Simon Hunt: HDI UK and Ireland is ‘central’ to overarching group strategy success

When HDI Global confirmed in January 2026 that the current chief executive of its UK and Ireland business, Stephanie Ogden, would be exiting the insurer for a role at Munich Re at the end of that month, it was only natural that the company would look for a nearby safe pair of hands to step into the breach.

Enter Simon Hunt, the international insurer’s chief financial officer since 2022, who first joined HDI Global in 2019 as UK finance and operations director. The company appointed Hunt as interim chief executive for its UK and Ireland arm from February 2026, subsequently cementing the move into permanence a few months later in June.

Speaking exclusively to Insurance Times mere weeks after landing the top job permanently, Hunt explains how the timing of his turn as chief executive has been idyllic, aligning neatly with HDI Global launching its four-year Xcelerate29 business strategy at the beginning of 2026.

The strategy was first spitballed in the summer of 2025, when global senior leaders came together “to workshop and refine” the plan, which will run until 2029. Internal communications revealing the strategy to staff went out in 2025’s fourth quarter, with Xcelerate29 then being externally announced in February 2026 – tying in with Hunt’s initial interim promotion.

Hunt emphasises that he is not simply stepping in and actioning “someone else’s strategy”.

He was involved in the senior stakeholder brainstorming sessions last summer and because “there was a period of time that we knew internally” that Hunt would be succeeding Ogden, he explains that he was therefore able “to make sure what we were agreeing as a UK and Ireland executive was in line with the vision that I wanted for HDI across UK and Ireland”.

Adding that he was “able to build and influence” the UK and Ireland’s interpretation of HDI Global’s international strategy, Hunt continues: “The timing works quite well. I’m coming in right at the start of the strategy. My role would have been a lot less appealing if it was a year down the line [after Xcelerate29 had launched].

“I like the strategy, I think it’s a really good one. [I] can own this and the delivery of this for the next four years.”

For Hunt, his UK and Ireland jurisdiction is pivotal to the overarching success of Xcelerate29.

Writing €1.3bn (£1.12bn) in gross written premium (GWP) and striving for a headcount of around 450 employees, Hunt confirms that his geographical remit is the largest division outside of the global insurer’s home territory of Germany, where the business is headquartered, meaning “the UK and Ireland business needs to be successful for us to be successful as [a global] business because we’re such a core hub”.

HDI Global operates direct entities, including foreign branches, subsidiaries and affiliates, across 35 countries.

‘Growth aspirations’

But what is Xcelerate29 and how does it translate into day-to-day focus areas for Hunt and his team?

Acting as a framework for all of the insurer’s international business units, the global strategy is centred around three pillars.

The first of these pillars is “international expansion in focused areas”, such as growth in the Middle East. The second is “about excellence in all of our key core functions”, such as “underwriting, claims and investment expense”, while the third homes in on “people and being the company that people want to work” for.

Underpinning the three fundamental strategy pillars is a unified drive for “profitable growth”, Hunt adds – a metric he is keen to impact now he is at the helm. In the UK and Ireland, Hunt feels profitable growth will be bolstered by underwriting discipline, service excellence and employees that “set us apart”.

HDI UK and Ireland has already practised what it preaches in terms of investing in people, being one of the first signatories and commercial sponsors of Insurance Times’ Destination Insurance talent campaign and charter, as well as participating in the associated inaugural Destination Insurance Conference in January this year.

Hunt adds that in accordance with Xcelerate29, HDI UK and Ireland has its own “growth aspirations” – not only to further develop its “core lines of business”, such as multinational programmes and captive arrangements, but also to bring organisational expertise currently in other territories to London.

An example of this would be the insurer’s launch of a London-based energy and power team in April 2026, led by Matthew Bond. Previously, this expertise operated from hubs in Singapore, Dubai and Houston, but Hunt wants London to join this geographical roster as he feels “it’s a market we can win in”.

He says: “We have an appetite to look at upstream [and] downstream [energy], power, renewables, so the whole remit of energy [and power] – and that’s quite an exciting opportunity.

“Where we’ve not been present in the London market [in this class], to establish [a] global book there – so it won’t just be a UK focused book, it will be an international book – is great. We’re bringing in resource that’s focused on underwriting, claims and risk management, so not just underwriting.

“The energy market [is] a big marketplace and we have proven that we have the expertise internally. We’ve grown the market historically out of Singapore as a hub, [but] there is a market assessment to [explore] how could we expand this? And [in] London, we [did not] currently offer those risks.

“You can focus on what’s to come, [such as] renewables and developing technology [in] that space, but to get into that, we feel we have to have a remit across the whole energy chain.

“That is why we will look at all risks within that [class] and as long as we make sure we bring in the right skill sets – and we’re transferring some people over from Germany to support this business as well – we think it’s a market we can win in with our approach at HDI.”

Metrics and measures

There are a number of ways Hunt plans to monitor Xcelerate29’s progress and achievements in the UK and Ireland.

In terms of growing HDI UK and Ireland’s clout when it comes to multinational programmes, for example, Hunt explains that the insurer is already one of the top five for the provision of such arrangements – meaning the organisation has a “very specific key performance indicator to keep our position and, if anything, improve our position”.

He continues: “We do have a great product there. We lead on 5,400 multinational risks already. We’re across 200 countries with our network that we have within HDI. So, actually, the UK has to feature within that [overarching] strategy and is central to what we can deliver for multinationals and captives.”

As for tracking the success of its people-centric pillar, Hunt explains that HDI UK and Ireland issues an employee engagement survey every August to get a temperature check of how staff view and interact with their employer – the firm aims to be “within the top quartile amongst our peers” across the financial services sector when it comes to this metric, Hunt adds.

The insurer’s staff survey is open for three weeks to collect responses, with 90% of the workforce participating in 2025’s poll.

However, Hunt acknowledges that “ultimately, it comes down to profitability and we still want to be profitable across the cycle – and that’s going to be the ultimate measurement” of Xcelerate29’s success.

Although Hunt cannot divulge HDI UK and Ireland’s GWP growth targets, he confirms that these are his “key metrics to deliver”.

He says: “Ultimately, we’re open for business. We have some good relationships across lines of business, but we want to be expanding those. We offer a huge number of product lines within UK and Ireland and we want to be doing business with our customers not just on one product line – we want to solve their challenges across the piece.

“We’re a long-term player, it’s a long-term relationship [we are after]. We’re not in it just because we can find terms. We need to build that relationship, build on that trust and make sure [customers] understand our expertise.”

Building trust

As an insurer leader, UK general insurance is still getting to know Hunt, who describes himself as “competitive”, “collaborative” and highly focused on building and maintaining trust.

“I love to work in a team, I love to be collaborative and achieve results together,” he tells Insurance Times.

“I probably am quite competitive, but how that translates into work is I want HDI to be as good as it can be and I want people to be excited about coming to work for HDI and what they’re delivering.

“[I am a] big believer [that] if people enjoy what they’re doing, enjoy the colleagues they’re around and you have a culture that you want to be [a] part of, you deliver much better results. So, [I am] really focused on developing that culture of open collaboration.

“We have a fairly flat structure in HDI. Everyone will talk to everyone and people will go out of their way to help each other. A big one for me [around that] is trust. If you trust someone [internally is] going to get something done when they say it’s going to be done, that’s huge, but also trust with others and clients.

“We’re in things for the long run – we’re not a market that’s going to change our appetite or approach. It’s long-term partnerships that we want to be building and those relationships are an awful lot better if you have trust within them.”