across the five MGAs, there are currently around 75 staff that write approximately £75m in gross written premium.

In July 2024, The Clear Group’s leadership reached the decision that the different MGAs within its portfolio should be united under one brand name, with an accompanying system infrastructure strategy also implemented to create back office uniformity and central functions – this instigated a comprehensive front and back end rebrand project that Hunt has been masterminding, to create Shape Underwriting.

Between July last year and May 2025, Profile Risk Solutions and One Commercial Specialty were the first two MGAs to be transformed into Shape Underwriting divisions – Shape Commercial and Shape Specialty, respectively.

Shape Underwriting was launched to the UK general insurance market at 2025’s Biba Conference in Manchester this May.

Next, Hunt plans to rebrand Thomond Underwriting and Accelerate Underwriting to sit underneath the Shape Underwriting umbrella by 2026’s Biba Conference. The rebrand of the much newer addition of Protect Underwriting will follow.

To support the overall rebrand effort, Shape Underwriting has additionally committed to grow its headcount between 5% and 10% over the next 12 months, looking not only at underwriting talent to facilitate product growth, but also information technology resources and other central support functions.

The business also plans to “tender for a new policy admin system” and “think about office space” in London, to house its newly united entities together and encourage greater cross-team collaboration.

Although Hunt acknowledges that getting the individual MGAs on board for a rebrand and encouraging their leaders to embrace new infrastructure and communication chains have been the largest process challenges – with Hunt herself needing to get used to private equity backed M&A models and managing brand design work when colour blind – she cites the creation of a newly collated, collaborative team as being “a really big accomplishment” from the project so far.

“You cannot achieve anything if you’ve got people going off in their own directions,” she says.

“Success doesn’t come from that. It comes from being an aligned, focused team. The rebranding was such a team effort, from people changing policy wordings, to [legal support], to the [Biba Conference] event. Everything about that made me really, really proud.”

Incubating growth

Alongside the core rebrand project and devising an accompanying integration strategy, Hunt has a few additional focus areas for 2025’s second half, primarily centred around how she intends to grow the rebadged business.

In part, Shape Underwriting will seek growth organically through maximising broker relationships and new product development achieved by its previously disparate MGA identities now working together and collaborating on combined covers.

For example, she hopes to launch a professional indemnity office package within the next six months, as well as offer more products digitally thanks to the capabilities Accelerate Underwriting brings to the table.

“Accretive M&A” will be another growth tactic Shape Underwriting will tap into.

However, Hunt is particularly “excited” to investigate bringing a new MGA incubator to market, with tentative plans in place to launch a new MGA through Shape Underwriting in the next year.

Currently, the MGA is exploring the internal infrastructure of how an incubation model could work – for example, whether teams of people would be brought in, or an appointed representative approach employed.

“We want to see what that opportunity might give us, for people that might be looking to start up on their own and where that might take us,” Hunt confirms. “I’m quite excited. That sounds interesting.”

She adds that Shape Underwriting would focus on specialty line MGAs initially, such as those that provide directors’ and officers’, cyber or crime covers. “They’d be great things for us to add,” she continues. “I’m open to anything, but what I don’t want to do is just bring exactly the same in on top [of what we already do at] the incubator stage.

“We want to try and complement against where we are. And that might be complement via broker distribution, [not just product set]. So, we might complement because there’s a big London market opportunity rather than a regional broker opportunity. We’ll just have to work those things out.”

Importantly, Hunt is aware that Shape Underwriting needs to build a reputation as an MGA incubator in order to attract both underwriting talent and capacity. As part of this, she stresses that incubated businesses and MGAs purchased via M&A will have different integration journeys within Shape.

Hunt explains: “If we create these incubated MGAs, what does that pathway look like? People will come in as Shape, that will be how we will start. They’ll be on Shape contracts. They’ll use Shape systems. We’ll build Shape products. That will be the logic of how we do it. We’ll have these two things, [M&A and MGA incubation], running in parallel and we’ll have slightly different plans around each of those.”

Beyond the next 12 months and engaging these initial growth levers, Hunt has even started considering Shape Underwriting’s five-year evolution – she wants to do “entrepreneurial stuff” that is currently the remit of “larger MGAs”, such as “really tough” wildfire cover for the US, as an example.

She says: “Our evolution in five years’ time needs to be where are those opportunities that we can go and do? You’ve got to earn the right to go and write that sort of stuff and get a carrier to support you.

“We’re doing the bit of earning the right [now]. Getting a reputation for doing it right, having great controls, having underwriting discipline, achieving growth [and] long-term relationships with carriers.”

The privilege of leadership

For Hunt, taking on the MGA mantle at The Clear Group represented so much more than simply finding a new career challenge and change of pace after 23 odd years at RSA.

In September 2020, Hunt’s husband, Neil, suffered three strokes within one day.

The third stroke was “life changing”, she tells Insurance Times, hugely impacting the couple’s day to day life and leading Hunt to reevaluate “when was I happiest” at work and “when did everyone get the best out of Mandy?”

She explains: “I wanted something different for me and some of that is associated with what happened to Neil. My life changed dramatically and you reassess what you’re happy with.”

Subsequently, she engaged with headhunters in January 2024, citing her passion for underwriting and the ability to “put your arms around something small, really influence a business and shift it forward” as the key traits she wanted in her next position.

For her, therefore, entering the MGA arena felt like the right move – especially considering she had already chalked up both broker and insurer experience – with her existing relationship with The Clear Group’s Phil Williams, group chief commercial officer and retail managing director, offering a foot in the broker’s door.

“Outside my comfort zone is quite a good place to be,” she smiles.

Hunt’s personal circumstances have also heavily influenced her leadership style, as she has seen firsthand the positive impact of empathetic leadership.

She says: “I treat people the way I’d want to be treated. Being a leader is a real privilege. People tell you their life stories, they tell you their problems, they tell you their aspirations – and you can make or break that.

“If you treat people badly, if you don’t listen, if you don’t try to help, you can ruin a life in the blink of an eye. At the point in my life where I needed help the most, when Neil had his life changing stroke, the people that I worked with – leadership or my peers – could not have been more supportive.

“It proved that working with the right people, with the right characters, is really important to me. But it’s also really important how I pay it forward.”