Property

Commercial Property

This week we have launched a new line of business: Commercial Property. Developers will now be able to quote policies for five total lines of business: Property, General Liability, Business Owners’ Policy (BOP), Workers’ Compensation, and Cyber. To support this new line, we created a standard set of Property coverage parameters and added new underwriting questions.

Dynamic Data Coercion

Herald helps maximize quotes through a function we call “data coercion,” which nudges requested coverage values towards the nearest input value that will yield an active quote for each carrier. Data coercion helps our distributors reduce the referral and declination rates of their submissions.

Previously we applied the same coercion logic across all classes of business within the context of any insurance product. This week we updated our coercion rules to dynamically change this logic based on the class codes associated with the applicant. We made this change after noticing that, for a subset of high-risk class codes, carriers were referring submissions to their underwriters that could be automatically quoted with minor changes to coverages.

This seemingly small change resulted in a big increase in approval rate for our distribution partners. One distributor saw a 20% decrease in General Liability referrals after our dynamic coercion adjusted the medical expense limit for certain high-risk classes.

Fixes and Improvements

Beyond launching a new line of business and changing our coercion logic, we also made a few fixes and improvements:

• We updated how we handled P.O. box addresses for a certain carrier partner to return a status of “declined” rather than “unresponsive.”
• We fixed a bug that incorrectly invalidated certain submissions for applicants with claims within the last three years.

‍