Automating Catastrophe Exposure Reviews in Property & Homeowners and Specialty/Marine: From Policy Schedules to Geospatial Reports in Minutes — Risk Manager

Catastrophe exposure reviews are time-critical, document-heavy, and unforgiving of errors. Risk Managers in Property & Homeowners and Specialty Lines & Marine must transform stacks of property schedules, declarations pages, coverage summaries, and reinsurance submissions into accurate, geocoded exposure views—fast enough to guide PML/AAL decisions and negotiate reinsurance terms. The challenge is familiar: addresses are messy, peril language varies by endorsement, and sub-limits hide in footnotes, all while brokers and reinsurers demand portfolio-level clarity in days, not weeks.

Doc Chat by Nomad Data solves this problem by automating the hardest parts of exposure processing. It extracts locations from policy schedules, normalizes addresses, performs rooftop-grade geocoding, and maps peril-specific coverages into geospatial outputs for immediate modeling. Designed for high-volume insurance documents, Doc Chat brings AI for catastrophe exposure analysis to everyday workflows—reducing review times from weeks to minutes and adding page-level traceability risk leaders can defend with confidence.

The Risk Manager’s Reality in Property & Homeowners and Specialty/Marine

Whether you manage a coastal homeowners portfolio or a global marine schedule spanning terminals, warehouse yards, and inland facilities, catastrophe exposure is dynamic and fragmented across documents. For Property & Homeowners, you’re reconciling roof types, construction classes, ISO PPC codes, elevation certificates, and wind/hail deductibles that vary by distance to coast. For Specialty & Marine, you’re tackling port exposures (storm surge, wave, tsunami), stacked cargo values by terminal, contractor’s equipment in motion, and inland marine floaters with locations that change weekly.

Across both lines of business, the documents are sprawling and inconsistent:

Policy-level artifacts: declarations pages, coverage summaries, endorsements (windstorm/hail exclusions, named storm/percent deductibles, earthquake endorsements), terrorism endorsements
Exposure artifacts: property schedules and Statements of Values (SOV), schedules of locations (SOL), COPE surveys, engineering reports (e.g., FM Global), FEMA elevation certificates, flood zone determinations
Portfolio and placement artifacts: reinsurance submissions, bordereaux, broker slips, Realistic Disaster Scenarios (RDS), PML exhibits, catastrophe modeling inputs/outputs

The nuance: the critical information you need to run a reliable exposure view often isn’t in one place. Sub-limits for flood may sit in an endorsement; named-storm deductibles apply only to certain ZIP codes; inland marine values hinge on a schedule memo; and marine terminal storm surge risk depends on more than a single street address. Risk Managers need a system that reads like a domain expert, merges content across the entire claim or policy file, and turns ambiguous language into structured, geospatially accurate data that will withstand internal audit and reinsurer scrutiny.

How Catastrophe Exposure Analysis Is Handled Manually Today

Most teams still rely on a manual, multi-step process that burns time and introduces avoidable risk:

Document intake and triage: collect property schedules, SOVs, declarations pages, coverage summaries, endorsements, and reinsurance submission packets; hunt for missing data
Address normalization: standardize addresses, de-duplicate locations, validate suite/building identifiers, and try to reconcile rooftop versus parcel centroids
Geocoding: run addresses through a geocoder, review uncertain matches, and hand-fix low-confidence results; repeat for international formats
Peril mapping: read coverage text to assign which perils apply where (windstorm, named storm, hail, flood, storm surge, earthquake, wildfire), including sub-limits and deductibles
Hazard tagging: intersect coordinates with coastal buffers, FEMA flood zones, wildfire indices, distance-to-brush or fault lines, elevation models, soil types, and PPC/closest hydrant or fire station
Model preparation: export SOVs and geospatial files aligned to RMS/AIR/EQ-ready schemas, run PML/AAL scenarios, generate OEP/AEP curves
Reinsurance prep: assemble broker-ready submissions, bordereaux, RDS schedules, and footnoted exhibits, then field data challenges and iterate

The friction points are predictable. Schedules arrive with inconsistent field names. Endorsements override peril terms you’ve already assumed. Addresses are incomplete or reference a yard or pier with no postal address. And any misread sub-limit or wrong geocode can materially distort AAL/PML calculations—hurting retention choices, layer placement, and ultimate reinsurance pricing.

