Morgan Hill: Innovating Post-Disaster Claim Processing

The specialists at Morgan Hill rely on their extensive experience, bespoke solutions, and personalized approach to provide their clients with agile, cost-effective, and efficient data solutions. They deliver advanced algorithm-based solutions to financial markets and other industries, delivering rapid and effective results.

Morgan Hill’s expertise becomes especially evident in scenarios where rapid, accurate data analysis is critical, such as in the aftermath of catastrophic events.

By leveraging advanced algorithms and tailored solutions, they enable insurers to process vast amounts of data quickly and efficiently. This not only mitigates delays caused by inaccessible properties and large-scale inspections, but also empowers insurers in making informed decisions about reserving, financial planning, and immediate payouts for clearly destroyed properties.

Finding Efficiency in Catastrophe

Following catastrophic events, insurers rely on getting critical information quickly and accurately. Consultants at Morgan Hill found that after such events, it could take months to obtain all of this information to get a full picture of the loss on a given property insurance book. Sometimes the properties aren’t accessible, and the sheer number of properties might mean that individual inspections could take months to complete. Also, any costs resulting from assessing these properties can’t usually be claimed from reinsurers, meaning they have to be paid by the primary insurer.

Time is of the essence for all parties involved. Insurers care about getting an accurate valuation for the overall level of loss in terms of reserving and financial planning, while they also want to handle payouts from obviously destroyed properties quickly, so as to not incur any financial costs on assessing them.

To that end, Morgan Hill found value in building a front-to-back model that would geocode exposure locations, download pre- and post-event aerial images of disaster locations, score the damage to the insured properties, and report the results to the clients claims team — all asynchronously.

Simplifying Complex Processes With Dataiku

Partnering with Dataiku — the Universal AI Platform — helped tremendously in facilitating completion of these disparate tasks and workstreams. Morgan Hill leveraged web apps, managed datasets, scenarios, and recipes in Dataiku, which helped solve many of their data challenges.

The team built the UI seamlessly with Dataiku’s standard web apps (HTML, JS, CSS, and Python), also ensuring that components were fully integrated in the Dataiku platform. At the same time, the team used Python recipes and scenarios to manage all of the automation.

The Dataiku web app we built prioritizes properties based on the severity of the damage, allowing claim adjustors to focus on the most critical claims first. ​ Jorge Ramirez Senior Data Scientist, Morgan Hill

Because the entirety of the system was built inside Dataiku, the entire workflow ran asynchronously. That left  the client’s claims team open to focus on more strategic tasks, improving productivity. Dataiku’s systems handled the image analysis and data processing in the background, and business goals were  being met at the same time. As the technical solutions were given time to operate, Morgan Hill found them to be invaluable tools for helping create an environment that enhanced operational efficiency and aid in decision-making.

Dataiku’s flexible and scalable platform also enabled easy integration of multiple APIs, models, and processes into one streamlined solution. Alasdair Duke Director, Morgan Hill

Put simply, the solution that Morgan Hill has built is designed to give an early estimate of total losses to their clients. It also flags obviously destroyed properties which can be paid out immediately, without insurance companies incurring the time and costs of assessing them.

Cost Savings and Business Efficiencies

Prior to their partnership with Dataiku and implementing AI-driven solutions in their organization, insurers were incurring significant costs and time investment on assessing properties that were either clearly destroyed or completely undamaged.

By leveraging the Dataiku platform to streamline their process, insurers no longer need to invest time or resources into manually assessing properties that are visibly destroyed, resulting in substantial savings in both time and costs.​ Jan Rosenzweig Quant, Morgan Hill

In addition, the claims team no longer had to manually review each property. Because of the automation baked into the systems they implemented, the client can upload a list of addresses, and Dataiku runs in the background, generating damage reports with confidence scores for each property. The app that Morgan Hill built also prioritizes properties based on the severity of the damage, giving them critical information on where to send claims adjusters in these time-critical moments. In short, the automation and machine learning (ML) models provided by Dataiku with input from Morgan Hill can handle the bulk of the heavy lifting, with teams now being able to process claims faster and also free up their time for more value-added tasks.

Specifically, Morgan Hill has seen strong results in several areas:

• Accelerated claims process: The client claims team has seen a dramatic improvement in how quickly it can go through the time-intensive evaluation process. This process, which previously took days, is now completed in mere hours, and sometimes even overnight for larger scale events.
• Improved customer satisfaction: Dataiku’s processing capabilities have resulted in faster response times for customers, allowing high claim volumes to be paid out more efficiently, which has been especially beneficial after hurricanes.
• Increased efficiency: The client can process claims faster, which has reduced their operational costs, and sped up customer payments, and minimized potential additional costs.
• Direct cost savings: The automated ML and AI systems that Morgan Hill has built in partnership with Dataiku have saved insurers time and money by evaluating properties that are clearly destroyed.
• Enhanced decision-making: Dataiku’s ML models have provided accurate confidence scores and aided in prioritization, allowing Morgan Hill to make effective data-driven decisions on high-priority properties.
• AI explainability: Claims adjusters can better understand AI decision processes and results with Dataiku’s provided saliency maps and bounding boxes, while also ensuring compliance and transparency. This improves risk management and governance, builds trust in the models’ outputs, and supports more informed decision-making in the entire insurance industry.

As they strive to be more data-driven, Morgan Hill’s collaboration with Dataiku showcases the innovative methods that turn complex, interdependent processes into efficient solutions. In combining Morgan Hill’s unique use cases and industry expertise with Dataiku’s robust platform, insurers have been better able to navigate post-catastrophe challenges with agility and precision. The results are clear — accelerated claims processing, enhanced customer satisfaction, and significant cost savings.