Clearwater Underwriting has appointed Richard Hooks (pictured) as managing director, upstream energy, as the marine-focused specialty underwriter continues expanding its platform into new lines of business.
Hooks will lead the establishment and growth of Clearwater's upstream energy offering, building a dedicated proposition for brokers and clients as part of the firm's strategy to diversify across a broader range of specialty and niche classes.
Hooks joins from Tokio Marine Kiln, where he spent more than 20 years, most recently as departmental head of marine and energy. In that role he oversaw a energy portfolio spanning upstream and energy-transition risk with a maximum combined line size of $100 million, and led a series of senior hires into TMK's energy team, including bringing in Beazley's former head of energy in 2024. He brings deep technical underwriting expertise across energy and marine, along with established relationships across the international specialty market.
At Clearwater, Hooks will be responsible for developing the upstream energy portfolio with a focus on combining technical underwriting expertise with the agility of the MGA model, positioning the new offering as a specialist alternative for brokers in a highly technical class, backed by Clearwater's underwriting capability, technology and capacity partnerships.
Hooks said upstream energy remains a highly technical market as the risks, technologies and capital behind it continue to evolve, making experience, underwriting judgement and a willingness to consider risk differently critical to a successful offering. He said what attracted him to Clearwater was the opportunity to build an underwriting proposition around those fundamentals while retaining the flexibility to respond quickly to brokers and clients, calling it a rare opportunity to build a business from the ground up within an ambitious underwriting platform.
Richard Young, chief underwriting officer at Clearwater, said upstream energy is a market where technical expertise and underwriting judgement matter particularly given the complexity and scale of the risks involved. He said Hooks brings decades of experience across energy and marine along with a detailed understanding of how the market is changing, allowing Clearwater to enter the class with a clear focus on disciplined underwriting and long-term portfolio quality while giving brokers the responsiveness central to the Clearwater model.
The hire continues a pattern of rapid diversification at Clearwater since private equity firm Aquiline Capital Partners took a majority stake in the business in November 2025.
Founded in 2023 and beginning underwriting in 2024, Clearwater built its initial reputation in marine and subsea cable insurance, offering products including port risks, builders risks and war cover, underpinned by a data-driven underwriting model developed with its own Clearwater Dynamics software platform. Aquiline's investment was explicitly aimed at accelerating both organic and inorganic growth toward what the firm described as an institutionalised, technology-enabled platform spanning multiple specialty lines and geographies.
That expansion has moved quickly. Clearwater entered crisis management earlier this year with the hire of a managing director focused on active assailant and terrorism and political violence cover from Aspen Insurance Group, and has now added upstream energy as a second new specialty class, both hires bringing in specialists with two decades or more of experience from established insurers rather than building capability through junior recruitment.
Two new specialty lines launched within months of each other, each led by a hire with 15 to 20 years at a single major insurer, suggests Clearwater's post-investment strategy is less about incremental growth within marine and more about rapidly assembling a genuinely multi-line MGA while Aquiline's capital is fresh.
For brokers, that means Clearwater is becoming a broader specialty market relationship rather than a marine specialist worth knowing for one class only, though the real test will be whether a platform built quickly across several technical, judgement-heavy classes can sustain the same underwriting discipline in each that made its original marine book credible.