AI for Catastrophe Exposure Analysis: What Changes with Doc Chat

Doc Chat is purpose-built for high-volume, high-variance insurance documents. It ingests entire policy and exposure files—thousands of pages at a time—and produces structured, geocoded outputs for modeling, dashboards, and reinsurance negotiation. Borrowing from Nomad’s documented capabilities, Doc Chat processes massive document sets at machine speed while preserving page-level citations so you can verify any field in seconds.

Automatically Extract Locations from Policy Schedules

Doc Chat reads property schedules, SOVs, and coverage summaries to extract and normalize the fields your exposure analytics depend on. It harmonizes inconsistent column names, resolves unit- and building-level details, and links each location back to its source page for defensibility. For Specialty & Marine, it can recognize terminals, piers, berths, and storage yards, and enrich incomplete place references with valid geocodes to support surge and wave risk analysis.

Addresses, building/unit identifiers, and coordinates (when present)
Construction class, year built, roof type, number of stories, protection features (sprinklers, alarm)
Occupancy and usage (residential, commercial, industrial, cargo storage, contractor’s equipment)
TIV breakdowns (Building, Contents, BI/Extra Expense), occurrence and aggregate limits
Peril tags and sub-limits (windstorm, named storm, hail, flood, storm surge, earthquake, wildfire)
Deductibles by peril (percent of TIV, flat, split by distance-to-coast)
Endorsements/exclusions cross-referenced to locations

Automate Geocoding for Insurance Policies—At Rooftop Accuracy

With Doc Chat, you can automate geocoding for insurance policies at scale. The system validates addresses, performs de-duplication, and assigns high-confidence rooftop or parcel coordinates based on your playbook. It flags low-confidence matches, suggests corrections, and standardizes country-specific formats (e.g., Eircode, Canadian postal codes, LATAM addressing). When a schedule references terminals or piers, Doc Chat triangulates using context (port name, yard identifiers, cross streets), producing defensible coordinates suitable for storm surge modeling and marine specialty analytics.

Peril Mapping and Hazard Enrichment

Doc Chat links each location to peril coverage and attaches hazard attributes using your preferred datasets and rules. Risk Managers can use out-of-the-box or custom presets to encode how peril terms should be interpreted and converted into modeling-ready fields.

FEMA flood zones, base flood elevation, and presence/absence of elevation certificates
Distance to coastline or navigable water, coastal buffer bands for named storm deductibles
Wildfire defensible-space indicators, distance to wildland, and brush indices
Earthquake soil class proxies, distance to faults, local seismic zone flags
Hydrant proximity, ISO PPC, nearest fire station, and response assumptions

As Nomad Data explains, true document automation isn’t just reading fields—it’s inferring coverage intent from endorsements, tying peril-specific deductibles to geographies, and surfacing every relevant clause hiding in long policy files. That is exactly what Doc Chat is designed to do.

From Documents to Geospatial: Model-Ready Outputs in Minutes

Within minutes of dragging in a new policy packet, Risk Managers receive standardized exports aligned to their modeling stack and analytics tools. Doc Chat’s outputs are tailored to your environment and file conventions.

Structured SOV with harmonized fields, peril tags, sub-limits, and deductibles
GeoJSON/KML/Shapefile with geocoded locations and hazard attributes for GIS
RMS/AIR/EQ-ready feeds mapped to your vendor schemas and import templates
Bordereaux and RDS schedules for treaty or facultative reinsurance placement
Broker-ready exposure exhibits with page-level citations back to source documents

Because the process is automated and repeatable, re-runs are easy: upload revised schedules, add new endorsements, or swap in updated hazard presets. Doc Chat instantly reprocesses the portfolio and produces a fresh set of outputs—critical during fast-moving events or at peak reinsurance renewal.

