Bind

Bind via API

This week, we published an API feature that was already available to early partners in beta: bind. ”Binding” is insurance parlance for buying a policy. Herald now empowers distributors to bind products from any carrier partner that enables this capability via API.

Developers can now bind a policy by making a POST request to our /policies endpoint with the quote ID of any product that is eligible for bind. Herald will continue to expand access to this capability as we add new integrations and existing carrier partners enable bind for their products via API over time.

Auth

We added a new auth method for consumers of our API to interact with Herald in a secure manner by using a JSON Web Token (JWT). JWT is an open standard that defines a compact and secure method for transmitting information between parties as a JSON object. Developers can make a POST request to the /auth/token endpoint to generate an expiring JWT.

While we will continue to support existing methods, JWT will become the preferred method for auth moving forward. This method is now mandatory for any consumer who will make calls directly to our API from the browser.

Fixes and Improvements

In addition to these two features, we also fixed a few bugs and made improvements to our API:

• We eliminated a bug that would replace an array of values with an empty array under certain (rare) circumstances.
• We updated a behavior to mark certain quotes as a decline that we erroneously labeled “unresponsive.”
• A carrier partner updated their auth methods in a new version of their quoting API, so we updated our API accordingly.

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