CUSTOMER STORIES
Hastings Direct Brings Machine Learning to Its Data for Speedier Service
With Snowflake and Microsoft, insurance provider Hastings Direct centralizes all of its data, uses ML to develop its own pricing models and more to transform its business.
Story Highlights
- Centralized data foundation for more agile workflows: With a unified data and AI platform, Hastings Direct can work more efficiently and effectively across teams to better serve its customers and act more quickly in the market.
- More data insights to create better pricing options: Before using Snowflake, Hastings Direct would only develop risk profiles with about 40 data points. Now the underwriting and pricing teams can use thousands of data points in nanoseconds — helping offer the best price for customers.
- Fueling innovation with AI and ML: Snowflake and Microsoft equip Hastings Direct with the AI and ML tools needed to reduce repetitive manual tasks and collaborate on optimizing its data strategy and roadmap.
Video Transcript
This transcript was automatically generated
Hi. I'm Sasha Jorey. I'm the CIO of Hastings Direct. We offer insurance in the UK market, for car, van, bike, and home.
So Hastings has an aspiration to be the best and biggest digital insurer in the UK market. The lifeblood of that is to have data and to have thousands of data points that we can access at speed to be able to offer the best price to our customers and offer them the best opportunities to get the insurance that they need. We work with Snowflake, and with Microsoft. They have been fantastic partners to Hastings Direct, really helping us to reach those ambitions.
Over the last four years, we have done a phenomenal transformation of our business, moving everything into the cloud, getting all of our data onto Snowflake, and actually transforming the way that we are able to provide services to our customers, but also to our colleagues so that we can work effectively and efficiently. So historically, one of the biggest frustrations for our underwriting and pricing teams was their ability to access the data and do the clever things they wanted to do. That problem has gone away. It's completely dissolved.
And now we are able to bring machine learning and we have been able to build our own pricing, models, our own pricing, capabilities, and this has made us really, really speedy in the market. With that, we've been able to sort of in the past, we probably used thirty or forty data points when we were looking at the risk profile for our customers to underwrite their insurance. We now use thousands of data points, and we use that in nanoseconds.
So it's really transformed our business and the way that we can, price for our customers. We're really excited about Azure Machine Learning. We're using that a lot, and we're actually moving off another provider because we can see the alacrity and the ability that that gives us. We use, a lot of Power BI.
We also use a lot of, Power Apps, and, this is transforming the way that we're doing some of our repetitive tasks within our organization, and I think people are really seeing the benefit of that. So I'm really excited that the relationship between Snowflake and Microsoft is, you know, coming together really, really well for us because they're two critical partners for us. I'm absolutely buzzing, with Arctek and Cortex. I can't wait for that to come to our London data centers, and I can't wait to work with, Snowflake, Microsoft, and to build out a data strategy and roadmap so that we could really take advantage of AI data cloud.
So with the Snowflake AI data cloud and our opportunity working with Microsoft on their open AI, we have everything that we could ever dream of. So the sky is the limit in terms of the opportunity that Snowflake was providing us with the AI data cloud. It's amazing.