Real-Time Q&A Across Portfolios

One of Doc Chat’s most powerful features is its Real-Time Q&A. Ask portfolio-wide questions in plain language and get instant answers with citations across thousands of pages. Examples Risk Managers use daily:

“List all coastal locations within 1 mile of the shoreline and show their named storm deductibles.”
“Summarize flood sub-limits by state and identify properties missing elevation certificates.”
“Which terminal yards exceed $50M TIV within surge zone X?”
“Extract locations from policy schedule where the wind deductible differs from the master declaration.”
“Which warehouses are within 1 km of brush and lack automatic sprinklers?”

Every answer includes links that take you to the exact page in the schedule, declarations page, endorsement, or coverage summary where the data was sourced—eliminating guesswork and accelerating approvals.

Supporting Reinsurance Negotiations with Defensible Data

Reinsurers reward transparency, consistency, and speed. Doc Chat equips Risk Managers to prepare submission packs and defend assumptions with precision. Whether you are placing a property cat XoL program, adding a marine layer, or negotiating facultative for high-TIV risks, Doc Chat:

Generates broker-ready SOVs, bordereaux, and RDS schedules
Builds footnoted exhibits linking peril sub-limits and deductibles to policy pages
Standardizes geocoding confidence and presents exception logs
Prepares alternate views (e.g., with/without certain endorsements) to support scenario pricing
Accelerates responses to data challenges with instant, cited answers

Bring your PML/AAL analytics, OEP/AEP views, and concentration reports forward days earlier. When reinsurers or brokers question an assumption, you can show the clause, the coordinates, and the hazard enrichment—on the spot. This combination of speed, traceability, and clarity creates negotiating leverage that often translates into improved terms and pricing.

Specialty & Marine: Port, Terminal, and Cargo Nuances

Marine exposures rarely fit neat postal address patterns. Doc Chat understands references like “Berth 4,” “South Yard at Terminal C,” or “Off-dock storage at Pier 17” and triangulates location using contextual cues. That allows Risk Managers to:

Assign coordinates to non-postal marine assets for surge/wave modeling
Split values across yards, berths, and sheds where schedules list stacked TIV
Apply peril sub-limits that vary by distance to shoreline or elevation band
Reconcile floating equipment and contractor’s equipment on inland marine floaters with known base locations and movement rules

For global books, Doc Chat handles international address formats and multi-language artifacts, providing consistent geocoding standards and defensible exposure data worldwide.

Business Impact: Time, Cost, Accuracy, and Strategic Advantage

Doc Chat’s impact spans operational efficiency and balance sheet outcomes:

Time-to-insight: Exposure processing compresses from weeks to minutes. Nomad’s platform has demonstrated the ability to process hundreds of thousands of pages per minute, then answer portfolio questions instantly—so Risk Managers move from document wrangling to decision-making the same day.
Lower cost per review: Automated extraction, geocoding, and peril mapping remove manual touchpoints across intake, QA, and rework—freeing teams to focus on analysis, not data prep.
Accuracy and consistency: Machines don’t fatigue. Every endorsement is read, every peril term is applied consistently, and every exception is logged. Page-level citations allow internal audit and reinsurers to verify assumptions without delay.
Fewer disputes, better reinsurance outcomes: Clean, transparent submissions reduce back-and-forth with markets and help you tell a stronger risk story, often resulting in more favorable negotiations.
Surge-ready scale: When renewal or cat season hits, Doc Chat scales with no additional headcount—eliminating bottlenecks and overtime.

The result is a strategic step-change for Risk Managers: faster cycles, tighter controls, and actionable analytics that arrive early enough to influence retention, layering, facultative decisions, and reinsurance pricing.

Why Nomad Data’s Doc Chat Is the Right Partner

Nomad Data combines insurance-grade AI with a white glove delivery model that makes transformation fast and low-friction:

Volume: Ingest full policy files and exposure workbooks—thousands of pages per claim or policy—without throttling your team.
Complexity: Exclusions, endorsements, and peril trigger language are discovered and applied reliably, not lost in PDF sprawl.
The Nomad Process: We train Doc Chat on your playbooks—geocoding preferences, hazard datasets, modeling schemas, and reinsurance formats—so outputs fit your world on day one.
Real-Time Q&A: Ask portfolio questions (“Which Florida condos are within 1 mile of the coastline with wind deductibles under 2%?”) and get answers with citations—instantly.
Thorough & Complete: Every reference to coverage, liability, sub-limits, deductibles, and exclusions is surfaced to eliminate blind spots and leakage.
Security and governance: Built for sensitive insurance data with SOC 2 Type 2 practices and page-level traceability. Client data is protected; outputs are defensible.

Implementation is measured in days, not quarters. Most Risk Manager teams are live in 1–2 weeks, starting with a simple drag-and-drop workflow. As adoption grows, Doc Chat integrates with your GIS, data warehouse, cat modeling stack, and reinsurance systems via modern APIs. It’s the fastest path from “proof” to “production.”

Implementation Blueprint: From Pilot to Production in 1–2 Weeks

Our approach mirrors how Risk Managers actually work—minimizing disruption while capturing value immediately.

Week 0: Discovery — Share representative policy files (property schedules, declarations pages, coverage summaries, reinsurance submissions). Define modeling schemas, hazard datasets, geocoding standards, and reinsurance outputs (bordereaux, RDS).
Week 1: Configure & Validate — Train Doc Chat on your playbooks. Validate extractions and coordinates on sample schedules. Calibrate peril mapping and deductibles. Prove page-level citations.
Week 2: Go Live — Drag-and-drop production files. Export SOVs, GeoJSON/KML/Shapefile, and vendor-model-ready feeds. Turn on Real-Time Q&A for portfolio questions. Plan API hookups to your GIS, modeling, or data lake.

Because Doc Chat is a suite of agents, we expand with you—adding automated completeness checks, broker-submission assembly, and portfolio-level analytics as your workflow evolves. For a deeper look at how we combine discipline expertise with AI to handle complex document inference, see Beyond Extraction: Why Document Scraping Isn’t Just Web Scraping for PDFs and AI's Untapped Goldmine: Automating Data Entry.

Handling the Edge Cases That Derail Analyses

Real-world exposure work has edge cases that sabotage schedules and slow down reinsurance submissions. Doc Chat addresses them head-on:

International formats: Normalizes addresses across regions, translating and resolving non-Latin scripts where needed.
Terminal/yard references: Geo-resolves marine descriptors (berths, sheds, off-dock yards) to surge-relevant coordinates.
Conflicting endorsements: Identifies conflicting peril terms between the declarations page and endorsements; flags discrepancies and anchors each to its source.
Incomplete schedules: Performs automated completeness checks and generates request lists for missing COPE details, elevation certificates, or occupancy data.
Moving assets: Applies business rules for inland marine floaters or contractor’s equipment to estimate base coordinates or ranges based on your standards.

These aren’t “nice to haves”—they’re the reasons Risk Managers lose days chasing clarity. With automation, you get a repeatable, defensible process underpinned by your own rules.

Cross-Line Value: Property & Homeowners and Specialty/Marine

Doc Chat’s value compounds across lines:

Property & Homeowners: Rooftop-grade geocodes, flood zone tagging, wildfire buffers, and percent-deductible logic linked to coastal bands—plus consistent TIV breakdowns for Building/Contents/BI across all schedules.
Specialty & Marine: Port and terminal geo-resolution, storm surge and wave exposure tagging, cargo stacking logic by yard/shed, and separation of cranes/contractor’s equipment from fixed structures.

The portability of your rules means once you standardize peril-mapping logic, you can apply it to every schedule in your book—legacy and new business alike.

Controls and Compliance: Audit-Ready by Design

Risk leaders often ask: will an auditor or reinsurer accept these outputs? Doc Chat makes the answer easy. Every extracted field, geocode, peril tag, and deductible can be traced back to a specific page and passage. Exception logs document low-confidence geocodes and unresolved conflicts. Outputs arrive with a clear lineage—what was inferred, how it was inferred, and where it was sourced—so external reviewers can verify the evidence without slowing your timeline.

For broader context on how transparent, explainable AI changes insurance operations, see Reimagining Claims Processing Through AI Transformation and AI for Insurance: Real-World AI Use Cases Driving Transformation.

Frequently Asked Questions (for High-Intent Searches)

How does Doc Chat deliver AI for catastrophe exposure analysis?

Doc Chat ingests complete policy files—including property schedules, declarations pages, coverage summaries, endorsements, and reinsurance submissions—and extracts the fields required for modeling. It harmonizes TIV, COPE, peril sub-limits, and deductibles, then geocodes locations and enriches them with hazard attributes. Model-ready SOVs and geospatial files are produced in minutes, with page-level citations for every field.

Can Doc Chat automate geocoding for insurance policies at scale?

Yes. Doc Chat standardizes and validates addresses, executes rooftop or parcel geocoding based on your standards, flags low-confidence matches, and resolves non-postal marine locations such as berths and yards. It supports international formats and produces GeoJSON/KML/Shapefile for direct use in GIS and modeling pipelines.

How accurately can Doc Chat extract locations from policy schedules?

Doc Chat reads irregular and multi-format schedules reliably, linking locations to units, buildings, or structures even when spread across multiple tabs or attachments. It resolves variant field names, corrects obvious data entry issues, de-duplicates locations, and anchors each extracted record to its precise source page—so you can verify any row during an audit or reinsurer review.

What Doc Chat Extracts—A Field-Level View

Risk Managers can tailor the extraction schema to their modeling and reinsurance needs. Typical field sets include:

Location data: Address, unit/building, latitude/longitude, geocode confidence
COPE: Construction class, year built, roof/wall materials, stories, protection features
Values and limits: Building, Contents, BI/EE, occurrence/aggregate limits, coinsurance
Peril terms: Windstorm, named storm, hail, flood, storm surge, earthquake, wildfire (coverage, sub-limits, deductibles, waiting periods if applicable)
Endorsements and exclusions: Cross-referenced to locations and summarized for modeling
Hazard enrichment: Flood zone, distance to coast/brush/fault, PPC/hydrant proximity, elevation bands

Integration Without Disruption

Start by dragging files into Doc Chat and exporting SOVs and geospatial formats the same day. As adoption grows, integrate via API with your:

GIS platform (for map visualizations and ad hoc spatial queries)
Catastrophe modeling tools (RMS/AIR/EQ schemas)
Data warehouse or lake (for portfolio analytics and longitudinal trends)
Reinsurance systems (for automated bordereaux and broker submissions)

Nomad’s modern architecture means integration timelines are measured in 1–2 weeks, not months. Because every answer links back to the exact page, risk teams, actuarial partners, and reinsurers can validate assumptions rapidly.

Proof in Practice

Insurers using Nomad report transformative gains when moving from manual reviews to AI-assisted exposure analytics. While many public case studies focus on medical and claims workflows, the same capabilities—high-volume ingestion, page-level citations, real-time Q&A—apply perfectly to risk and reinsurance. As one client put it in a related workflow, the ability to “find it instantly” changes not just speed but confidence. Exposure teams can now defend every coordinate, deductible, and sub-limit with the document page at hand.

Your Path Forward

If you’re preparing for renewal, evaluating new cat aggregates, or re-baselining exposure after a portfolio change, the fastest way to value is to put Doc Chat on your next packet of schedules and endorsements. In a single session you can:

Upload mixed-format schedules and coverage summaries
Export harmonized SOV and GeoJSON with hazard tags
Run Real-Time Q&A to answer portfolio questions on the spot
Assemble a broker-ready submission with source citations

From there, the roadmap is simple: add APIs, automate completeness checks, and standardize reinsurance outputs. You’ll spend less time wrangling documents and more time shaping strategy—retentions, layers, facultative decisions, and negotiations that stick.

Ready to see it? Visit Doc Chat for Insurance to schedule a walkthrough tailored to Property & Homeowners and Specialty/Marine portfolios.